“I loved it, and the crowd went nuts,”
Reed said. “It really is an amazing homage
to and parody of those old blaxploitation
movies, and it’s so consistently funny. Sus-
taining that over a feature-length film is
quite an achievement.”
A film maven, deejay and connoisseur
of all things lowbrow, Sanders had just the
right combination of sensibility and direc-
tor’s chops to poke affectionate fun at the
blaxploitation genre while getting the
details right. So now the guy from the mail
room is tasting the big time. Spike Lee is a
fan, although they nearly missed connect-
ing because Sanders almost didn’t answer
his call (“I thought it was a creditor, but I
picked it up on the last ring and it’s Spike
Lee wanting to go to lunch.”).
And Sanders has been jetting around
the world to attend Black Dynamite
premieres, although not all of those have gone
well. The audience at a film festival in
France, for example, seemed to be expecting something a little more high-class.
“It was the most red-carpety, everybody-
taking-our-picture thing ever — until they
showed the movie,” Sanders said. “Then it
was kind of not so good. I was told the
translation was good, but I know enough
French to know the subtitles were not
right. There’s this line where a guy goes,
‘You need something to eat? Sister Betty
made some hog maws and put her ankles in
it.’The translation was, ‘Sister Betty made
some tripe, would you like some?’
“The crowd was mostly older, nobody
was laughing, all these people were walking
out and I’m sinking down in my chair.”
On the upside, a handful of younger
Parisians sought out Sanders afterward to
congratulate him. Harrison Ford and come-
dian Bobcat Goldthwait were there. And so
was one of Sanders’ long-ago co-workers
from the UTA mail room — there to rep-
resent a managerial client, Anne Fletcher,
director of the Sandra Bullock/Ryan
Reynolds comedy The Proposal.
As Sanders says, it helps to know people.
Hustling the angles
“Everybody’s path into this business is
kind of random,” Reed says. “But Scott’s
path might be the strangest, most oddball
of anybody’s. For such a long time, he was
just written off. It’s amazing that things are
happening for him now. And nobody
knows that more than him.”
Sanders has always been able to hustle
the angles, maybe because he comes from a
family of politicians (his mother is the
mayor of Roper, N.C., population 570). He
took his first steps toward directing while
attending an unconventional summer camp
run by hippies near Washington, D.C.
“We did a psychedelic version of Hansel
and Gretel, shot on Super 8 film,” Sanders
recalled. “I was 8 or 9 years old, and I said,
‘Hey, I’d like to do movies.’And I did
nothing about that until 10 years later,
when it was my major.”
COURTESY OF SCOTT SANDERS
But that’s not to say that Sanders wasn’t
studying film until college. Like Quentin
Tarantino, Sanders conducted an informal
course of study at the video-rental store,
developing an aesthetic sense based on
watching lots of movies. What moved him
most was the trashy stuff — camp classics
by John Waters and Russ Meyer, along
with Shaft, Across 110th Street and other
blaxploitation landmarks.
“I always liked weird movies,” Sanders
said. “Anything offbeat. I’d see all the weird
movies before the basic stuff, like every
John Waters movie, before I ever saw The
Godfather. And I’ve still never seen Saturday
Night Fever. But I like the weird stuff and
that’s my problem, because the normal stuff
is where you make money. It looks like it’s
gonna work out, but it’s taken time and a
whole different angle.”
Tar Heel couches
In Hollywood, Sanders fell in with
Reed and the rest of the expatriate Tar
Heel community, a group of like-minded
alumni who work in film and television
(story, page 40). That gave him a network
to plug into, not to mention a series of
couches to sleep on while he got started.
Sanders soon graduated from the UTA
mail room to become assistant to Pat Dol-lard, who was Oscar-winning director
Steven Soderbergh’s agent. And that’s when
Sanders’ career path got a bit twisted.
“Pat left UTA to go to Triad and didn’t
take me with him because his sister wanted
to be his assistant,” Sanders said. “The
agency told me, ‘Look, either you knew he
was leaving, in which case you’re fired; or
he was plotting to leave and you were too
stupid to know, in which case you’re fired.
So, you’re fired.’ ”
While collecting unemployment,
Sanders wrote an episode of the family sit-
com Roc, which he
submitted to UTA
under a pseudonym.
UTA liked the script
enough to sign
Sanders as a client —
mere months after
firing him. The writing gig lasted a couple of years and also
included episodes for
A Different World
before Sanders got fired again in a purge.
Most people would have taken that as a
setback. Sanders decided he was ready to
make a movie. Another guy he’d known in
the mail room had become assistant to
actor Alec Baldwin. Sanders had a screenplay he describes as “this sort of Elmore
Leonard, Pulp Fiction kind of thing.” And
he figured that if he could get Baldwin to
sign on, he could raise the $3 million it
would take to make the movie, which
became 1998’s Thick as Thieves.
