WHAT’S IT ABOUT

A Black advertising executive who has sold out his own community gets kidnapped by an underground group that “deprograms” people it believes have lost their way.

WHY IT’S GONE

Spike Lee put his name on this one as a presenter, David C. Johnson directed it, and Eriq La Salle carries it as Bruford, an ad man who sells products to Black customers with images that insult them. The film had a $2 million budget and earned about $735,000, so it came and went quickly. Some writers have pointed to it as an early cousin of Lee’s own Bamboozled, which came six years later and asked many of the same questions.

Universal put out a DVD back in 1999, one of the earliest years of the format, and nothing has followed. That disc is now over 25 years old, and there has never been a Blu-ray. A movie this sharp and this uncomfortable makes studios nervous. It doesn’t hand the audience an easy hero. It asks who gets to decide what “real” Blackness looks like, and whether the people doing the deciding are any better than the people they are judging. That is exactly the kind of story that needs to stay available, especially now that Lee’s later work on the same subject gets studied in classrooms. Instead, the film that came first is sitting on a disc most people can’t find.