The 2020 Oscars were an entertaining procession of Chris Rock and Steve Martin, Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig, Janelle Monae and Martin Scorsese, with a special Korean soju toast to Bong Joon Ho. The Oscars are over, but one visitor coming this weekend to CSU Monterey Bay has been to the big show – and won.
Last year, Kevin Willmott (and Spike Lee) won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for BlacKkKlansman.
This weekend Willmott is speaking at the All Black Gala, a Black History Month annual formal that includes a reception, performances, hors d’oeuvres, a keynote speech and a meet-and-greet, done to foster community and student retention. Last year, 300 people attended, according to Otter Cross-Cultural Center Programs Coordinator Allymyr Atrero.
Willmott’s role will be to inspire perseverance and excellence in the students. He’s a good model for that. In addition to a successful filmmaking career, he teaches screenwriting, and black and anti-war film studies at the University of Kansas.
“I came from a small town, Junction City, Kansas,” Willmott says. “My father went up to the sixth grade. My mother, the 10th grade. We didn’t have much.”
He wrote plays in high school because he didn’t have access to film. But he went to the movies every weekend. Born in 1959, he and his friends didn’t see black heroes on the screen except for Sydney Poitier in the late 1960s.
Then, as a teenager, the blaxploitation era hit the scene.
“It was this amazing moment for guys my age,” he says. “We got to see storylines that spoke to us – Shaft, Superfly. Gordon Parks was a hero, also from Kansas, and he directed Shaft. That’s when I started to see myself as a filmmaker.”
Now, he says, the game has changed. Digital technology has encouraged filmmakers to shoot more with little consequence, which has dulled planning and discipline. And the proliferation of streaming content has made it harder for small indie films to stand out.
“Before, they could have a bigger effect on the industry,” he says. “You were compensated better and had a better chance of getting a theatrical release.”
But he concludes that in terms of diversity and abundance, technology has been very positive.
“Netflix and Amazon have helped open up things. You’re seeing projects come that before could not find support and financing. You see more different kinds of black films: romances, romantic comedies, dramas, historical dramas.”
In 2004 he released a scathing mockumentary called C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, which postulates what would have happened had the South won the Civil War. The premise sounds similar to that of Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ projectConfederate, which offended black people and was canceled before completion.
“I don’t think they knew the dynamite they were playing with,” Willmott says. “You really have to be aware of the challenges that material contains.”
He’s all for writing across race, identity and culture, if done with diligence.
“Nothing But a Man is a black film, one of my favorites, and the maker is German [and Jewish], Michael Roemer. He did the work to understand. If you do that, you’ll probably be OK.”
He says people still misunderstand C.S.A., but Spike Lee loved it and became an executive producer. That led to their collaboration on the script for Chi-Raq, the 2015 musical satire about black gun violence in Chicago, adapted from Aristophanes’ classical Greek play Lysistrata, which is about women who deny sex to their male partners fighting the Peloponnesian War.
“I was in the play in college,” Willmott says. “I thought it lent itself well to rap and spoken word.”
In adapting the play, he tried to maintain the structure and language, while Spike Lee chose to transpose it to gun violence in modern Chicago. It was the first film produced by Amazon Studios. Lee and Willmott collaborated again, this time adapting BlacKkKlansman, based on Ron Stallworth’s memoir of his time as a police officer in the 1970s when he infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
That film went on to garner an A – from CinemaScore, racked up $93 million from a $15 million budget, won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for Golden Globes, Critics Choice and Academy Awards – of which it won Best Adapted Screenplay.
“We all had an amazing, beautiful moment [at the Oscars],” Willmott says.
BlacKkKlansman will be screened on Thursday, Feb. 13, at CSUMB. And Willmott is putting in work on this visit, teaching a masterclass on Monday, Feb. 17, where he’ll impart an understanding of screenwriting and storytelling techniques. One of his most central themes: “We all imitate others, but it’s important to find your own voice.”
Kevin Willmott is a good model for that, too.