Trivia / Shaft

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• Breakaway Pop Hit: The theme song is very well-known and commonly quoted, however few have honestly seen the film.
• Cast the Runner-Up: In addition to doing the soundtrack, Isaac Hayes auditioned to play Shaft. He makes a cameo as a bartender.
• Completely Different Title:
  • French and Spanish: The Red Nights of Harlem
  • Greece: The Black Panther
  • Japan: Black Jaguar
  • Taiwan: Panther
  • Turkey: Fearless
• Creator Backlash: 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.
• Darkhorse Casting: Richard Roundtree was a male model whose acting experience was limited to commercials.
• Follow the Leader: 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 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which wasn't quite an exploitation film.
• The Foreign Subtitle:
  • Denmark: Shaft: Detective in Action
  • Finland: Shaft: Rock Hard Detective
  • Italy: Shaft the Detective
  • Norway: Shaft: Gang War in Harlem
  • Portugal: Shaft: Mafia in New York
• Franchise Killer: Shaft in Africa came out amidst a glut of Follow the Leader 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 movies, 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 Richard Roundtree that would occur four years later.
• Playing Against Type: Richard Roundtree was a model before he was cast as Shaft.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: There is a surprisingly durable legend that John Shaft was a white man in the original novel, until Gordon Parks cast Richard Roundtree. This seems to be a jumbled retelling of Melvin van Peebles' claim that the success of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song 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 white lead instead, but given that the unique selling point of the Shaft novels was that they starred a black detective, this seems unlikely.^{More details here} Legends Revealed has an entry on it here. One prominent book on detective movies took Peebles' statement to mean the novels' Shaft was white, meaning the myth now has a citation on the Other Wiki despite being patently untrue. The fact that the novels were out of print until The New '10s didn't help.
• Self-Adaptation: Ernest Tidyman, who wrote the novels, co-wrote the script.
• Star-Making Role: For Richard Roundtree.

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