For this Oscar day special episode of Black History Month, we asked devoted reader Paul Outlaw, who you'll know from the comments, to share his Oscar memoir from the 1993/1994 ceremony. We're happy to call Paul a friend after our last few trips to Los Angeles. He starred in a German short film that won the Oscar years ago.
An elderly German woman (Senta Moira) and a black youth (yours truly) sit side-by-side on a Berlin streetcar in Schwarzfahrer, a twelve-minute 35mm film that premiered at the Berlinale 22 years ago this week. The film’s title is a play on words: a “Schwarzfahrer” is slang for “fare dodger” as the film was called in the UK , but if you break the German compound word into its components, it translates as “Black Rider” (the US title).
“Schwarzfahrer is a trenchant and stylistically assured work which makes the best use of all possibilities open to the short film. The film deals with a topical subject in a very humorous and extremely entertaining manner. The jury only wishes that German feature films would portray burning social issues and events with a similar lightness of touch and craftsmanship.
- Jury statement at the awarding of the first Panorama Prize of the New York Film Academy, 43rd International Film Festival, Berlin, Germany, 1993
When the short premiered I was an expatriate living in Berlin. After the film’s extremely positive reception – we were promptly invited to Cannes – I got the idea in my head that Schwarzfahrer could one day win an Academy Award.
Our journey to Oscar after the jump...
The producer thought I was crazy and minimized the film’s potential (“It’s only a short!”), but Pepe Danquart, the film’s auteur, was intrigued by the notion and began to look into the options.
At this point in his career, Pepe was an acclaimed documentary filmmaker known for his socially critical work with Medienwerkstatt Freiburg. Little did he know what this little film about everyday racism in Germany would achieve.
Pepe & I relax in Cannes.
In Cannes we screened during critics week. One afternoon I spent an hour in a cafe trying not to stare at jury member Gary Oldman; two years later, we filmed a scene together on Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat!
What does it take to be eligible for an Academy Award nomination in the Live Action Short category? A) The film must win a Gold, Silver or Bronze Medal award in the Student Academy Awards competition – nope; B) within two years of completion, the picture must be publicly exhibited for paid admission in a commercial motion picture theater in Los Angeles County for a run of at least seven consecutive days with at least one screening a day – nope; C) the film must have won a qualifying award at a competitive film festival on the Academy’s specified list – hmm…. So Pepe submitted Schwarzfahrer all over the world, and over the next several years it was seen in over 100 cities from Reykjavik to Taiwan and from Paris to Toronto, winning top prizes in New York, Cairo, Minsk, Jerusalem, Hamburg, Quebec and Sydney. Here in the US, it was screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, as well as at festivals in Seattle, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
A week after the final screening of its American premiere at the Sundance Festival in January 1994, Schwarzfahrer was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short.
The night of the ceremony after parking our car in the bowels of the Music Center, we somehow managed to land at the tail end of the red carpet, which we proceeded to walk in the wrong direction – call it a metaphor for our futures in the Hollywood film industry. The ceremony itself is mostly a tipsy blur of an adrenalin rush. But the mini-music festival on the Chandler Pavilion stage featuring Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Dolly Parton, Janet Jackson, Peabo Bryson and Keith Carradine remains vivid. As does Whoopi’s professionalism during the commercial breaks.
The short film presenter was Rosie O’Donnell (post-A League of Their Own , pre-“Queen of Nice,” pre- The View, and looking better than ever before or since) wearing half-a-mil in diamonds on loan from Harry Winston. I hope her German pronunciation has improved since then.
Listen closely and you’ll someone scream when Rosie announces the winner. That’s me in my balcony seat. Because the “minor” nominees were all at the back of the orchestra seats, friends and family around the world were treated to a hefty dose of my closeups as Pepe walked to the stage. And then my director mentioned me by name in his very short speech, but I’m afraid the joke he was trying to make got lost in translation…
Presenters List. Remarkably only two have since passed away and two are nominated again this year!
After the ceremony,we were a group of four with only two tickets to the Governors Ball. Oscar held aloft, we
squeezed together and approached the entrance to the party tent outside the Pavilion. And they never even asked to see our tickets. Now, my high school didn’t do proms, but the Ball more than made up for that gap in my experience: the white tent was enormous and done up Victorian style with 14,000 feet of gold carpeting. A 15-piece orchestra played.
In that era prior to digital cameras and phones with cameras, the Ball was able to maintain a private-party
mystique. But the food (Wolfgang Puck’s debut) was delicious, and would it be indiscreet of me to report that Emma Thompson (seated at a table with Branagh, Hopkins and Tom & Nicole) is a great dancer.
an Eichinger polaroid
After a trip to the CNN tower to do interviews for the morning TV shows in Germany – the nine-hour time
difference was convenient – we stopped by an Oscar Night party at the Hollywood Hills home of the late Bernd Eichinger (seated right), producer of films like Christiane F., The Neverending Story, Last Exit to Brooklyn and the first Resident Evils. Note that in this nighttime Polaroid full of Germans that the tall black man and the little naked gold man are hard to make out.
Although Schwarzfahrer's international success did not translate into cataclysmic changes in our careers – after moving back to the US, I continued to work mainly in experimental theater; Senta soon retired from performing; and Pepe wisely chose not to “go Hollywood,” instead carving out a formidable career in Europe – I spent much of the subsequent decade visiting high schools and colleges in the US, performing one of my solo shows and giving lectures about the black experience in Germany. A screening of Schwarzfahrer was naturally part of the package.
Nieces and Nephews
The film has often been shown in German schools as well, and a little over three years ago I was tickled by a request from my German nieces and nephews (my brother-in-law’s kids): would I send them some signed photographs, so that they could prove to their classmates that their uncle was the star of Schwarzfahrer ? It was both exhilarating and shocking to realize that none of these four kids were born yet when the film was made.
Why has this little film connected with so many people who have seen it on television and airplanes and millions of times on YouTube ?
Even though it deserves to be seen in high quality on a big screen to truly appreciate Ciro Cappellari’s cinematography, I hope you’ll watch it and decide for yourself. In its moment in the Oscar sun, I believe Schwarzfahrer was blessed by its proximity to that year’s Best Picture winner, Schindler’s List. Both films were shot in glorious black-and-white and deal with the dark side of German history and society, albeit in very different way.
This gif shows one of the film’s many moments of lyricism: as the two streetcars stop for passengers, the look
exchanged between the two young men can mean several things. Flirtation? Fear? A longing to switch places? Pepe never explained it, and I’ve always been happy with the ambiguity.
True story: the guy in the other streetcar was played by Axel, an old flame of mine. Axel happened to know the casting director of Schwarzfahrer and when she mentioned over drinks that they were looking for an African or African-American actor, he told her about me; unfortunately, though, we’d fallen out of touch and Axel didn’t know how to reach me. Sitting at a nearby table was an acquaintance of his who overheard the conversation and interjected: “Him? He and my ex-boyfriend used to mess around. I can find him for you.” And the rest, as they say, is history.