Darktown Strutters

Darktown Strutters
Directed by	William Witney
Produced by	Gene Corman
Written by	George Armitage
Starring	Trina Parks
Distributed by	New World Pictures
Release dates	1975 (1975)
Country	United States
Language	English

Darktown Strutters is a 1975 blaxploitation film from New World Pictures. Despite having lukewarm reviews at the time it has gained cult status over the years with praise from film director Quentin Tarantino.

Cast

• Trina Parks
• Edna Richardson
• Sweet Bettye (Sweet Bettye)
• Shirley Washington
• Roger E. Mosley
• Christopher Joy
• Stan Shaw
• DeWayne Jessie
• Milt Kogan
• Norman Bartold
• Dick Miller
• Gene Simms
• Sam Laws

Production

The film was written by George Armitage, who had worked with producer Gene Corman before. Armitage:

I wrote Darktown Strutters in three days, and the script form is all one sentence, the entire script is one sentence. I just did it to have fun. I was going to direct it, but I had another script that I sold called Trophy, which was about two police departments who end up in a shooting war, and it was really a labor of love, so I asked Gene to excuse me to work on that, but it never got made, unfortunately. So Joe Viola came in to direct Darktown Strutters, but then he left the project and William Witney came in. And he was fantastic—I was an old Roy Rogers fan and he’d done so many of those... When it was done, Gene said: “You know, we could punch this up a little.” He had a screening after it was first made and was taking suggestions, and he’d invited Richard Pryor to come. And I remember about three-quarters of the way through I looked down in the aisle, and Richard was crawling out. He obviously didn’t care for the film, but was crawling up the aisle so nobody would see him, and he escaped. So he didn’t contribute much to the movie, other than giving them a reason to say: “Hm, maybe there’s some work to be done here?” Still, I enjoyed that movie, I thought Witney did a good job, and it’s a lot of fun.

The film was produced by Gene Corman for a company in Tennessee which was unable to secure its release. Corman then sent it to his brother Roger who released it through New World Pictures. It was re-released in 1977 under the title Get Down and Boogie.

See also

• List of American films of 1975

External links

• Darktown Strutters at IMDb
• Darktown Strutters at Trailers from Hell