| Intl. Notebook | Apr 5 2024 |
She's a rare example of prey that's more dangerous than her predators.
Above is a fun pressbook cover for the legendary Pam Grier's classic action movie Foxy Brown, a tangled tale of drug dealers, crooked cops, loan sharks, and narcs, which premiered in the U.S. today in 1974. When pressed against the wall Grier gets just as vicious as her screen foes. She even sets one guy on fire and runs another over—with a plane. There are no holds barred in blaxploitation cinema.
Below we also have various lobby cards from the film. These are interesting because they're made from production photos that you don't typically see online. It's too bad Grier's blaxploitation/action phase was short, because she was good in the films, even when the films weren't good enough for her. But every artist seeks to hone their craft, so we imagine she got tired of such roles. That's okay—her output, though limited, is always fun to re-watch.
As a side note, the hazards of blogging during the unethical digital age are amply illustrated here. Users on both Alamy and Getty attempt to assert copyright on these items, but movie promos are made for non-copyright holders to publicize the works depicted, and despite claims to the contrary individuals can't hold copyright on them. There are probably hundreds or thousands of these reproductions out there, all individually possessed, so a specific person claiming copyright is nonsensical on the face of it. Only the issuing studio holds copyright.
Even so, we occasionally get threatening e-mails from digital photo resellers. They're AI generated and automatically sent, which means they'll only increase in number as time goes by. We have a form e-mail we send back demanding proof of copyright. We never get a reply to it. Shockingly. We'll say this though—one day corporate greed will kill the blogging culture the same way it's killed most everything else. But that day isn't today. Read what we thought about Foxy Brown here.
