He was a leading member of the L.A. Rebellion movement that brought African-American filmmakers together in solidarity, and, more importantly to our purposes, he made a movie about a man who gets his revenge on a corrupt justice system using his eight-foot dong (Welcome Home Brother Charles, 1975).
Jamaa Fanaka's stock in trade was the grindhouse and the drive-in, but his movies, including Emma Mae (aka Black Sister's Revenge) (1976), the aforementioned Welcome Home Brother Charles, and the Penitentiary films (Penitentiary, 1979, Penitentiary 2, 1982, and Penitentiary 3, 1987) all embody a defiant spirit that wouldn't be out of place at a Black Panther Party meeting and inspired intense excitement and passionate fandom in the inner-city kids who saw his movies (Snoop Dogg is a particularly vocal Fanaka fan).
Fanaka, who was born in Mississippi and grew up in Los Angeles, had a natural aptitude for movies and wrote, directed and got distribution for his first three feature films while still enrolled in UCLA's film school. Penitentiary was the highest-grossing independent film of 1980, but Fanaka's career unfortunately slowed down with his worsening health throughout the '90s and early 2000s. He passed away this week at the age of 69.
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