The Spook Who Sat by the Door new restoration screening presented by BAM

On August 16, 2024, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) will present the world premiere of the new 4K restoration of the legendary and controversial film, The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), directed by Ivan Dixon, based on Sam Greenlee’s novel, and produced by Dixon and Greenlee.

After over 50 years since its interrupted theatrical release, this towering work of American independent filmmaking and political cinema returns to the screen. For too long, it was only viewable on faded prints and bootleg video (and an out-of-print DVD); now, audiences can experience this crucial work in a new 4K restoration undertaken by the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

One of the most radical, revolutionary statements in film history, The Spook Who Sat by the Door follows Dan Freeman, brilliantly portrayed by Lawrence Cook, the fictional first Black CIA agent, from recruitment and training, through leaving the agency and returning to Chicago to use his specialized skills to form a guerrilla army intent on stoking a people-powered revolution.

After being denied permits to film legally in Mayor Daley’s Chicago, the film was primarily shot in neighboring Gary, Indiana, with the help of Mayor Richard Hatcher, one of the first Black mayors of a large American city.

Greenlee and Dixon (perhaps best known for his performance as Duff Anderson in Michael Roemer’s seminal Nothing But a Man) produced the film independently, first raising money from Black investors and completing it with funding from a major studio, which was secured by selectively showing execs scenes which were in keeping with the action-adventure style of the then-popular blaxploitation genre.

They were reportedly shocked upon seeing the final product no one at the studio had bothered to read Greenlee’s actual script. So potent is the film’s call to revolution, that it was pulled from theaters within weeks of opening despite immediate box office success. Ever since rumors have swirled, Greenlee has been on record citing government intervention in suppressing the film, and the studio quickly washed their hands of it.

Once thought lost, Dixon had quietly stored the original 35mm negatives in a vault, kept safe by the Dixon family. In 2003, actor Tim Reid released the first authorized version on DVD, leading to a resurgence of attention.

In 2012, the film was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. The Spook Who Sat by the Door has been widely discussed and analyzed as a landmark work, in countless articles, dissertations, and essay collections (Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door, edited by Michael T. Martin, Davis C. Wall, and Marilyn Yaquinto) and documentary film (Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rose and Fall of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, directed by Christine Acham and Clifford Ward). In the half-century since the film was made, nothing has blunted its power.

Restored by the Library of Congress and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, this beautiful new 4K restoration, now available through the auspices of the Dixon and Greenlee families, with assistance from Jake Perlin of The Film Desk, will help cement the film’s place in the canon of American cinema.

The Spook Who Sat by the Door will premiere on the Steinberg Screen at BAM’s Harvey Theater on August 16, in the presence of Ivan Dixon’s children Alan Kimara Dixon and Doris Nomathandé Dixon, and Sam Greenlees’s daughter Natiki Hope Pressley, followed by a live panel discussion with Dr. Khalid El-Hakim (co-founder of the Black History Mobile Museum), Dr. Laurence Ralph (professor of anthropology, Princeton University), Dr. Raquel Gates (associate professor, film and media studies, Columbia University), and moderated by film historian Michael Gillespie (professor and author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film).

The premiere will kick off BAM’s Cinema, Restored series at the Harvey (August 16-22), celebrating the best recent restorations of classic works of cinema.

Starting August 23, the film will then have a two-week engagement at BAM Rose Cinemas, coinciding with a simultaneous opening at Maysles Cinema in Harlem, where Ivan Dixon was born and raised.

Tickets for the BAM screenings will go on sale on July 16.

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