The money liberated Zippo from normal-people worries, the ascendancy of the hippie-weirdo complex expanded his notion of possibility, and the downers took care of the rest. In the summer of 1972, he rented a bungalow in Venice Beach. He had chased a casting agent named Doris across the country. He met her downstairs at Max’s and immediately mistook her universal agreeability for a specific affection. He lingered on the West Coast even though it was clear even to him that nothing was happening between them. It was in California that he suffered （his word） the first part of a two-part epiphany while watching Blacula. The country was entering a recession after all; self-realization on the installment plan was a prudent move.
Blaxploitation movies had left Zippo cold up to that point. He had witnessed his father keel over on the A train; forgive his hankering for heroes. Sweetback, Shaft, and Super Fly, that first wave, gave him cartoons instead. Then Blacula flew in through the window. The plot: When the African prince Mamuwalde （William Marshall） pitches European power brokers on the antislavery movement, Count Dracula of Transylvania punishes his uppity ass by inducting him into the ranks of the undead. Centuries pass. In contemporary Los Angeles, Blacula stumbles upon the reincarnation of his dead wife and vows to make her his. （Movie mummies and vampires were always stumbling upon replicas of women they’d loved hundreds of years before. Zippo couldn’t stretch a relationship past a month.） In the “bloody finale,” she accidentally gets shot while Blacula is busy slaughtering the LAPD. What’s the point of a lonesome eternity? He kills himself by walking into the sunlight—purified and destroyed by fire.
Even in the vampire world the races led segregated lives. You never saw a white vampire walking into the sun. If Blacula had waited another couple of centuries, he probably would have run into his dead wife again. Nonetheless, the film remained a fine testament to love undying and supernatural blackness.
Months later a Christmas matinee of The Poseidon Adventure furnished Epiphany Part Two. Zippo liked seeing white people get got as much as the next guy, so disaster movies were right up his alley. He wanted to see what made the blockbuster tick, as research. He emerged from the theater profoundly moved.
The church has rebuked hip Reverend Scott （Gene Hackman） for his unorthodox views. “Angry, rebellious, critical, a renegade,” he says. “Stripped of my so-called clerical powers, but I’m still in business.” The luxury liner Poseidon ferries him to his demotion: “Banished to some new country in Africa. Hell, I had to look it up on the map to find out where I was going.” A tsunami overturns the boat and Scott leads a ragtag group from danger, deck by deck. Almost to safety, only a suicide mission will save his dwindling flock. “What more do you want?” he demands of God. “You want another life? Then take me!” He saves his crew and disappears into a burning oil slick.
Christmas in LA was a disorienting affair: the Santas wore shorts and the workshop elves were past-prime centerfolds and future Waitress #2s. The city was like an Antonioni film. The first time you see it, it sucks, and then you see it a second time and it’s incredible. It was like that, except the second time it still sucks. The end of the year found Zippo in a philosophical frame. What did it mean that Blacula came from Africa and Reverend Scott journeyed to it? The motherland, the source. Both men longing for meaning and finding it in sacrifice.
Both of them burning.
Zippo had outgrown the Warholian experiments of his Grotto. Enough with the gesture—what about committing the act itself, without irony? A full embrace of low culture in all its gorgeous vulgarity.
What kind of hero to put on that big white screen? Dealers, pimps, private dicks—it had been done. He wanted to combine his recent preoccupations, the vampire and the preacher. Blacula embodied an occult power from Africa, the cradle of humanity. At the end of the movie he’s brought LA to its knees, tearing it all down like a bloodthirsty revolutionary. The maverick Reverend Scott served the system while trying to reform it, within and without at the same time. Like the Negro—of America and yet not American, as Du Bois put it. Like Zippo, who walked among the normals as one of their tribe while all sorts of wicked ruin flickered in his mind.
A secret agent, then. James Bond—but a sister. In one of those more-secret-than-the-CIA operations, working for the Man, but really working for the Black Nation from the inside.
Nefertiti T.N.T.
Los Angeles was a hex, New York the hexbreaker. Back on Greene Street he wrote the first draft in longhand on a legal pad, working from one of the Pussy-Cat Playhouse seats, the empty screen taunting him with what he might put there. He played Nuggets at full volume. At the end of each side he flipped the record over with the solemn focus of a monk. I can’t get your love, I can’t get a fraction / Uh-oh, little girl, psychotic reaction. Four days in he had the hi-fi system ripped out and put in the latest model, one more aggressive across multiple sectors. He didn’t tell anyone he was back in the city. He wrote and wrote. When it got dark, he dog-paddled up West Broadway and then picked a new direction once he hit Houston, any direction he hadn’t hit last time.
On these walks, half in a stupor, he tried to reconcile idea with object. Uncle Heshie said his inventions came from seeing something in his mind’s eye and then delivering it to the world. That was art—manifesting your idea in the world. If it were enough to have the idea, all those white boys Zippo went to art school with—who talked and talked but never got off their asses—would be celebrated geniuses. The idea had to be executed, find its worth in its passage into existence.
It was different with fires. Zippo’s doctors had told him that it was perfectly fine, perfectly normal to have dark fantasies if he didn’t act on them. It was okay to imagine the flames gnawing a set of drapes, the whistling gases escaping, the heat on his skin, as long as it stayed in his head. Same with erotic photography. There was nothing shameful about a naughty thought or series of escalating scenarios provoked by a nude photograph. If it was in your head and not out there with other people, it was okay.
It was a quandary. Best to concentrate on the screenplay.
He met Samuel Z. Arkoff at a bar mitzvah in Flushing, Queens. Samuel Z. Arkoff, famous producer of Blacula and The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant—among other classics—was a family friend of the Lehmanns, and Zippo and Josh Lehmann were school pals. Josh’s brother was the one getting the big-boy treatment. Zippo cornered Arkoff at the reception and told him he was making a blaxploitation picture.
“Marvelous,” Arkoff said. He had a small plate of hors d’oeuvres in his hand and dots of soft cheese in the corners of his mouth. The king had one piece of advice: Never use your own money. Zippo had enough toothbrush reserves to shoot that winter in New York City, if everything came together. “Not your own money,” Arkoff repeated. “That’s what people are for.” Arkoff’s father had been a Russian immigrant like Uncle Heshie, placing a bet on America. America, inventions, moviemaking—Zippo detected a common mix of dreaming and pragmatism. Arkoff gave him his card: Look me up when you’re done. American International Pictures had cashed in with Blacula and Slaughter, and just released Coffy. Blaxploitation = box-office cash money. For now. Juvenile-delinquent movies, beach-party romps, biker flicks—the fads come and go and you have to stuff your pockets while you can. “Sooner the better, my young friend.”