Business screen magazine (1946)

Jim uennett, production manager for Mike Gray will "do anything for a film he is working on." black doctors and therein lies its strength. "The film is essentially militant because it's a powerful, motivating force," says Cavan. "It says to young blacks; 'Here are your brothers and they're making it! So can you!" The black students in A Matter of Opportunity obviously are not Cadillac drivers. If they weren't in medical school they'd be social workers or ACLU lawyers or Black Panthers. Their covenent is with their people, in working in black communities and in guidini; more blacks into paramedical careers. "If you don't have any money, you work in the summer for tuitition and get a job when you get to school," insists a coed. "Don't let money be a hang-up. If you want to go to medical school, you go!'" And there's Walter Palmer. He's big — real big — and he's got a beard and he's wearing shades and a Nigerian cap and he doesn't come on like any doctor. "We must eliminate disease, man, and affirm the health standards of our communities ... To do that, we have to take the mystique out of n-edicine. make its language understandable so that ten-year-old boys can learn to recognize communicable diseases . . . Paramedicine means you engage everybody." Despite the danger of implicit and outspoken criticism of organized medicine, the AMA refused to influence the direction of the film. The AMA's primary concern was to bring blacks into the medical profession, not to put on a black-face corporate image. Nobody over shoulder "Nobody sat over our shoulder, telling us how to engineer the truth," said Denett. "We shot and recorded everything, from the hip. If it happened, and it was important, we got it." The "we" is the skeleton crew of Gray, Denett. Chuck Olin (producer cum sound recorder), John Mason (utility film maker) and Cavan (even the client worked). On Gray's crew, job titles are superfluous. "We'll do anything for a film we're working on," said Dennett, "anything at all. We all become tremendously involved, emotionally involved." The sense of involvement is apparent in the highly subjective camera work and the discrete use of overlapping individual scenes — unrelated by time or space — with a single dialogue track. The effect can be devastating. A team of interns is shown examining a chronically ill black man. The man admits to havina belted down at least a pint a day for 34 years, but no doctor ever told him he was a heavy drinker. Amusing enough. Even one of the interns cracks up. As the examination continues, the track goes from synch to voice over. Med students are discussing the need for black doctors to relate to their people. The scene shifts to the students rapping. The talk continues as the action cuts to the team of interns, now fingering what is obviously an ossified human liver. "Heretofore, the black doctor has not been someone we could be proud of . . ." Overlap is the only remotely theatrical technique in the film and it's used to crystalize rather than abstract. There are no "aesthete duschlock" effects to distract from what is being said. The film is guided by the subjects themselves. The overwhelming reaction to A Matter of Opportunity was laudatory from both civic groups and the profession. Dr. Ernest B. Howard, executive vice-president of the AMA has championed the film, especially to its few critics. The AMA's Committee on Health Care for the Poor offered Chuck Olin suggestions for similar films to explore different aspects of black recruitment. Dick DuMont, who seldom gets excited about anything, said. "We've got a winner! "This is the film we needed." A prototype? And Mike Gray is satisfied. "There is a real possibihty with this film that somebody may walk up to us on the street and say, 'Hey, listen, man. I want to thank you because I saw your film in 1970 and I decided to become a doctor and now I am." This is what we were after, this is the soul of the film.'" And the value. A Matter of Opportunity could well be the prototype for any major institution involved with eradicating its own inequities. The film doesn't offer a young black a macawberish future of money and prestige. It doesn't offer the white Establishment any racial panacea. All it offers is a challenge and a struggle. Ultimately, the matter of opportunity that Mike Gray and the AMA examine is the opportunity to serve humanity. OCTOBER, 1970 31