Line #19 Trivia/Shaft


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2	* BreakawayPopHit: The theme song is very well-known and commonly quoted, however few have honestly seen the film.
3	* CastTheRunnerUp: In addition to doing the soundtrack, Music/IsaacHayes auditioned to play Shaft. He makes a cameo as a bartender.
4	* CompletelyDifferentTitle:
5	** French and Spanish: ''The Red Nights of Harlem''
6	** Greece: ''The Black Panther''
7	** Japan: ''Black Jaguar''
8	** Taiwan: ''Panther''
9	** Turkey: ''Fearless''
10	* CreatorBacklash: According to a modern interview with Ernest Tidyman's son, the author was dismayed with the changes made for the film, which he co-wrote the screenplay, as he felt the studio was trying too hard, in an unauthentic way, to make Shaft more ethnic.
11	* DarkhorseCasting: Creator/RichardRoundtree was a male model whose acting experience was limited to commercials.
12	* FollowTheLeader: The film became the model of a film genre for movies targeted towards urban African Americans now otherwise known as {{Blaxploitation}}. It also owed a lot to ''Film/SweetSweetbacksBaadasssssSong'', which wasn't quite an exploitation film.
13	* TheForeignSubtitle:
14	** Denmark: ''Shaft: Detective in Action''
15	** Finland: ''Shaft: Rock Hard Detective''
16	** Italy: ''Shaft the Detective''
17	** Norway: ''Shaft: Gang War in Harlem''
18	** Portugal: ''Shaft: Mafia in New York''
19	* FranchiseKiller: ''Shaft in Africa'' came out amidst a glut of FollowTheLeader {{Blaxploitation}} films, the preceding two films having ironically been the leaders in question, and between that and its mixed reviews, it bombed at the box office. Afterwards, the series was shunted to {{TV movie}}s, and it took until 2000 for a new, theatrically released ''Shaft'' film to be made after that. Sadly, the scathing reviews of the 2019 film and its resulting underperformance has proven to be the final blow to the series. Not to mention the death of Creator/RichardRoundtree that would occur four years later.
20	* PlayingAgainstType: Creator/RichardRoundtree was a ''model'' before he was cast as Shaft.
21	* PopCultureUrbanLegends: There is a surprisingly durable legend that John Shaft was a white man in the original novel, until Gordon Parks cast Creator/RichardRoundtree. This seems to be a jumbled retelling of Melvin van Peebles' claim that the success of ''Film/SweetSweetbacksBaadasssssSong'' changed ''Shaft'' from a "white film" to a "black one." In fact, ''Shaft'' was already filming when ''Sweet...'' was released. There ''may'' be some truth behind this, because there is a rumour MGM originally wanted to adapt the novel with a [[RaceLift white lead]] instead, but given that the unique selling point of the Shaft novels was that they starred a black detective, this seems unlikely.[[labelnote:More details here]]''Legends Revealed'' has an entry on it [[http://legendsrevealed.com/entertainment/2016/07/29/was-shaft-nearly-played-by-a-white-actor-in-the-first-shaft-film/ here]].[[/labelnote]] One prominent book on detective movies took Peebles' statement to mean the novels' Shaft was white, meaning the myth now has a citation on [[Website/{{Wikipedia}} the Other Wiki]] despite being patently untrue. The fact that the novels were [[KeepCirculatingTheTapes out of print]] until TheNewTens didn't help.
22	* SelfAdaptation: Ernest Tidyman, who wrote the novels, co-wrote the script.
23	* StarMakingRole: For Creator/RichardRoundtree.

Context Trivia / Shaft