A Conversation with Kevin Willmott - filmmaker - Interview

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Jeff Loeb

Kevin Willmott is, by necessity, a person of many talents. As an independent filmmaker on a small (sometimes approaching nonexistent) budget, he must be, by turns, screenwriter, actor, producer, director, impresario, and salesperson to keep his projects afloat and on track. To survive financially between films, he often works for other filmmakers and in other theatrical areas, over the past several years writing or co-writing several screenplays for film and television, as well as acting in or directing plays in a variety of venues. Finally, as an assistant professor in the film department of the University of Kansas, he teaches regular classes on a year-round basis. Needless to say, Willmott has been involved in every phase of filmmaking and theater, yet he's also a long-time social activist, working for years on behalf of the homeless and even leading demonstrations for fair employment practices.

While best known for his film Ninth Street (Ideal, 1999), in the last five years Willmott has also written or co-written six other screenplays and three television scripts, acted in or directed a number of plays, and served as a "script doctor" for such notable directors as Oliver Stone. The screenplays, most of which he co-wrote with Mitch Brian, include: Shields Green and the Gospel of John Brown, purchased for 20th Century Fox by producer Chris Columbus, which tells the story of Green, an ex-slave and disciple of Frederick Douglass who accompanied Brown to Harper's Ferry, where he died; Civilized Tribes, about the conflict that occurs when a woman of mixed African American and Native American heritage falls in love with a railroad tycoon in late nineteenth-century Oklahoma, also written for 20th Century Fox; Little Brown Brothers, re-written for Stone, which takes place during the Philippine Insurrection and centers on a black soldier who finds he is fighting on the wrong side in a war of racial exterminat ion; Marching to Valhalla, an adaptation of a book for young adults about Custer by Michael Blake, also done for Stone; C.S.A., an imaginative drama Willmott is presently making in the Lawrence, Kansas, area, which explores what would have happened if the South had won the Civil War and slavery continued until the present; and Colored Men, his most recent screenplay, which explores the deadly Houston race riot of 1917 and the trial that followed.

Since 1998, Willmott has also co-written three teleplays with Brian. The first, due to air this year on NBC, is House of Getty, about the life of financier J. Paul Getty. The second, The 70's, a two-part series shown in early 2000 on NBC, follows two protagonists, one white and one black, through the events of this turbulent decade, including Watergate and Vietnam. The last is a rewrite for CBS of an adaptation of a novel by Christopher Paul Curtis called The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963, about a Northern black family who visit their aging grandmother in the South.

In addition, Willmott has been active in the theater. In 1998, he directed the play Buffalo Hair, by Carlisle Brown at Kansas City's Coterie Theater. The following year he directed Little Tommy Parker's Celebrated Minstrel Show, also by Brown. And in 2000, he played Oedipus in a production of Sophocles's Oedipus the King at Southwest Missouri State University.

In the following interview, Willmott talks about all of his projects and what he sees as their common vision. Mostly he discusses the film Ninth Street, because he spent so much time with it and because it seems to sum up his views about America and race at this point in our history. The film, which was released directly to video in 1999, is about the last days of an all-black business district in a small Kansas town, Junction City, located next to Fort Riley, the large army training base. The time is 1968, the height of the Vietnam War. The district, situated primarily on one block of East 9th Street, had been in existence since before World War I, when the Tenth Cavalry (Buffalo Soldiers) had been stationed at Fort Riley. The district served the legitimate needs of Junction City's sizable African American community (who largely migrated there after the Civil War)-such as hair care, transportation, food service, and entertainment-and the illicit needs- including prostitution, gambling, drinking, and, eventu ally, drugs-of Fort Riley soldiers, both black and white. Finally demolished as a purported nuisance in 1976 by order of the (all-white) Junction City Commission, 9th Street has been depicted, usually disparagingly, at different periods of its existence in accounts as varied as Joseph Stanley Pennell's 1944 novel The History of Rome Hanks, a bestseller about post-Civil War Kansas, and David Parks's Vietnam memoir GI Diary. Many people, however, remember it as a center of black culture, purportedly visited by legendary jazz figures such as Charlie Parker and Jimmie Smith. The film Ninth Street attempts to capture this varied sense of the street's character.