We used to play a game he called “Movie/Movie.” He would name a title of a film and I’d have to respond with another: the last letter of his needed to be the first letter of mine. It’s the kind of game you invent for children on a long road trip. My wife and I used to do it with ours when they were very small, but with animals. When Tony and I stumped each other we would talk a little trash, a lot of trash. I beat him the last time we played and he promised vengeance upon a rematch. I said “Double Indemnity” and he couldn’t think of anything in time. Tony Todd asked me to play the first time I met him, was it ten years ago now? Just to pass the time. He was in town to host a screening of Candyman at one of the theaters I was running then and, after his introduction, we had a couple of hours to kill. We had dinner, we talked about his great love of the theater, we had thoughts about Candyman’s place in the horror pantheon as its only African-American (“non-enslaved!” he would say) and the things that motivated him there in his hunting grounds of Chicago’s Cabrini Green. We talked about how Candyman came not long after his star turn in Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead, taking on the Duane Jones role of hero Ben and how the new ending of the picture returns agency to Barbara… and maybe Ben, too.
That same year, 2014 in Denver, he originated the role of “Paw Si Don” in Marcus Gardley’s Black Odyssey at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts in their small “Space” theater. Seeing 6’5” Tony Todd — a man only surpassed in his physical presence by the weight and intonation of his voice — live in a tiny venue was overwhelming. As the vengeful, tricky, quick-to-anger but clever, playful, now malignant/now benign God of the Sea, he was commanding. You surrendered to him. In the play he is engaged in a game of chess with rival Deus and that’s Todd in a nutshell, corporeal and intellectual just opposite sides to him, quick to flip from one to the next. I told him how much this performance haunted me when we met and he grabbed my forearm and leaned in close: “It was a good one,” he said, “a good role.”
Todd’s career spanned five decades and hundreds of good roles on stage and screen. He won scholarships to the University of Connecticut and the Eugene O’Neill National Theatre Institute which led to time spent with the Hartman Conservatory and the Trinity Repertory Company. In his later years, he spent time with the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival in, among other productions, a pair of August Wilson plays How I Learned What I Learned and Fences. (He had, previously, originated Wilson’s Hedley in King Hedley II — if there was a performer made for August Wilson, it was Tony.) I made plans to make it out there to see him in his element but I could never manage the money or the time. I am weighed down with regret and bad excuses.
The first time I saw Candyman, it was an advance screening on the campus of the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I was an undergraduate. It was held in the Chem 140 classroom, a room very much like the one the film’s college professor lectures in as the film opens, and the audience was rowdy and composed mostly of the football team which, that year, would include future-NFLers Chad Brown, Alfred Williams, Kordell Stewart, Michael Westbrook, Mitch Berger, Rae Carruth, and future-Heisman winner Rashaan Salaam. I remember the unrest in the audience as Black poverty was portrayed on screen, exploited by white intellectuals looking for publication opportunities built on academic studies of redlining and race-based institutional, indeed systemic, repression. When a pair of Black janitors appear, the crowd erupted in shouted protests at what I was learning in that instance were tired and offensive portrayals. And then Candyman appears. Tony Todd as Daniel Robitaille who somewhere in the pre-Reconstruction South, fell in love with a white woman and for his sin of miscegenation, is tortured and murdered by a white mob. His mission is different from other movie monsters, the Michael Myers and Freddy Kreugers, Jason Voorhees and Leatherfaces — he serves as a reminder for his community that this country was founded on the sweat of their brow and the blood spilled from their veins. He has a hook in place of a hand sawn off by his lynchers — the kind of hook farmers use on bales of hay — and he’s surrounded by the swarm of bees with which his murderers filled his body cavity. He is a harvest god. He is the reaping of what we have sown. He is America’s nightmare.
As played by Todd, he is inevitable. His voice is thick desire and sadness. “Be my victim,” he says and he promises “sweets to the sweet.” He becomes fixated on Helen (Virginia Madsen) who is trying to prove her intellectual bona-fides by writing a paper on urban legends. She is patronizing at first, these primitive stories told by the undereducated, and then she visits the Chicago projects and Candyman, in the middle of the day in a parking garage, tells her that they were meant to be together. Immediately, Candyman, a film by white British director Bernard Rose based on white British writer Clive Barker’s short story “The Forbidden,” is steeped in the delicate complexities of class. I brought Tony Todd back to Denver in 2016, this time with Rose, for an encore presentation of Candyman in front of two sold-out shows. We talked at length then, the three of us, of personal obsessions like Tolstoy and popular ones like the possibility of another installment of their masterpiece directed by Rose and starring Madsen as the inheritor of the hook. We went deep on the changes that were made to the source material, and what Candyman means to the African-American community: driven not by vengeance, but righteousness and knowledge. When that first screening was over, the crowd exploded in applause, in excited shouts and an extended chant of “Candyman” that spilled out into the student quad. It was the scariest movie I had seen as an adult and then it was an impromptu party in the middle of a chilly Autumn night. It seemed the best way to celebrate the birth of something vital and new.
Tony’s great roles for the screen — Candyman, of course, but also his turn as Jake Sisko in “The Visitor” (Deep Space 9, s04e02, David Livingston, 1995) — center on the tremendous depth of sadness at the heart of him. He listens carefully, like someone who has asked questions of people he’s lost to have their answers whipped away by a rapacious wind. He fell out with his mother as a child and was taken in by an aunt, a janitor who had as one of her employers a library where she often brought young Todd. “I loved books,” he said, “so I was content.” He reconciled with his mother later in life but had a rough period with his son, captured in part by his last collaboration with Bernard Rose, the Bunuel-inspired, pandemic-born Traveling Light (2022). Largely improvised, Rose recalled to me how he was driving around Los Angeles with Todd, looking for Todd’s lost son. “It was completely real. He was really looking for his son. I think that’s what’s really interesting about that. Tony was out there and he has since found him and then lost him and then found him again.” I didn’t know what to say. Rose continued: “The courage it takes to just put it all on the line, for art, for truth. All the searching, the pain, that’s real. He’s looking, and we are looking.” In “The Visitor,” aged Jake, an author of two books living in comfort but alone, is visited on a stormy night by a fan who wonders why he never wrote again. Todd’s Jake talks about the day his father died, their sometimes-troubled relationship, how he has struggled all of his life with his dad’s advice of “it’s life, Jake, you can miss it if you don’t open your eyes;” and how he began to be haunted in a literal way by his dad’s apparition. Jake speaks of the open wound of grieving – how time passes and you come to realize that this person who was the sun and the moon is gone now for good.
I don’t want to make a list of his appearances, I want more appearances. I want to play another round of “Movie/Movie” with my friend, because it was never about winning, you know, but the conversations the titles would inspire. How he loved the greats: the Spencer Tracys and Sidney Poitiers — the lacerating performances in groundbreaking films. His knowledge was huge and his curiosity matched it. He engaged in gang outreach programs, in workshops for aspiring actors. He referred to himself as a figure in the arts who wasn’t supposed to succeed, and yet here he was and what would he be if he didn’t show the way for those who might follow. “The Visitor” becomes a science fiction metaphor for how the dearly departed return now and again in our lives. A scene where Jake’s dad is presented with the two books his son has managed to complete still devastates me. My dad didn’t live long enough to see me become a published writer, he died a month before his first grandchild was born, but in the laughter of my son and the way my daughter holds her brow sometimes when she’s making fun of her dad, I can hear my father — and see him, too. But it’s never when I expect to, and the air empties out of the room for a moment every time. Suddenly I am who I was again when he was just gone and I couldn’t believe it. The last text I have from my friend Tony were birthday wishes. He said “ur a great man and a wizard of movie/movie” and I told him I loved him and for him to be well. He was 69 when he left us on November 8, 2024. I’ll miss him terribly.
Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.
