In 1979, Director Jamaa Fanaka release the seminal movie Penitentiary. It was a gritty, real, depiction of prison life. Join Jamaa as he talks in depth about his experiences as a young filmmaker, creating the classic movie that not only became the #1 independent movie of 1979-80 but also is said to lower the crime rate in major metropolitan cities. 

Forgive the pun, but there's no shortage of arresting imagery on hand in Jamaa Fanaka's Penitentiary (1979), from the sight of a bugged-out prison inmate strutting along the cellblock with a lit cigarette stuck in his ear to a boxer standing triumphant above his opponent in a curly wig and black bra; perhaps thestrangest image in the entire film is that of black actor Leon Isaac Kennedy standing up from a makeshift lean-to in the wide open space of the Southern California desert. Even thirty years later, moviegoers are unaccustomed to seeing black actors, whom Hollywood has coded for urban environments, in a setting reminiscent of John Ford, particularly The Grapes of Wrath(1940). As drifter Martel "Too Sweet" Cordone, Kennedy certainly has the lean and hungry look of Tom Joad and does find himself in a Joadian pickle when he defends a roadside prostitute (Hazel Spears) against the bullying of a pair of motorcyclists and is thrown into prison for his gallantry. While the setup is familiar to the point of being over-familiar (Robert Aldrich's The Longest Yard [1974] comes immediately to mind), Fanaka's mostly all-black cast makes the material feel fresh and immediate. By the end of the 1970s, the racial demographic of the US prison system found black inmates outnumbering Caucasians but prison movies continued to center around white inmates (Tom Gries' excellent 1972 made-for-TV movie The Glass House) or surround their black star with a supporting cast comprised for the most part of white actors (Buzz Kulik's 1969 Riot). Penitentiary flipped that script.