Over the last few weeks, if not several months, tensions have repeatedly flared within black activist circles over the disproportionate amount of work (theory, praxis, street activism) done by black women, and the erasure and disrespect heaped upon them not only by people outside the community, but by many black men within it. The issue of invisibility and disrespect of black women, which is as old as the struggle for black liberation and citizenship, is one of the dozen or more sub-plots in Nick Broomfield’s Tales of the Grim Sleeper. It’s a powerful documentary about a serial killer who had unofficial carte blanche to murder black women for over twenty-five years, without even a feigned show of police intervention. Some experts estimate that his victims may number in the hundreds. Almost from the start, black women were in the streets sounding the alarm in the community and agitating for police action. They were routinely ignored, underscoring what the film itself illuminates: there may be no body less valued in American society than that of the black woman.
Part thriller, part collection of cinematic short stories whose real-life characters dismantle stereotypes even if, on the surface, they embody them, Tales is magnificent investigative journalism. Broomfield, whose tabloid tenacity has brought the world the documentaries Aileen Wuornous: The Selling of a Serial Killer, Biggie and Tupac, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam, and Kurt & Courtney, among others, has refined his bulldog technique without sacrificing the bite. He’s relentless, thorough, and compassionate without being a patsy, his reporter curiosity married to a proper sense of moral outrage. After citing the years-long killing spree of the serial killer, and the estimated body count, an incredulous Broomfield asks simply, “How can this be?”
Thanks in part to the investigative work of LA Weekly reporter Christine Pelisek, Lonnie Franklin was arrested at his modest South LA home in 2010 and charged with murder, opening a floodgate of crimes that are staggering in scope. Most of his victims (not all) were prostitutes. Armed with his camera, Broomfield heads into South LA (formerly South Central) to interview the family and friends of the victims, but also to speak with those who knew Lonnie Franklin. Almost from the start one of Franklin’s neighbors utters those immortal words: “He was a really nice guy.”
What Broomfield emerges with is a film that is engrossing from the beginning, one that slowly blossoms out to become a powerful expose on South LA’s black community – its historical migratory roots, the bustling community it once was, the industry that sustained it, the grim economic fallout behind factories closing and crack being ushered in – while always circling back to ask how and why so many black women could vanish with a lot of the local community not realizing what was happening right in their midst. The ineptitude and indifference of the LAPD is shown to be so massive as to make them complicit in the crimes. Some of the film’s most powerful moments come as friends who initially defend Franklin slowly have their memories jarred over the course of filming, and bring forth memories they now realize have horrific implications.
Tales is crisply filmed (the various skin tones of its numerous black talking heads are better captured here than in many big-budget Hollywood films) and masterfully edited, jumping back and forth across the timeline while weaving in original interviews, stock footage, and often grim crime scene photos.
It’s fitting that in a film that becomes a meditation on how little the lives of black women matter across strata of America, two black women are the most vibrant, insightful speakers. The first is Margaret Prescod, founder of Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders, who we see in file footage from 1985 passing out leaflets in her neighborhood to raise awareness of the killings. In the present, her hair now in dreads and many of her theories now proven, she gives countless illustrations of the bumbling of the LAPD. The other is Pam Brooks, a former crack addict and prostitute who acts as a tour guide of sorts for Broomfield, brokering conversations with current working girls through compassion for them. Blunt, funny, wise, and unapologetic, she’s a street philosopher who breaks down everything from the tricks of tricking to the lure of drugs, and gives Tales a lot of its heart.
Ernest Hardy is a Sundance Fellow whose music and film criticism have appeared in the New YorkTimes, the Village Voice, Vibe, Rolling Stone, LA Times, and LA Weekly. His collection of criticism, Blood Beats Vol. 1: Demos, Remixes and Extended Versions (2006) was a recipient of the 2007 PEN / Beyond Margins Award.
