Cinema Speculation

*Floyd Footnote

So who exactly was this Floyd character I was referring to earlier?

His name was Floyd Ray Wilson and he was a black guy of about thirty-seven, who for about a year and a half in the late seventies lived in my house. He used to date my mom’s best friend Jackie and he hung around in their circle. Years earlier, from time to time, he would visit the apartment my mom and I shared with her roommates Jackie and Lillian. And every time he came by it was exciting, because I thought Floyd was really cool and I could talk movies with him. And since he was a hip guy who saw a lot of shit, he could keep up (at least compared to the adults I knew). He especially knew all the action movies and the Blaxploitation films. I remember when Jackie introduced us (I was ten), she said, “Quentin, Floyd’s who you should talk to about movies. He knows as much as you.”

So I—a ten-year-old white boy—started testing this grown-ass black man on his knowledge of black movies.

“Do you know who Brenda Sykes is?” I tested.

“Of course I do,” he said.

I told him, “I think she’s the prettiest black actress in movies.”

“You damn right she is,” he answered.

“Do you know who James A. Watson is?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

Wow, that’s pretty good, I thought, he mostly does TV.

“What’s your favorite Jim Kelly movie?” Again a test.

If he answered Enter the Dragon, he’s just like everybody else.

“Three the Hard Way, obviously,” he answered correctly.

Lillian just stared at the two of us and said to the room, “I don’t know who any of these people are.”

So from that moment on, whenever Floyd visited the apartment, it was practically like a holiday for me. Because finally, I was going to be able to talk to somebody about movies who knew what the fuck I was talking about. So when Floyd would come over I’d attach myself to him like a tick. But also during this time, I realized the hard way that Floyd was a flakey guy who couldn’t be counted on. On at least two occasions when Floyd was visiting, he played the big man and told me he’d come over next Saturday and take me to the movies.

Oh boy, I thought, not just talking about movies with Floyd, but actually going to the movies with Floyd.

But when Saturday came, no Floyd.

No call.

No, I’m sorry.

No excuse.

Just, no show.

He either forgot or he just didn’t give a shit.

I was so excited too.

If Floyd visiting the apartment was a holiday, this was going to be Christmas. And as the hours passed, and I waited, and waited for the buzzer to buzz on the intercom of our apartment, and it got later and later, I finally realized he wasn’t coming.

I wasn’t mad. I was heartbroken. I also realized Floyd wasn’t as great a guy as I thought he was. I didn’t even think of myself as a kid, but even I knew you didn’t do that to a kid. But I forgave Floyd and played it cool next time he came by.

And a few visits later, he promised to take me out again. I said, “yeah sure.” And without mentioning the last time, I made sure when he left that he remembered that we had plans, and I’d be waiting for him. He said, “Of course, no problem. See you Saturday.”

And the fucking guy did it to me again. But this time, I wasn’t heartbroken. I felt lousy, but not crushed. It was just now I knew who Floyd really was. And when he came over again, I didn’t confront him with his—bordering on cruel—behavior. I didn’t bring it up, and we still had great conversations, and I still really dug talking to him. I just knew not to try and make plans with him. Because he was an adult I couldn’t count on (I also promised myself—when I grew up—I’d never do that to a kid).

CUT TO 1978.

I’m fifteen going on sixteen.

My mom’s work is requiring her to spend more and more time away from the house, or she wanted to, and that was a good excuse, so she ran with it. Which happened to coincide with the age I started getting in trouble a lot (fights in school, ditching, and staying out later and later). There wasn’t necessarily a correlation between these two events, I was just a young wise guy who thought he was tough.

So mom rented Floyd a spare room in our house with the proviso that he keep an eye on her sixteen-year-old son. Which worked for me, because I still thought Floyd was the coolest. Yeah, years ago he stood me up. But since that time, I had gone through the whole trauma of being sent to Tennessee and put in the care of hillbilly alcoholics. So by that time, Floyd being a flake was easy to forgive. But it equipped me with two pieces of information that would prove valuable as our relationship moved forward.

One, I couldn’t count on Floyd. And if I ever did, be aware he’d probably let me down. And two, I cared more for Floyd than Floyd cared for me.

Knowing how much I dug Floyd, I’m sure my mom thought she came up with the perfect solution for the “What to do with Quentin?” problem.

At the time, I don’t think she was as aware of (though I think Jackie knew) what a shady cat Floyd really was. Nor did she consider the ramifications of having her very impressionable young son spend so much time around such a sketchy dude. It was sorta like moving Sam Jackson’s character in Jackie Brown (Ordell Robbie) into your home and having him look after your sixteen-year-old boy for over a year.

Not that I had any problem with it. Floyd could be mercurial and he could get irritated easily but I dug him. He lived an interesting vagabond life, he told great stories, he was funny as hell and I drank in all his hustler/male-centric/streetwise wisdom.

Floyd grew up in the fifties in Catahoula, Louisiana, and it was interesting listening to him recount pop culture history from his perspective.

He told me about being a little boy and going to the Saturday matinee and seeing the cowboys for a nickel. His favorite was the man in black Lash LaRue. Lash LaRue was extremely popular in the South. Like Johnny Cash he dressed all in black but he also carried a bullwhip and wasn’t shy about using it. In the book about the Gower Gulch matinee cowboy stars, The Sunset Corral, it described LaRue as looking like a cowboy Bogart. His sidekick was a very funny Gabby Hayes type, with a face full of whiskers called Fuzzy St. John.

And Floyd told me about going to see a Lash LaRue picture when he was nine and both Lash and Fuzzy made a personal appearance at his neighborhood cinema. This was back when the movie theatres were segregated and the black kids had to sit up in the balcony.

“But those are the best seats?” I said.

And he said, “That’s what we thought! But if these dumb motherfuckers think they’re gonna put us down by givin’ us the best seats in the house? Fine by me.”

He said that Lash and Fuzzy were on stage, talking about all the kids in the audience. Pointing out at the white boys on the bottom level, in his cantankerous accent, Fuzzy said, “We got some real tough looking cowpokes in the audience today.”

Then, pointing out the girls in attendance, Lash added, “And some mighty pretty does.”

Then Fuzzy pointed up at the balcony and said with a twinkle, “And them the bucks.”

Floyd said the whole place laughed, but for different reasons. The white kids thought Fuzzy was making fun of the black kids, but the black kids knew Fuzzy was calling them badasses.

Floyd was still a kid the first time he saw Elvis when he was on The Tommy Dorsey Show. And he said the next day at school everybody was talking about it, “Didja see that wild white boy on TV last night?”

Once I asked him what was he doing when he was my age.

He said, “Walking around trying to look as much like Elvis Presley as I could.” His other favorite at the time was Jackie Wilson. He’d act out seeing Jackie, when he was a teenager, on stage singing Lonely Teardrops. Floyd told me Elvis said, “If Jackie Wilson was white, he’d be twice as big as me.” Now I don’t know if Elvis ever really said that. But Floyd said he did.

There was a rumor going around in the black community that back in the fifties somebody asked Elvis what he thought of colored folks.

And Elvis said, “All they can do is shine my shoes and buy my records.”

Floyd didn’t buy that shit at all. “Elvis never said that shit.”

Then I said, “But so-an-so said she heard him say it?”

“So-an-so never heard that shit,” he came back, “So-an-so’s a fuckin’ liar!”

I was all ears about this firsthand rock ’n’ roll history, because I wasn’t into seventies white-boy rock. I didn’t give a fuck about Kiss, I didn’t give a fuck about Aerosmith, I didn’t give a fuck about Alice Cooper or Black Sabbath or Jethro Tull. I didn’t own Frampton Comes Alive. I openly rejected that entire culture. At sixteen, I think I heard of Bruce Springsteen, but I’d never heard Bruce Springsteen.

I was into fifties rock ’n’ roll.

Not sixties.

Not The Beatles.

Not Jimi Hendrix.

Not Bob Dylan (that would come later).

But fifties rock ’n’ roll . . . and . . . seventies soul music.

Elvis and Stevie Wonder.

Eddie Cochran and Bootsy Collins.

Gene Vincent and Parliament.

The Five Satins and Rufus.

Jackie Wilson and Rick James.

The Coasters and the Commodores.

Chuck Berry and Barry White.

Brenda Lee and Teena Marie.

Curtis Mayfield in the Impressions and the Curtis Mayfield that did the Super Fly soundtrack.

Well, that just happened to be Floyd’s wheelhouse too.

It was great watching something like Floyd Mutrux’s American Hot Wax with Floyd. One, he explained to me who Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was and he laughed at the fellow who was supposed to be Dee Clark. And he remarked about Tim McIntire (who was playing disc jockey Alan Freed), “Alan Freed didn’t look nothin’ like that motherfucker.”

He liked American Hot Wax, but he didn’t like The Buddy Holly Story.

“They tried to make Buddy Holly bigger than he was. Nobody gave a fuck when Buddy Holly died. Now Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, that was a loss.”

I remember when I told him after Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died they replaced them with Bobby Vee on the remaining concert dates. Floyd smiled and said, “Man, those musta been some real disappointed people.” And we both burst out laughing.

He introduced me to Howlin’ Wolf. In fact as I’m proofreading this page right now I’m listening to Howlin’ Wolf and thinking about Floyd.

He introduced me to George Thorogood and played his second album Move It on Over all the time.

He liked Johnny Cash, but he used to joke, “I don’t listen to Johnny around the brothers.”

He had one Bob Dylan album, Bringing It All Back Home, but he only listened to one song, Gates of Eden. But he listened to it all the time.

He taught me who the abolitionist John Brown was. John Brown was his favorite American, he knew a lot about him, and over the year we were together he told me John Brown’s whole story. And made it damn entertaining. His two favorite historical characters were John Brown and Gen. George Patton. And he quoted the both of them a lot.

He served in the army with Frankie Lymon.

Back in the day he dated Joey Heatherton for a while.

And he used to know Bobby Poole, the screenwriter of The Mack.

He said, incredulously, “That ugly motherfucker wanted to play Goldie. Ain’t nobody with good sense making a movie with that motherfucker as The Mack!”

He saw all the Blaxploitation movies when they came out.

Floyd on The Spook Who Sat by the Door:

“That movie was way too heavy for Hollywood. They had to shut that shit down.”

Floyd on The Mack:

“If Max Julien were white, after The Mack, he’d be the biggest motherfucker in Hollywood.”

Floyd on Jim Brown:

“People say Jim Brown can’t act. I say I don’t go to Jim Brown movies to see good acting. If I want to see good acting I’ll go watch Marlon Brando. I go to see Jim Brown movies to see Jim throw a motherfucker outta window.”

Floyd on 100 Rifles:

“You went to that movie to see Jim Brown fuck Raquel Welch. But Burt Reynolds stole that motherfuckin’ movie.”

Floyd on Sidney Poitier:

“Sidney Poitier is a good actor. But he played them nice guy ‘Patch of Blue’ roles too long. Now I understand it. He had to play those roles, so other motherfuckers could play other parts. But he done it too long. So when he’s in Buck and the Preacher you’re like, so what, now you’re this dude now? Naw man, you done played that other shit too long. I can’t buy you in this Jim Brown shit, you ain’t that guy. You’re the motherfucker from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

Floyd on Bill Cosby:

“Bill Cosby ain’t been a good actor since I Spy. And on I Spy, Cosby wasn’t shit next to Culp.”

Floyd on Charles Bronson:

“I’ll see any movie starring Charles Bronson ’cause I know Bronson’s gonna be good.”

Floyd’s Five Favorite Actors

Marlon Brando

George C. Scott

Peter O’Toole

Charles Bronson

William Marshall

Floyd on William Marshall:

“Greatest Shakespearean actor in America. Marshall’s voice was so magnificent, they’d use him to dub white dudes. He’s the guy who played Blacula. Now don’t get me wrong, he’s good in Blacula—that movie wouldn’t be shit without him. But he’s better than motherfucking Blacula. He had to do that shit to get a name.”

Later, when I’d watch William Marshall play the King of Cartoons on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, I’d always think of Floyd.

Floyd liked Richard Pryor in movies, but he didn’t consider him an actor. “He’s a comedian. He ain’t no actor. For a comedian, he’s a good actor, but he ain’t no actor.”

But Harry Belafonte he took serious as an actor. Especially in his character roles, like Buck and the Preacher, Uptown Saturday Night, and The Angel Levine, which he was a big fan of.

His five favorite movies starred three of his favorite actors (in fact they’re why they were his favorite movies).

Floyd’s Top Five Movies

The Godfather (hands down, top of the list)

The Lion in Winter

Patton

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Cluny Brown (yes, a Lubitsch movie made it on Floyd’s top five. Though I’m positive he never knew Lubitsch by name. Which I think Ernst might appreciate even more than if he did).

During the year (1978, some of 1979) Floyd and I saw a lot of movies together. Both at the theatres and on On-TV (pay movie channel).

The movies I can remember, Eaten Alive (especially the parts with Robert Englund as Buck), American Hot Wax, Bloodbrothers (he especially loved the part when Robert Englund fucks Kristen DeBell on the couch), Journey into the Beyond, Paradise Alley, Animal House, Fingers (he loved the head clunking scene), The Boys in Company C, Go Tell the Spartans, Days of Heaven, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman version), Dawn of the Dead (he was blown away), The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover (he thought Michael Parks was a great Bobby Kennedy), Death on the Nile, Blue Collar, Eyeball, Autopsy, The Boys from Brazil, Brass Target (he saw it because George Kennedy played Patton in it), Who’ll Stop the Rain, Thank God It’s Friday, Rocky II, Time After Time, The Wanderers, and Apocalypse Now.

We also devotedly watched the miniseries Centennial and he loved, loved, loved Robert Conrad’s French fur trapper character Pasquinel. (“Best thing that motherfucker ever did.”)

And we watched Franco Zeffirelli’s miniseries Jesus of Nazareth and he thought Rod Steiger stole the show as Pontius Pilate.

But of all the movies we saw together, his number one favorite was:

The Deer Hunter (“Now that was a great movie”).

Floyd dug all the big comedians of the day, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx, but he thought Steve Martin was silly.

Nor could Floyd wrap his head around the fact that Rudy Ray Moore was starring in kung fu movies. When Rudy came out with The Human Tornado, I asked him did he know who this kung fu star Rudy Ray Moore was? Floyd looked at me as if I’d lost my goddamn mind. “I know who Rudy Ray Moore is. But the Rudy I know ain’t starring in no damn kung fu movies.”

But there were two comedic actors I saw break Floyd down laughing more than anybody else.

One was Willie Best.

If you don’t know who Willie Best is, it’s because for the last thirty years he’s been effectively erased from film history. He was a young skinny black comedy actor, from mostly the forties, that started getting some big roles in comedies opposite some big-name farceurs. The reason you might not be familiar with Best is because his comedic character, the black man that’s scared of his own shadow, has—to say the least—gone out of favor. And if you just look at the names of some of the characters he performed (Sambo, Algernon, Woodrow, Sunshine, Chattanooga Brown), they don’t bode well for his filmography.

Best did do his share of insulting, slow witted, mush mouthed black caricatures (especially in High Sierra). But not all Willie Best performances were created equal. Best was a very skilled comedian and was very popular with black Americans in the forties and even into the fifties. Yes, his comedic persona was that of the shaking-like-a-leaf coward, but stick that character in a haunted house, like they did opposite Bob Hope in The Ghost Breakers or Eddie Bracken in Hold That Blonde!, now you got just a funny guy. Is Best really any different from Jerry Lewis in Scared Stiff or Lou Costello in Hold That Ghost?

Yes, he’s a little different, but not by much. And many times the black audiences of the forties and fifties appreciated the difference.

When black folks watched Hollywood movies in those days, they were used to seeing a world that hadn’t any relation to their lives. But Willie Best, partly because he was so young, would make cool hip references, which sailed over the head of the floor-level white audiences, but made direct hits in the balcony (white audiences always found it disconcerting when the black folks in the balcony laughed at something they didn’t get). This was Mantan Moreland’s specialty too. As he was goofing around next to Charlie Chan, he was also creating a private dialogue with black audiences.

Floyd was very pragmatic about the black performers from that time.

“They did what they had to do.”

I once put down Stepin Fetchit.

He asked me, “Have you ever seen Stepin Fetchit?”

“No,” I answered.

“I didn’t think so,” he said.

“Don’t be so quick to make judgments about people stuck in situations you can never understand. I got no problem with Stepin Fetchit. Those were the only roles he could get, so he did ’em. And by doing those roles became the wealthiest black man in America. Fuck those motherfuckers say he shuffled. Yeah, he shuffled his black ass all the way to the motherfuckin’ bank!”

Floyd didn’t understand why they didn’t air The Amos ’ n’ Andy Show on reruns like they did other shows he grew up with from the fifties. “That was a funny show! How is Amos ’n’ Andy degrading? How is Kingfish degrading? When I was a kid I thought he was the baddest motherfucker on the box! They lived well. They dressed nice. Kingfish had his own business. And they didn’t walk around callin’ each other nigger. What’s the problem?”

But it was watching the George Marshall comedy Hold That Blonde! late one night, on KTLA Channel 5, starring Eddie Bracken, Veronica Lake, and Willie Best that I saw Floyd laugh like I never saw him laugh before. Willie Best played Eddie Bracken’s manservant Willie. And Willie’s antics cracked Floyd up the whole movie. But the whole climax—when Eddie and Willie go to investigate a supposedly haunted house—that’s the sequence that physically doubled Floyd up on the couch in hysterics. By that point every single thing Willie did cracked Floyd up. It’s a really funny movie. George Marshall was a terrific comedy director and movies with haunted house set pieces were sort of his forte. And personally Hold That Blonde! is my favorite.

But Floyd’s favorite comedy actor . . . Don Knotts.

Floyd would watch an episode of The Andy Griffith Show and howl with laughter at everything Don Knotts as Barney Fife did.

I remember Floyd both describing and acting out for me the Don Knotts haunted house comedy, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, with the same enthusiasm that Peter Bogdanovich had for Buster Keaton or François Truffaut had for Jerry Lewis.

“Don Knotts just tickles me,” is what Floyd would say.

Once Floyd and I were in a pizza parlor. A gay nineties joint. Sawdust on the floor. Player piano in the corner playing a jaunty piano roll.

And they were projecting a series of Charlie Chaplin shorts on the wall from a 16mm projector. Floyd poured a glass of beer from a pitcher, glanced over at the image of the Little Tramp projected on the wall, and sneered, “That motherfucker’s never made me laugh. Folks say that nigger’s a comic genius. Not to me he ain’t. Just look at that shit . . . it ain’t funny. Now you wanna know who’s a comic GENIUS?

“Don Knotts is a motherfuckin’ comic genius! Don Knotts make ya laugh!

“Don Knotts might be the funniest motherfucker in the whole wide world!

“Compared to Don Knotts, Charlie Chaplin ain’t shit!”

And it was from watching Willie Best and Don Knotts from Floyd’s perspective that made me realize how similar to each other their comedic personas were. Is the shaking scared black man a stereotype of an earlier time? Yes it was. It’s also an attribute of many white comedians of the time (Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Danny Kaye, Lou Costello). And none more so than Don Knotts. When Knotts did a remake of Bob Hope’s The Paleface, it was titled The Shakiest Gun in the West. Meanwhile Don Knotts is respected as one of the most beloved comedians in the history of television, whereas Willie Best doesn’t get any respect.

Naturally, it’s a question of context. Even in Willie Best’s most legit studio film outings, his shaky subordinate was (usually) the only black character on display. While Don Knotts shared the screen with a cast of able white characters and he still ended up the hero and got the girl. Even as a fish!

Nevertheless, the almost identical nature of their two comedic personas brings up two questions.

If Don Knotts were black, he couldn’t be Don Knotts?

And if Willie Best were white, would he still be a disgrace . . . or a legend?

During this time the only family I had around me was my mom. But to us her close circle of friends were our family. Her best friend Jackie was like my second mom. Her friend Lillian was like my aunt. Jackie’s brother Don was like my uncle. Jackie’s daughter Nikki was like my sister. And they all looked out for me. Floyd, in his own way, looked out for me too. The difference between Floyd and them was, while they loved me, Floyd didn’t give a shit about me. Don’t get me wrong, Floyd liked me. We had a good time together. He liked telling his stories to me, he liked being admired by a young boy, and he liked handing out his sage wisdom to open ears.

You see, a guy like Floyd could like you, and simultaneously not give a fuck whether you lived or died.

One doesn’t contradict the other . . . if you’re a guy like Floyd.

Not to say Floyd didn’t have affection for me, but he was always looking out for number one. And that wasn’t me.

And it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to hang around an adult who didn’t treat you with kid gloves. Who told it to you like it is, without too much concern for your feelings.

For one thing Floyd never lied to me. Yeah, maybe about some of the shit he said he did in his past (like that Joey Heatherton shit).

But he never lied to me about me. He didn’t care enough about me to lie to me.

Obviously, sometimes that hurt my feelings. But through Floyd I received an authentic glimpse of the impression I was making on others.

Once, Floyd and I went to the Del Amo Mall with a young girl I was dating, and while there we caught a movie. Later, Floyd told me, “When you take a woman to the movies, don’t buy all that candy shit. It makes you look childish.”

Well, on the one hand, I was childish. On the other, I wanted to grow up. And Floyd gave me some unvarnished masculine advice.

Not all of it was correct.

On account of Floyd it took me a few years before I broke down and ate pussy (“No man has to do that shit!”).

But that was for me to work out for myself.

Now when Floyd moved out in 1979, my initial memory is I never saw him again. But that can’t be correct, because I remember seeing the movie American Gigolo with Floyd, and that didn’t come out till 1980. So I guess we kept in touch somewhat. Enough to go to a movie together. But when Floyd moved out, for the most part, he was gone, never to be seen or heard from again.

And that was the story of Floyd.

I didn’t hold it against Floyd for not keeping in touch. By that time I knew what kind of a guy Floyd was, so I didn’t expect anything else. Also, I’m sure he’d had enough of me. And by that time, he had done things to disenchant everybody in our circle. He was persona non grata with my mom due to some jewelry and a pawn shop, and I’m sure other things I wasn’t aware of. Jackie was done with him. And her daughter Nikki hated him and ran him down all the time.

Nevertheless, Floyd Ray Wilson left a lasting impression on the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boy he mentored in the year of 1978, as well as a bit of a legacy he never could have imagined.

What exactly Floyd did for a living all these years was open to wild speculation. He never had a career. He just moved from one situation to another—some more lucrative than others—for most of his life. Like everybody I’ve ever met like him, he always had stories of the days when he was living the high life, dating Joey Heatherton and driving a yellow Stingray.

If he’s thirty-seven years old, moving into his old girlfriend’s best friend’s spare room, and made to keep a lookout on her teenage son, he wasn’t doing so well (but you’d never know it to look at or talk to him).

Floyd didn’t have any serious bad habits. He didn’t take drugs, he didn’t even smoke weed as far as I could tell. Nor did he have a drinking habit. I don’t just mean he wasn’t a drunk. I mean, he didn’t need a drink or a couple of glasses of wine to unwind at the end of the day. But he wasn’t a recovering alcoholic either. He drank a beer, or a glass of whiskey when he was out. Not that any of those things are serious bad habits. But it’s a little unusual he didn’t develop a recreational reliance on at least one of them.

He did have a job when we lived together. He worked the night shift at the post office. Which was a pretty good job for a vagabond type guy, as anyone who’s read Charles Bukowski’s novel Post Office can tell you. Floyd was a very personable guy, yet he never had friends from the old days visit him. Which I can’t say rang any bells back then. But now, I think it’s due to the fact he didn’t have any old friends. People were in Floyd’s life for a while, then they weren’t. Usually it was probably a burnt bridge situation, or he just disappeared one day, leaving nothing but a memory.

He did have friends who came to the house every once in a while and hung out. But they were work buddies from the post office. And they were good guys who I liked and remember fondly. Nickleberry and Toulivert (in early attempts at script writing their names would find their way in). Nickleberry looked a bit like Montel Williams and Toulivert looked a lot like Sonny Liston (Floyd called me Quint, but he always called them by their last names).

Floyd might have been a vagabond, and a scrounger, and an opportunist, but he did have an ambition.

He wanted to be a screenwriter.

By the time he moved into my house he had written two screenplays and one novel. And we spent many hours discussing his screenplays during the year he lived with me. The novel, which I never read, was a romance set in Roman times, featuring two black characters titled Demetrius & Desiree (which Nikki claimed was plagiarized. “I saw that goddamn book in the store once. I just laughed, that fakey motherfucker.”).

Floyd’s two screenplays were the first two screenplays I ever read.

One was a horror film titled The Mysterious Mr. Black.

The Mysterious Mr. Black, Floyd admitted, was inspired by the Sidney Poitier movie Brother John (about the second coming of Christ, but as a black man in Mississippi). But Mr. Black wasn’t Christ. He was the vengeful spirit of a former slave, out to punish the descendants of the white slave owners who performed some ghoulish experiment on him a hundred years earlier. The suit clad Mr. Black, distinguished by his dignified manner and his mastery of languages, suddenly showed up in town one day and integrated himself in the highest echelons of upper New Orleans high society. Meeting and targeting the wealthy and powerful descendants of the family whose fortunes were built on the pain and suffering of black flesh. And then, Omen-style, causing their death in grand glorious set pieces.

Okay, I’m making this screenplay sound a little better than it was. I only read it once, about forty-five years ago, so I’m not sure how much is memory and how much is me filling in to complete the picture (I remember it being a little dry). But that was the basic idea—and no doubt—Mr. Black was a damn cool character. Floyd’s choice for Mr. Black . . . Harry Belafonte.

But the script I loved, and was the first script I ever read, was Floyd’s epic western saga, Billy Spencer.

Floyd was a big fan of westerns and his mammoth screenplay was basically every moment he loved from his favorite westerns, all rolled up into one story, and featuring an incredibly cool black cowboy named Billy Spencer.

In the script, which was similar to a Marvel Comic I liked called Gunhawks, the Spencers—owners of the most powerful ranch in the territory—find the baby of a runaway slave in the desert. They decide to keep the child and raise it as their own son. A few years later Mrs. Spencer has a son, Tracy (yeah, I know, Spencer Tracy. But I didn’t put that together back then). And Billy and Tracy grow up together, the best of friends, and a dynamic duo. The script didn’t really have one story, just a lot of different adventures for Billy and Tracy and the Spencer clan. Mother Spencer and the tough father were great characters, and there was never even a hint of ambiguity when it came to their love and devotion for Billy or his for them (the mother and the father made no distinction between Tracy and Billy). And as long as the screenplay was, Floyd wasn’t finished yet. He kept coming up with different adventures and situations to stick into the script. I remember when we watched the Muhammad Ali and Kris Kristofferson miniseries Freedom Road, Floyd thinking maybe Billy Spencer should be a miniseries. He felt Charlton Heston or Burt Lancaster should be old man Spencer and he thought Peter Fonda should be Tracy. But he strongly felt Billy Spencer should be an unknown (when I read it I always saw the actor Thomas Carter).

I don’t remember the villains, but at some point a range war develops and, in a scene taken from Public Enemy, Tracy is murdered by the bad guys and his fucked-up, dead carcass is dropped off at the Spencers’ front door. The scene was genuinely powerful, and Floyd would act it out so I got the full effect, and I did. After reading the massive screenplay, you did fall in love with the Tracy Spencer character and his death was devastating. Especially the detail that it was his mother who opened the door to find the mutilated corpse of her son. Floyd would act this out to maximum effect (of course, he’d seen Public Enemy). Once the bad guys murder his brother, Billy knows it’s time to leave the safety of the Spencer ranch behind and kill every single member of the bad guys’ gang.

So donning a poncho, which represents his now solitary existence, he rains hell on the bad guy camp with a bow and arrow and dynamite, and his lightning fast pistol.

Riding off, never able to return back to his home, to wherever the trail takes him.

Sound familiar?

Okay, not a single scene, situation, idea, or image that was in that screenplay was in my script for Django Unchained.

Yet . . . the essence of what Floyd was trying to accomplish in that script, an epic western with a black heroic cowboy at its center, was the very heart of what I was trying to accomplish with Django Unchained.

But even more influential than any one script was having a man trying to be a screenwriter living in my house. Him writing, him talking about his script, me reading it, made me consider for the first time writing movies. The reason I knew how to even format a screenplay was from reading Floyd’s screenplays. It would be a long road—from that year of 1978 to me completing my first feature length screenplay—True Romance—in September 1987.

But due to Floyd’s inspiration I tried writing screenplays. I usually never got that far. I think page thirty was by far the furthest I ever got. But I tried. And eventually I succeeded.

What happened to the script for Billy Spencer?

Nothing.

I doubt any really serious entity has ever read it.

And I’m fairly positive not a single copy of it exists anymore.

I’m sure at the time of his death Floyd was the only one who still had a copy of it. And whenever he died, wherever he was, it was disposed of with the rest of his meager possessions (the fate of most vagabonds).

And whatever trash can it was tossed into was the final resting place of Floyd Ray Wilson’s dream of a black cowboy hero named Billy Spencer.

My dream of a black cowboy hero, Django Unchained, was not only read, it was made, by me, into a worldwide smash. A smash that resulted in me winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

By the time I walked up to that podium and accepted that little gold man, with Dustin Hoffman and Charlize Theron standing behind me, Floyd was long since dead.

I don’t know how he died, where he died, or where he’s buried.

But I do know I should’ve thanked him.