Two Assignments for Noel

In 1990, Noel was in his apartment working on a couple of assignments. Assignment # 1 was to write a brief profile on the first blaxploitation movie "Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song" for a film festival in North Carolina that wanted to do a "Black's in Cinema" retrospective. They had a print of King Vidor's "Hallelujah!" proved that an all-black cast could carry a movie. They had "Gone with the Wind" which proved a black woman could act. "Lilies of the Field" proved a black man could act as well) and a couple of contemporary movies like "The Last Dragon", "Breakin'" and "Action Jackson" to fill in the time. The festival originally wanted "Song of the South" for the slot Sweet Sweetback would take. The reason was that even though Sidney Pottier was the first man of African decent to win an Academy Award for acting, the first black man to win an Academy Award, period, was James Baskett for his portrayal of Uncle Remus in the aforementioned movie. They were set to include a print of this controversial movie in the film festival but a very intimidating phone call, given after the plan was announced, persuaded them not to. They decided to go with Sweetback instead. Noel watched the movie several times and couldn't figure out a one word summary that would best describe the movie's cultural relevance. A one sentence summary that would promote it to the status of art. What exactly did this movie prove? "It proved that racking focus was over-rated, I guess, but I can't put that into an article." In his confusion of how to proceed, he decided to go onto his second assignment.

The second assignment was different. It required Noel to write a humorous story about a Bostonian kitten in 1775 inadvertently causing "the shot heard 'round the world" by rubbing against a British officer's leg. While the battle of Lexington & Concord was going on the kitten comfortably walked away from the danger unaware of the devastation he just created. Now even though the second assignment sounded very easy, for Noel it was not. He struggled for hours to work out the logic that would make such a premise plausible. "A kitten," he reasoned, "would panic as soon as a single shot was fired." For Noel, it was a cute story, but it betrayed what he considered a fundamental law of reality. Kittens get scared when shots are fired. Period. "How could you base an entire story on an outright lie," he thought. Suddenly, his mind gave him the answer. "Because your being paid to." When he realized this, he finally understood how to finish The Sweet Sweetback profile as well. "It proved," he wrote in his legal pad, about the movie, "that black people didn't need the white establishment in order to make a movie. It also proved that racking focus is overrated."