In Once Upon a Time in Harlem, David Greaves Revisits a Vital Piece of Black History

In August 1972, director William Greaves arranged a cocktail party at the stately Harlem townhome of Duke Ellington. The carefully curated guest list included an impressive coterie of Black intellectuals, artists, writers, librarians, actors, musicians, and dancers who had helped shape the Harlem Renaissance, the flourishing of Black arts and culture centered in the New York neighborhood during the 1920s and ’30s. Greaves frequently expressed an interest in “creating a series of great films on great people,” and with this gathering, the filmmaker hoped to bring the movement’s surviving leaders into conversation. With a small team of cameramen, he sought to capture their recollections, relationships, and debates in intimate detail.

More than 50 years after that landmark event, William’s son, David Greaves, has fulfilled his father’s dream with Once Upon a Time in Harlem, a new documentary opening in select theaters across the U.S. today. David, who helped film the gathering, returned to the footage with his daughter, producer Liani Greaves, following restoration work led by William’s late wife, Louise Archambault Greaves. The result is an immediately resonant work of nonfiction that serves as a lasting testament to the power of Black intellectualism.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is an impressive feat of cinéma vérité filmmaking, a lively portrait of a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of some of the greatest Black thinkers of their time. Among those captured on film are James Van Der Zee, a photographer whose career spanned more than eight decades; Richard Bruce Nugent, a queer poet and painter; and Regina Andrews, the first Black librarian to lead a branch of the New York Public Library. As these “living luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance” reflect on the moment they helped shape, nostalgic recollections slowly give way to contentious (but always respectful) discourse. Lively debates bubble to the fore about the merits of Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” movement, the implicit limits of writing about Black empowerment in a language that isn’t truly our own, and whether the pursuit of a unified “negro art” practice was progressive or counterintuitive. As a historical document, it’s fascinatingly insightful. But as a piece of cinema, shot on striking 16mm film, it feels like a modern masterpiece.

A few days after the film’s New York Film Festival premiere on September 29, David Greaves talked to Harper’s Bazaar about revisiting footage he filmed more than five decades ago, the unique pleasures of gathering in person to exchange ideas, and why he hopes the documentary changes the way we think about Black thought leaders.

Your documentary, five decades in the making, is finally coming out for the general public. You just had the New York Film Festival premiere. How are you feeling?

It’s a little stunning. It’s almost surreal that this is really happening. It’s just a pleasure having completed it, and I’m really excited for other folks to see it. That’s all I can say.

I love that the film opens up with this quote about your father’s desire to create “a series of great films about great people.” It’s such a simple mission statement, but it also packs a lot of heft, since that isn’t an easy undertaking. Why did you want to kick off with that?

Well, [that came] from reading his writings while I was doing research to prepare for the film. He was a great follower of Sri Aurobindo, an Indian guru, and he wrote copious notes in the margins and underlined stuff and argued with the book. Those [quotes] came from his actual writing in the book. He saw all people as having a divineness, and believed that it was expressed in creativity.

So, when he says “they’re metaphors for the Godhead,” that’s the way he saw these folks—as being metaphors for what the divine was and what we’re supposed to do with it. I got that from his writing, and that’s why that starts off the film—because that’s what it was supposed to be. And at the end of the film, when he says, “I finally know why I made this film,” I refer back to it.

You were one of the cameramen at this party with your father. What do you remember about that entire process?

I don’t remember the day itself. I was working. I was on the camera. I was in my zone. Now, I do remember getting ready for it. I knew it was an important thing [for my father], so I studied up on my camera work to prepare. But as for the day itself, I can’t really tell you.

Had you worked on other projects with your dad by that point?

Yes, yes. I had been working with him. It was a small company, so I was doing sound, I was doing camera, editing, that kind of thing. I had worked with him for about three years before this. We had other camerapeople, and everybody was very instructive because I was the young guy. They would be like, “Okay, this is the boss’s son!” But everybody was extremely helpful.

But the editing room, it’s a great place for a cameraperson to be—especially with cinema verité, because you know what’s needed. You know about cutaways. You’re just very conscious of what you have and what you don’t have and “Why didn’t they get such and such?” Or “Why is he focusing on that?” So all of that training I already had really helped.

There’s something so touching about a son fulfilling the dream of his late father through film. What did it mean to you to finish it after his passing?

Well, it really was just a matter of wanting to make the film. I wasn’t thinking in terms of “Let me finish dad’s dream.” My thought was, We’ve got work to do, and there just was nobody else who I would allow to do it. If anyone asked, “Well, who’s going to direct it,” I was like, “I will.” There was maybe some ego involved. I was like, “I’m president of the company. I’ll decide.” [laughs] So that was really it. That was pretty much the ballgame.

You also got to work on this film alongside your daughter, Liani Greaves, who is credited as a producer. There’s something so special about that, especially since one of the main themes in this documentary is about legacy and lineage—which is also just a huge concern in the Black community, in general. What did it mean to you to be able to share this experience with your daughter?

That was such a wonderful experience. [William’s late wife] Louise was working with this film while she was in the hospital. Nurses on her floor would be like, “Oh, you mean the one who’s always working?” She was just this old lady who had her laptop, her papers, and would be talking to me on the phone [saying], “Get the lawyer! Check on this with the stenographer!”

But eventually, she was like, “Liani has to be involved with this. You can’t do this alone.” So she made sure that Liani was in there. And it’s been great. You get to see your offspring in action, and it’s like, “Whoa! She really knows!” She keeps me in line, too. It was a real role-reversal. It’s usually me going, “You do that.” But then, she was saying to me, “Listen, dad, you’ve got to do this.” And that’s kind of enjoyable. Particularly when I travel, I don’t have to think.

You’ve been sitting on this trove of footage for over five decades. Why was now the right time to revisit this footage and put it all together into a cohesive documentary?

Well, Louise had completed the restoration, and once the footage is restored, you can’t just say, “Well, it’s restored.” No. Now you’ve got to do something with it. So that was the time to do it. It found its own time.

This film does a great job of turning Harlem into its own character in the film. Obviously, this documentary is about these Black intellectuals and artists and their unique experiences of Black identity, but it also has a real sense of place—which is important since Harlem, as a neighborhood, really did help to facilitate this particular moment of Black creativity and thought. There’s a reason it’s called the Harlem Renaissance, after all.

In the film, there was the notion of The Great Migration, and with that, the library in Harlem became a destination for seekers, if you will, just people looking for themselves, looking for intellectualism. So Harlem was a magnet. People would go there, they would meet these incredible librarians who would invite them to their apartments, and they would collaborate and stuff.

I like that thing Regina [Andrews] says about how they went out to these Chinese restaurants “with the boys.” I put a photo with her in the middle and Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Aaron Douglas around her, so you could imagine them just walking down this Harlem street. It was like, “Imagine these people! Imagine these young kids. Nobody knows who the hell they are!”

They didn’t even know they were going to end up being historical figures!

That’s right. They didn’t know who they were going to be. So I hope that places it in that space. You could just cheat and imagine them going down Lenox Avenue, just having a good time.

Given what Harlem used to be for Black people back then, do you have any feelings about the ways that area has changed and evolved over the years?

Well, obviously, Harlem has changed. Matter of fact, we were just up there. We visited where Regina Andrews lived. She lived where Noble Sissle had his music store. But, yes, Harlem is certainly not the “intellectual center” that it used to be. Back then, it was, as someone said, “the think tank of America.” But now, that has spread out. It’s in California, Chicago, Philadelphia. There are a lot of other places, so Harlem is not exclusively the home of intellectual thought in Black America.

But having said that, there’s a lot of creative stuff that’s still going on. There are young poets groups. There are different arts groups. There’s a lot of that remaining. It isn’t all “gentrification.” There are these Black folks still there who are still creating, and maybe you could even have a similar kind of party now, if there was someone with the genius that my father had to bring them all together. Or, if there was a person like Regina Andrews who would have a Rolodex with everybody’s name from all of these disciplines—art, poetry, writing, acting, sculpting. All these disciplines were constantly interacting, and that feeling of collaboration was born out of that time, because of the pressure they were under. My uncle Donald, my dad’s brother, said of the time, “If you have the right kind of pressure and the right rock, you get a diamond.” They had a lot of pressure, but with the kind of people they were, they excelled.

On a similar note, one of the things that actually made me slightly sad was the realization that a meeting like this might almost be impossible now. Though places like Harlem still have these pockets of culture, it’s hard to imagine there being the same kind of interconnectedness, where all the top people in their respective fields and mediums were all friends who regularly convened together socially. As you already mentioned, so much has spread out over the years, and while a prominent Black actor in California can still easily be in contact with a prominent Black musician in New York, I think we lose out on something when they aren’t able to gather in person in the same way.

Well, now, when you’re out, everyone is doing this: [pretends to look down at his phone] And if they’re not doing that, they’re looking at a Zoom meeting. I think that adds to that atomization.

But [the people in the film] are from a time when, if you went to see somebody, you went and saw them. Or, if you wanted to write to somebody, you wrote it down and communicated that way. So the time brought them together. And as my uncle said, it was the pressure. It was the other things going on in the country that forced them together also.

We couldn’t be spread out because there were only some places we could be.

Exactly. As Regina says, in Harlem, they knew they could find a job. It was “the Mecca of the New Negro,” as Aaron Douglas says. It was a place where they felt safe, and that was important, because these were people who challenged [the imperialist system]. So they had to get out of areas where that wasn’t possible.

So, could it happen now? I guess so. Sure. There’s enough intellectual activity going on. But to bring them all together, from their many different disciplines, without them being self-conscious of what they were doing? I don’t know. These people were into the moment.

I completely agree with that, especially since so many of the actual conversations that happen in the film are still being had today. One of the things that stands out about this documentary is the way it captures the spirit of debate. These are all incredibly intelligent Black people, all living under the same circumstances, and yet they all have these radically different opinions about so many different topics. It gives way to this lively discourse and debate, and I was surprised by how much overlap there seemed to be between what Black people disagreed on back then and what they still disagree on today.

My wife, Coco, and I founded a new newspaper in Brooklyn 30 years ago, so I had a sense of how newspaper publishing was very close to documentaries. We’re both working to “tell a story” given certain information. So, sure, the idea of, like, Theodore Roosevelt being booed and hissed at[inspired lots of debate]. I love the word hissed. Black folks hissing.

It’s quite a visceral word.

Exactly. That’s the word. And [my father] said to me, “David, if things affect you viscerally, go with it.” And I did. And then, another time, when Richard B. Moore says, “What shall it be tonight? Straight socialism or Negroology?” Well, you have to define “Negroology.” There’s no seminars on that. Same thing is true with Irvin C. Miller, when he says, “Mr. John T. Gibson loaned me $5,000.” This was a Black man loaning another Black man $5,000, in the 1920s—that would be like $100,000 today. That’s a seminar right there: segregation, integration, economics, class—all with just that one exchange. So there are several things in there that have historical importance.

And I love the story about Jimmy Walker, because if you read about Jimmy Walker, [it’s all about how] he was corrupt, he was a philanderer. You hear all these things, but you don’t hear anything good about him except that he dressed well. But in that day, on the tarmac, he stuck out his hand—he was the moral person. If you only knew that about Jimmy Walker, you’d say, “Gee, he was a hell of a good mayor. He stood up.” I love being able to give him another look.

As the documentary reaches audiences, what do you hope they take away from it?

I’d like them to know what my father wanted them to know, which is that these kinds of people existed, that this kind of thinking was going on. He didn’t want that time to be lost, so I want them to look at this and say, “Oh, wow. These people were here. This time existed.”

I hope it really affects them viscerally. I just hope that they take away an understanding that Black folks had a deep intellectual and artistic history, and that they should remember and respect that. And then, when you look back at these times, you’ll realize that, as my father said in the film, a man’s social history is his essence. I want people to have that feeling, to get that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is playing in select theaters now.