If you don’t know the name Theodore Witcher, don’t feel too badly. In 1997, the filmmaker released the cult romantic comedy “Love Jones” starring Larenz Tate and Nia Long, and the picture returned to the big screen on Valentine’s Day in 35mm at BAMcinématek. The Village Voice used the opportunity to catchup with Witcher to talk about the film, and he revealed a rather curious anecdote.
Being the James Gray nerds that we are, we didn’t know the filmmaker once tried his hand at acting. It turns out that Gray and Witcher (who was given a thank you credit in “The Lost City Of Z“) are old pals, and even more, out Gray once tried his hand at acting, with a small role in “Love Jones.” We’ll let Witcher tell the story:
James and I have been close friends for over 20 years. As filmmakers do, when he’s working on a picture, he’ll ask for my input. I’ll read the script and give him notes and go to early screenings. He does the same for my material. I didn’t know he put me in the credits [of ‘The Lost City Of Z’], though. That’s very nice.
I think he’s credited in Love Jones, actually. James had a scene that I cut out, believe it or not. We had the same producer — Nick Wechsler produced Little Odessa [Gray’s debut], and also produced Love Jones. That’s how we met. I wrote a scene for him at the beginning. He plays a guy who works at the newspaper with Larenz the day he’s quitting his job. I don’t know if you’ve ever interviewed James, but he’s a character. I thought, “This guy has to be in the movie.” And he’s not the guy who would usually be in a quote-unquote “black movie.”
It’s less so now, but at the time, there were all these rules you had to follow. If you were making a mainstream movie, there’s the cool black friend. If you’re making a black movie, there’s the corny white-guy friend. I was like, “I don’t know any corny white guys.” So let me have the sharpest, most unique, idiosyncratic white guy be Darius’s friend at the newspaper. [Laughs] James came to Chicago. He had never acted before. As I was finishing the movie, I was trying to make it shorter. The scene was expository, so it wound up getting cut. But I think I left his name in the credits. So maybe he paid me back 20 years later.
There’s a nifty piece of film trivia you can use to impress your cinephile friends. Witcher, meanwhile, is cooking up a couple projects which he hopes will finally break his twenty year filmmaking drought. But before that happens, he just want to remind everyone how awesome “The Lost City Of Z” is:
But on the subject of Lost City of Z — this is a crime. This movie is criminally overlooked. It’s far and away the best picture I saw last year. His last three pictures — Two Lovers, The Immigrant, and Z — are absolutely incredible. Z in particular — me, all of his friends, were blown away with what he achieved. The fact that nobody is talking about it, and these other wack-ass fucking movies are getting the awards nominations, it’s infuriating. But that’s the state of the culture, my man.
Damn right.