We played a game he called “Movie/Movie.” He said a movie title and I had to respond with another: the last letter of his had to be the first letter of mine. It’s the kind of game you think of for children who are on a long journey. My wife and I did it with ours when they were very little, but with animals. When Tony and I would bother each other, we would talk about a little bit of shit, a lot of shit. I beat him the last time we played and he promised revenge in a rematch. I said “Double damages‘ and he couldn’t think of anything in time. Tony Todd asked me to play when I first met him, was that ten years ago now? Just to kill time. He was in town to host a screening of Candyman in one of the theaters where I was shooting at the time and after his introduction we had a few hours to kill. We had dinner, we talked about his great love of the theater, we had thoughts about Candyman’s place in the horror pantheon as the only African American (“non-slave!” he would say) and the things that motivated him in his to live. Cabrini Green hunting ground in Chicago. We talked about how Candyman came not long after his star turn in Tom Savini’s remake Night of the Living Deadin which he takes on the Duane Jones role of hero Ben and how the film’s new ending returns agency to Barbara… and perhaps to Ben too.
That same year, 2014, he played in Denver the role of “Paw Si Don” in Marcus Gardley’s Black Odyssey at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in their small “Space” theater. It was overwhelming to see 6-foot-4 Tony Todd – a man whose physical presence is surpassed only by the weight and intonation of his voice – in a small room. As the vengeful, cunning, quick to anger but clever, playful, once evil/now benevolent God of the Sea, he was in charge. You surrendered to him. In the play he is engaged in a game of chess with rival Deus and that is Todd in a nutshell, facing him physically and intellectually, moving quickly from one to the other. I told him how much this performance haunted me when we met and he took my forearm and leaned toward me, “It was a good one,” he said, “a good part.”
Todd’s career spanned five decades and hundreds of great roles on stage and screen. He won fellowships to the University of Connecticut and the Eugene O’Neill National Theater Institute, which led to time spent at the Hartman Conservatory and the Trinity Repertory Company. In his later years he spent time at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival in a few plays by August Wilson, among others How I learned what I learned And Fences. (He had previously originated Wilson’s Hedley in King Hedley II – if there was an artist made for August Wilson, it was Tony.) I made plans to go there to see him in his element, but I could never manage the money or time. I am burdened with regret and poor excuses.
Prop bay
The first time I saw it Candymanit was a pre-screening on the campus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I was a student. It was held in the Chem 140 classroom, a room that looked very much like the room in which the film’s college professor lectures when the film opens, and the crowd was rowdy and consisted mainly of the football team, which that year also included future N.F.L. -ers would belong. Brown, Alfred Williams, Kordell Stewart, Michael Westbrook, Mitch Berger, Rae Carruth and future Heisman winner Rashaan Salaam. I remember the audience’s unrest when black poverty was depicted on screen, exploited by white intellectuals seeking publishing opportunities based on academic studies of redlining and race-based institutional, even systemic, repression. When a few black janitors showed up, the crowd erupted in shouted protests against what I learned in that case: tired and offensive images. And then Candyman appears. Tony Todd as Daniel Robitaille who fell in love with a white woman somewhere in the pre-Reconstruction South and is tortured and murdered by a white mob for his sin of miscegenation. His mission is different from that of other movie monsters, the Michael Myers and Freddy Kreugers, Jason Voorhees and Leatherfaces – he serves as a reminder to his community that this country was founded on the sweat of their brow and the blood that flowed from their veins. He has a hook in place of a hand sawed off by his lynchers – the kind farmers use for bales of hay – and he is surrounded by the swarm of bees with which his killers filled his body cavity. He is a harvest god. He is the harvest of what we have sown. He is America’s nightmare.
As played by Todd, he is unavoidable. His voice is thick with longing and sadness. “Be my victim,” he says, promising “sweets to the sweet.” He becomes fixated on Helen (Virginia Madsen) who tries to prove her intellectual bona fides by writing an article about urban legends. At first she’s patronizing, these primitive stories told by the undereducated, and then she visits the projects in Chicago and Candyman, in the middle of the day in a parking garage, tells her that they were meant to be together. Immediately, Candymana film by white British director Bernard Rose, based on the short story ‘The Forbidden’ by white British writer Clive Barker, is steeped in the delicate complexity of class. I brought Tony Todd back to Denver in 2016, this time with Rose, for an encore presentation of Candyman for two sold out shows. The three of us then talked at length about personal obsessions like Tolstoy and popular obsessions like the possibility of a new installment of their masterpiece, directed by Rose and starring Madsen as the hook’s heir. We delved deeper into the changes made to the source material, and what Candyman means to the African-American community: not driven by revenge, but by justice and knowledge. When that first screening was over, the audience erupted in applause, with excited shouts and a prolonged chant of “Candyman” spilling into the student room. It was the scariest movie I had seen as an adult and then it was an impromptu party in the middle of a chilly fall night. It seemed like the best way to celebrate the birth of something essential and new.
Photo: Everett Collection
Tony’s great screen roles — Candyman, of course, but also his turn as Jake Sisko in “The Visitor” (Deep space 9s04e02, David Livingston, 1995) – focus on the enormous depth of grief in his heart. He listens attentively, like someone who has asked questions of people he has lost and whose answers are swept away by a predatory wind. He had a falling out with his mother as a child and was taken in by an aunt, a janitor whose employer included a library where she often took young Todd. “I liked books,” he said, “so I was satisfied.” He reconciled with his mother later in life but had a rough patch with his son, captured in part by his final collaboration with Bernard Rose, the Bunuel-inspired pandemic born man. Travel light (2022). Largely improvised, Rose recalled driving with Todd through Los Angeles in search of Todd’s lost son. “It was completely real. He was really looking for his son. I think that’s what’s interesting about it. Tony was out there and since then he’s found it and then lost it and then found it again. I didn’t know what to say. Rose continued, “The courage it takes to risk everything, for art, for truth. All the searching, the pain, that’s real. He watches, and we watch.” In “The Visitor,” old Jake, an author of two books who lives comfortably but alone, is visited one stormy night by a fan who wonders why he never wrote again. Todd’s Jake talks about the day his father died, their sometimes difficult relationship, how he has struggled all his life with his father’s advice: “It’s life, Jake, you can miss it if you don’t open your eyes;” and how he was literally haunted by his father’s appearance. Jake talks about the open wound of grief – how time passes and you come to realize that this person who was the sun and the moon is now gone forever.
I don’t want to make a list of his performances, I want more performances. I want to play another round of “Movie/Movie” with my friend, because it was never about winning, you know, but about the conversations the titles would inspire. How he loved the greats: the Spencer Tracys and Sidney Poitiers – the devastating performances in groundbreaking films. His knowledge was enormous and his curiosity matched that. He participated in gang outreach programs and workshops for aspiring actors. He called himself a figure in art who was not supposed to succeed, and yet here he was and what would he be if he did not lead the way for those who might follow. ‘The Visitor’ becomes a science fiction metaphor for how dearly departed ones return to our lives every now and then. A scene where Jake’s father is presented with the two books his son has completed still cracks me up. My father didn’t live long enough to see me become a published writer, he died a month before his first grandchild was born, but through my son’s laughter and the way my daughter sometimes holds her forehead when she makes fun of her father, I can hear my father – and see him too. But it’s never when I expect it, and every time the air rushes out of the room for a moment. Suddenly I’m back to who I was when he first left and I couldn’t believe it. The last text I got from my friend Tony was birthday wishes. He said “You are a great man and a wizard of film/movie” and I told him I loved him and that he would be fine. He was 69 when he left us on November 8, 2024. I will miss him terribly.
Walter Chaw is the senior film critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with an introduction by James Ellroy, is available now before purchase.
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