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There’s a glamour to the proceedings of Once Upon A Time In Harlem, a rare document of the kind of party that most mortals just wistfully imagine — cosmopolitan, intellectual, diverse, and brimming with talent and verve. It’s not just a party, though; it’s a party, captured by esteemed documentarian and filmmaker William Greaves in 1972, that winds up echoing many previous and even more legendary gatherings that happened four and five decades prior during the Harlem Renaissance. In the film, luminaries like pianist and composer Eubie Blake and Leigh Whipper, the first Black member of Actor’s Equity, don natty suits and sip cocktails at Duke Ellington’s house while reminiscing about the icons and reprising the debates of their ’20s and ’30s heydays. With their peers they are human and warm, rather than just names in a history book; the Renaissance is itself reborn, in a way, presented anew.
Just released, the film is a time capsule twice over: footage captured 50 years ago of artists and thinkers who flourished 100 years ago edited for a contemporary audience, one that likely has little familiarity with the Harlem Renaissance beyond a few memorable names like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. For Greaves, who dedicated his life to sharing Black stories on film through numerous documentaries and his Emmy-winning work on the television series Black Journal, the film was a passion project that went unrealized during his lifetime. He worked with the librarians in the film to gather all these critical historical figures in one room, but never found the funding or the time to complete the film. His wife Louise Archimbault Greaves eventually secured a grant to preserve the footage (60,000 feet of film), but it was not until after she too had passed that William’s son David Greaves, along with his daughter Liani Greaves, was able to manifest this long dormant project. Now, it is finally reaching audiences as one of the year’s most critically acclaimed documentaries.
Three generations of filmmakers coming together to tell the story of still another generation of Black creatives — for something so ambitious and grand, the result is still intimate and deeply-felt. David Greaves spoke with Playboy about what it means to finally complete Once Upon A Time In Harlem, and how it came together.
You worked on the original 1972 shoot for Once Upon A Time In Harlem alongside your father William Greaves, but as you’ve said previously, you don’t remember it specifically. What was working with your dad like generally during that time?
We were a very busy house [laughs]. We had just done From These Roots [another documentary on the Harlem Renaissance], and then there were other films that we had to finish to fulfill different contracts. At that time we did do an initial rough cut of the film, but had to set it aside to complete these other projects.
People have asked why it took so long. Well, they were doing additional shooting in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and into the 2000s to trace the history of the Renaissance. But ultimately we decided to stay with that time, and stay with that footage because it was always the heart of the project — bringing those folks into the now, if you will, so that people can know not only that these folks existed, but that they were thinking about things that still are current today. They were 100 years ago, they were in ’72, and they feel like they’re current today.
So how long was the gap for you, personally, between that rough cut and seeing the footage again to finish the film? What surprised you most about it when you were able to finally revisit it?
The gap was like 50 years. My wife and I co-founded a publication [Brooklyn’s Our Time Press], and so we’ve been doing that for 30 years. That’s my day job. This came to fruition after Louise, my stepmother, had gotten the funding to do the restoration. After the film was restored and she had passed, the question was, “What do we do?” Well, we had to make a film out of it. It couldn’t just be for an archive. It was something that had to be brought to the public.
What surprised me was just how interesting it was. Going through it and making the choices was really fun. Take Leigh Whipper reciting Haile Selassie’s speech [reprising a part he played in the 1943 film Mission To Moscow]. He did the whole thing in one take. It wasn’t like he had to stop and think about it. Initially I had it all in there, and my daughter said, “You can’t have the entire thing in the movie!” I understood that, but still…He was just amazing. My first thought was, “How am I going to edit this thing down?” Then I said, “Well, what would Volodymyr Zelenskyy have said at that time?” It became very easy. I thought people would react to the political thing he was saying, but instead they are reacting to, “Look, he’s still going!” [laughs].
That speech was one of the most remarkable parts of the movie, that this man who obviously had done so much and lived such a long, amazing life could, at 96 years old, not only remember the whole thing, but also present it in such a commanding way. You were pulling from all 60,000 feet of film for the movie, right? Both of the main party, and a number of one-on-one interviews that are also edited in throughout?
Yes — the whole archive will be available in probably a year or so, so you’ll be able to see the full range of the interviews. It’s going to be a mind-blower. Those one-on-one interviews give so much context. I think one of the most important interviews is with the librarian, Regina Andrews [a librarian in Harlem, at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, during the Harlem Renaissance]. You really get to understand her importance in bringing people together, and being a centerpiece for the collaborative creative process. Otherwise, the importance of the librarians might have been lost almost completely.
I came away from watching the film feeling like Regina was kind of the heart of the whole movie. You could just see the emotion on her face, captured so beautifully by you and your father, as she was reminiscing about that period. It clearly meant so much to her, and it really was transporting.
It was amazing to think about how she facilitated through her work at the library, just by asking different writers and artists who would come in, “We’re having some folks up at our apartment, would you like to join?” Well, yeah! Andrews’ roommate was Ethel Ray, who worked at Opportunity magazine. There, they collaborated. They met other folks. There was networking at a very high level, before the term networking was even used.
Even at the party the librarians, Regina and Jean Blackwell Hutson [longtime chief of the Schomburg Center], played the same kind of role in terms of bringing people into the room and taking people out — you know, trying to tamp down Bruce Nugent, who was always asserting himself in there [laughs]. In the movie, the librarians played that same kind of role in terms of keeping it moving.
Poetry became one of the throughlines of the film. How did you land on that as a narrative strategy?
Well, poetry was so important to the time. When Arna Bontemps speaks about Countee Cullen, and says his poem “I Have A Rendezvous With Life” had city-wide impact even though he was a high school “ghetto boy,” so to speak — I’d never heard it before. When I read it, I said, “Oh God, this poem has to go in.” It really sets up the idea of a young man looking toward life, as they all were.
With [Langston Hughes’] “The Negro Speaks Of Rivers,” that was one of my father’s favorite poems, and one of my favorite poems too. So that had to go in. Originally, I had a lot of historical data at the beginning of the film, talking about ancient Africa and the Middle Passage and all of that. And the general feeling was [after seeing an initial cut], get to the party! So instead, we put all of that history in tandem with the poem, and it works. It just fits right in there. Of course, you can’t cut out Richard B. Moore reciting [Claude McKay’s] “If We Must Die.” That’s a thing in and of itself.
The movie really made me feel like I needed to memorize some poetry.
As my daughter says, you know, they weren’t all scrolling. They weren’t on their phones. Their brains were engaged all the time, they were writing things down instead of typing — and it shows. The times have changed, and we’ve changed in how we think, the things that we retain, and how we relate to each other. The fact that they were all in the same space but with different ideas. It wasn’t like preaching to the choir — you see them going back and forth, in a natural kind of way.
Something you’ve pointed out is that a lot of these figures were basically refugees, seeking out some kind of freedom in Harlem that they couldn’t find where they were from. How do you think that shaped their community and what came out of it?
My dad saw divinity as a creative energy. All these points of creative energy were converging, brought there for various reasons whether it was to get a job, or because they were just naturally seekers, looking for their meaning in life or intellectual development, and they heard that Harlem might be a place where they could find themselves. The home of “the new Negro.” They came, and they went to the library — that’s where they converged, and then there was this glow of light and learning. You get all that creative energy together, all that divinity, as my Father would say, and it’s just [gasps]. That’s what pure creativity looks like.
Working alongside your father, what was the most important thing you learned about filmmaking, or even just creative documentation?
Really to appreciate your own emotions. As he would say, if something affects you viscerally, go with it. Trust your instincts. He would often stop the machine and speak about Sri Aurobindo, speak about Eastern philosophy. One of his comments was, “David, you know, sometimes the shortest distance between two points is a circle” [laughs]. The joy of being able to choose your own pain, which I’ve used a number of times when we’re loading the car up at two o’clock in the morning with newspapers. I literally remember thinking, “Well, this is my pain. This is what I chose. No sense in whining about it.” That sort of gives you an appreciation of choices made. Hey, I’d rather be doing this than working in a cubicle being told what to do.
That final montage was so stunning. Was that mostly assembled in that initial rough cut, or was that something that you put together more recently?
Both. With the kid walking down the street that ends it, originally, [journalist] Gerri Major was reciting Langston Hughes’ “Mother To Son” as he walked. That was a long walk — we only saw a little bit of it, but that was a long tracking shot with her reciting the poem. Don’t get me wrong; that was beautiful as it was, but for this film, we went with — at my daughter’s insistence — the poem of “In a Quiet Wood” [by William Greaves], which I think really was a better choice. It gave you a sense of the wistfulness, of the passage of time, of what’s lost and what could have been. Either you feel it directly, or internally. “You know there’s something happening here that is speaking to me. I don’t know quite what it’s saying, but I’m really enjoying listening to it.”