W
hen third world cinema productions
was first announced, Davis said he antici-
pated producing five feature films in the
next two years. One was to be a biopic
of Billie Holiday starring Diana Sands,
although the untimely death of the actress
(also originally cast as Claudine) and the 1972 Diana Ross vehi-
cle Lady Sings the Bluesessentially nixed the idea. The June 1972
issue of Black World anticipated TWC screen adaptations of
Puerto Rican writer Thomas’s Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand
starring Rita Moreno, with Davis slated to direct, and Killens’s
And Then We Heard the Thunder. A 1974 dispatch in The New
York Post claimed that an adaptation of Thomas’s Seven Long
Timeswould be directed by fellow Puerto Rican Jose Garcia. At
one point, there was also talk of TWC purchasing the Filmways
studios in Harlem.
The company’s eventual follow-up to Claudinewas the biopic
Greased Lighting, about one of the first Black stock car drivers in
NASCAR, Wendell Scott, starring Richard Pryor and Pam Grier.
But reviews were middling and the 1977 film did not earn much
of a following. Weinstein produced both Claudine and Greased
Lightning—but the next Pryor film she produced, Stir Crazy, was
not made for TWC. In 1975, an article in the Amsterdam News was
wondering if the wheels were coming off the once-promising
company. Third World Cinema produced one last film in 1980, a
documentary on painter Romare Bearden for PBS called Bearden
Plays Bearden. James Earl Jones returned to narrate Nelson E.
Breen’s film, which also involved the participation of James Bald-
win, Alvin Ailey, and Ntozake Shange.Various factors led TWC to cease production, the most popularly
cited reason being that the city’s political winds had shifted, cutting
off grant money and stifling union jobs. Not enough private funds
came forward to keep operations going. “Money ran out,” said
Frazier, who today runs the Harlem arts nonprofit Dwyer Cultural
Center, much of which is dedicated to the legacy of Davis and Ruby
Dee, his partner. According to Frazier, the TWC isn’t quite dead,
only absorbed under the umbrella of the International Communi-
cations Association, which was established in 1986 to also include
the Community Film Workshop Council and Institute of New
Cinema Artists, a training organization. It has since taken decades
for Hollywood to adopt or adapt TWC’s training program model.
Not long after the end of TWC’s run, a new wave of indepen-
dent Black and Latino filmmakers arrived—Spike Lee, John
Singleton, Julie Dash, Luis Valdez, and Gregory Nava, to name
but a few. However, by the end of the ’90s, progress once again
waned until the recent push for diversity and inclusion reignited
calls for Hollywood to open up its studio gates. Some filmmakers
are taking a more active hand in mentoring or independently
producing their own projects, with Lee employing NYU students
on his sets and Ava DuVernay seeking out women directors on
Queen Sugar. TWC’s plan to create a studio just as invested in
training and empowering underrepresented filmmakers as it was
in independently producing their stories may have petered out,
but the core ethos of its mission has yet to fade. Monica Castillois a film critic and features editor for CherryPicks.
Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wash-
ington Post, NPR, RogerEbert.com, and elsewhere. July-August 2019|FILMCOMMENT| 49Criterion Collection Edition #97: Do the R Right Thing