Shaft not only gave African Americans their first real shot at Hollywood jobs behind the camera, but it played a pivotal role in rescuing the movie industry from the financial quirks that threatened the industry's future in the era before multi-plexes and suburban movie malls. It was far from an exercise in sex and violence, as so many of its detractors claimed. It spoke in a voice that Hollywood hadn't heard before. Parks, the son of a Kansas dirt farmer and one of 15 children, can sit in his Manhattan apartment overlooking the U.N. building and play his piano, think about writing another book or plan another retrospective of his photography. But that doesn't mean the man who directed Shaft has let down his guard.
Shaft has nothing to do with exploitation.
I don't know where they got that. What Shaft was about was providing work for black people that they never had before, letting them get into films. That's not exploitation. Shaft was the type of film that Hollywood made with white actors. Cagney could have been in Shaft .