'Under the Influece' Screening of
Killer of Sheep with Charles Burnett

Discussion moderator LeVar Burton (left) with director Charles Burnett. (Photo: D L Hope)

The screening and talk formed the latest installment in the DGA Independent Directors Committee's series "Under the Influence: A Dialogue About Films From the '70s." DGA Assistant Executive Director Elizabeth Stanley welcomed the audience and Penelope Spheeris, director of The Decline of Western Civilization, Suburbia and Wayne's World and Independent Directors Committee member, introduced the film, which Burnett made as a graduate project in the early 1970s at UCLA Film School.

Spheeris thanked the DGA and the Independent Directors Committee for their help "to screen movies that inspired us to become directors... I'm really proud of Charles and you should be as well, because he's actually been more true to himself than I have been [to myself]. I admire him greatly and the film is quite brilliant."

Killer of Sheep centers on the lives of a slaughterhouse worker and his family and friends in South Central Los Angeles in the early 1970s. The film was added to the National Film Registry in 1990, the second year of its existence. The Library of Congress designates 25 films for the registry each year as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant."

For Killer of Sheep — a black-and-white piece that Burnett made with perseverance, friends working gratis in the cast and crew and practically no money as a graduate project in college — to be in this select company defies even the most extraordinary perimeters of the David-and-Goliath format, in film or anywhere else.

When a journalist called to ask him about the extraordinary honor, Burnett told the DGA audience, "There were kids making noise in the background. The reporter asked, 'How do you feel about your film being in... such and such?' I couldn't quite hear. I thought that it was in a festival. I just started talking off the cuff — ad-libbing. Then I learned later what that was all about. I was very pleased. The film wasn't meant to go beyond a Royce Hall screening [at UCLA], but it has become what it's become."

Coincidentally, kids in the background and foreground are constants in the film, which functions as a slice-of-life, near-documentary poem about childhood, marriage, friendship, partying and the overall hardscrabble existence to maintain a sense of morality and a family core in the South Central of the times.

In 1981 the film won the Critics' Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and the first-place honor at the U.S. Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It has never had theatrical or video distribution, because Burnett never acquired the rights to the music he used. Burton called attention to the blues tunes on the soundtrack, and detected the distinct voice of Dinah Washington.

"I still don't have the rights," Burnett said. "Someone asked me why the film hasn't screened more than it has, and that's the reason. I tried to get the rights earlier, but you have to go all over the place. The people who made those old 78s [vinyl, grooved records] have to be tracked down. You have to go to peoples' garages and things like that. It's very hard. I just quit." Burnett said that a video company that's determined to release the film is currently tracking the music rights.

Burnett also directed the critically well-received To Sleep With Anger (1990) starring Danny Glover in a contemporary story about the South Central middle class, and Nightjohn (1996, for the Disney Channel), starring Carl Lumbly, Beau Bridges and Bill Cobbs in a harrowing story about Southern slavery in the 1830s. Burnett was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1944 and grew up in the South Central neighborhoods he used for both Killer of Sheep and To Sleep With Anger.

"I used most people who weren't actors," Burnett said of Killer of Sheep. "I spent long periods waiting for them to show up. You have to explain to them that, 'It's imperative that you show.' Then they say, 'Well, can't George take my place?' 'It doesn't work that way...' It wasn't about getting performances anyway. It was about trying to demystify filmmaking in the community. I was part of a group trying to make films for social change. I let the kids do the sound. It was just me and the actors a lot of the time. I wanted the opposite of slick."

Burnett said that despite the authentic ragged-fringe look to the ultra-realistic film, he made sure the actors stuck to his screenplay and he storyboarded every scene.

"This film wasn't made to be screened in a theatrical environment," he said. "It was made to show how people lived in a certain environment. It's supposed to look accidental. Yet all of it was scripted and all of it was storyboarded. It just looks like I caught everything on the fly. And I did it as cheaply as possible. You had to be inventive. I was trying not to let my notions and feelings exert themselves and impose rules. I let what was going on in the community explain itself. Everyone was conscious about the film speaking for the black community. It was really neorealistic filmmaking trying to present the truth."

Even though Killer of Sheep was shot in 1972 and 1973, and first exhibited in 1977, the print was already in decline. "I was under the impression that when you make a film and put it in a can, it's safe," Burnett said. "But I learned it will deteriorate, and you have to be aware of that. This film had already started to turn to vinegar. The UCLA Film and Television Archive came along just in time. They restored the film to its original status. I owe them for that."

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