What drew you to the world of “blaxploitation” films — and what is “blaxploitation” anyway?
For those who don’t know, “blaxploitation” was a term coined by the ever inventive copyeditors at Variety magazine to describe the wildly lucrative black-cast action films of the early to mid-1970s. When I wrote the story “Show Business,” I was pretty surprised to find myself writing about a woman who had acted in those films. Though I find them extraordinary historical documents, I’m not obsessively in love with them. But I went with it. I like to be surprised when I write. That’s a big part of the fun. Tamara, Angela’s daughter, also gave me a rich way to examine filmmaking and what I imagine to be a filmmaker’s temperament. There is a lot of sex in this book — good, bad, and indifferent. Can you talk some more about that? I surprised myself a bit when I found Angela so frankly using sex for so many different reasons — not all of them good. And I was quite surprised when the love of her life turned out to be Sheila. I can’t say I had this all planned out, but I found that I did want
