Christopher St. John | |
---|---|
Born | |
Other names | Chris St. John |
Occupation(s) | Actor, film director, film producer, screenwriter |
Years active | 1968–1988 |
Children | Kristoff St. John |
Christopher St. John, sometimes credited as Chris St. John, is an American film and television actor. He is also a film producer, film director and screenwriter and played a minor role in the television series Remington Steele .
A member of the Actors Studio starting in the mid-1960s, [1] [2] St. John is best known for playing the role of Ben Buford in the 1971 blaxploitation film Shaft . Between 1968 and 1988, he appeared in eight film and television productions.
In addition to appearing as George Lattimer in Top of the Heap (1972), St. John wrote, directed, and produced the film. [3] [4] It was entered into the 22nd Berlin International Film Festival [5] and was nominated for the Golden Bear, the festival's biggest prize. [6] Richard Brody in The New Yorker described the film as a "crucial work of Afrofuturism." [7]
In 2014, the documentary film that St. John began in 1980, A Man Called God, debuted at the San Diego Black Film Festival. The film was co-directed with his son Kristoff St. John. [8]
He had one son, actor Kristoff St. John, who died on February 3, 2019. [9]
Shaft is a 1971 American blaxploitation crime action thriller film directed by Gordon Parks and written by Ernest Tidyman and John D. F. Black. It is an adaptation of Tidyman's novel of the same name and is the first entry in the Shaft film series. The plot revolves around a private detective named John Shaft who is hired by a Harlem mobster to rescue his daughter from the Italian mobsters who kidnapped her. The film stars Richard Roundtree as Shaft, alongside Moses Gunn, Charles Cioffi, Christopher St. John and Lawrence Pressman.
John Saxon was an American actor who worked on more than 200 film and television projects during a span of 60 years. He was known for his work in Westerns and horror films, often playing police officers and detectives.
Daniel Ronald Cox is an American actor, singer and songwriter. His best-known roles include Drew Ballinger in Deliverance (1972), George Apple in Apple's Way (1974–75), Ozark Bule in Bound for Glory (1976), Colonel Kerby in Taps (1981), Lieutenant Andrew Bogomil in Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Dick Jones in RoboCop (1987), Franklin Reed in Family Ties (1986), Vilos Cohaagen in Total Recall (1990), The President in Captain America (1990), Justin in Age of Dinosaurs (2013), Vice President Kinsey in several episodes of Stargate SG-1 and Captain Edward Jellico in two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1992) as well as in an episode of Star Trek: Prodigy (2022). Cox is also active as a musician, performing over 100 times per year at festivals and theaters each year as of 2012.
Kristoff St. John was an American actor best known for playing Neil Winters on the CBS daytime soap opera The Young and the Restless from 1991 until his death in 2019. Playing the role of Neil earned him two Daytime Emmy Awards from eleven nominations, and ten NAACP Image Awards. He was also known for his role as Adam Marshall in the NBC soap opera Generations, for which he received two Daytime Emmy Award nominations; and his role as a young Alex Haley on the ABC miniseries Roots: The Next Generations.
Pamela Suzette Grier is an American actress and singer. Described by Quentin Tarantino as cinema's first female action star, she achieved fame for her starring roles in a string of 1970s action, blaxploitation and women in prison films for American International Pictures and New World Pictures. Her accolades include nominations for an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Satellite Award and a Saturn Award.
Robert DoQui was an American actor who starred in film and on television. He is best known for his roles as King George in the 1973 film Coffy, starring Pam Grier; as Wade in Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville; and as Sgt. Warren Reed in the 1987 science fiction film RoboCop, the 1990 sequel RoboCop 2, and the 1993 sequel RoboCop 3. He starred on television and is also known for his voice as Pablo Robertson on the cartoon series Harlem Globetrotters from 1970 to 1973.
The Story of a Three-Day Pass is a 1967 film written and directed by Melvin Van Peebles, based on his French-language novel La Permission. It stars Harry Baird as a black American soldier who is demoted for fraternizing with a white shop clerk in France.
Ed Guerrero is an American film historian and associate professor of cinema studies and Africana studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. His writings explore black cinema, culture, and critical discourse. He has written extensively on black cinema, its movies, politics and culture for anthologies and journals such as Sight & Sound, FilmQuarterly, Cineaste, Journal of Popular Film & Television, and Discourse. Guerrero has served on editorial and professional boards including The Library of Congress' National Film Preservation Board.
Raymond St. Jacques was an American actor, director and producer whose career spanned over thirty years on stage, film and television. St. Jacques is noted as the first African American actor to appear in a regular role on a western series, portraying Simon Blake on the eighth season of Rawhide (1965–1966).
Black Shampoo is an American exploitation film directed by Greydon Clark. Released in 1976, the comedy film is considered an example of the blaxploitation and sexploitation subgenres of exploitation film. Produced on a budget of $50,000, the film stars John Daniels as Jonathan Knight, an African American businessman and hairdresser who frequently has sex with his predominantly white female clients, and Tanya Boyd as Brenda, Jonathan's secretary and girlfriend, who was previously in a relationship with a white mob boss, who, out of jealousy towards his ex's new lover, begins to regularly send goons to trash Jonathan's hair salon. The violence escalates as the film progresses.
Chameleon Street is a 1989 independent film written by, directed by and starring Wendell B. Harris, Jr. It tells the story of a social chameleon who impersonates reporters, doctors and lawyers in order to make money.
The following tables list films released in 2013. Three popular films were re-released in 3D and IMAX.
Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s. The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood NAACP branch. He claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypes often involved in crime. The genre does rank among the first after the race films in the 1940s and 1960s in which black characters and communities are the protagonists and subjects of film and television, rather than sidekicks supportive characters, antagonists or victims of brutality. The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.
Top of the Heap is a 1972 American drama film directed by and starring Christopher St. John. It was entered into the 22nd Berlin International Film Festival.
Jayhawkers is a 2014 American sports drama/biographical film directed by Kevin Willmott, following the life of Wilt Chamberlain, Phog Allen, and the 1956–57 Kansas Jayhawks men's basketball team. Former Kansas basketball player Scot Pollard portrays B. H. Born in the film.
Rosalind Miles was an American film and television actress and fashion model. Miles was most known for her roles in film during the early to late 1970s. Miles appeared in mostly American blaxploitation films such as; Shaft's Big Score!, The Black Six and Friday Foster.
Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property is a 2003 documentary film about Nat Turner co-written and directed by Charles Burnett.
Black film is a classification of film that has a broad definition relating to the film involving participation and/or representation of black people. The definition may involve the film having a black cast, a black crew, a black director, a black story, or a focus on black audiences. Academic Romi Crawford said, "I think a black film is a film work that takes into account in some way the relationship of African-Americans or blacks from the African Diaspora to filmmaking practice, means and industry. For me, it's in that relation between blacks and the film industry. How one engages in that relationship can be a mixture of black director and black acting talent; black director and black content in story; black content in story, no black director; black production money, nothing else that reads as black."
African American cinema is loosely classified as films made by, for, or about Black Americans. Historically, African American films have been made with African-American casts and marketed to African-American audiences. The production team and director were sometimes also African American. More recently, Black films featuring multicultural casts aimed at multicultural audiences have also included American Blackness as an essential aspect of the storyline.
Passing Through is a 1977 American film directed by Larry Clark and co-written by the director and by Ted Lange.