Dr. Megan Francisco will introduce the screening as part of her course on Music and Film

Cool Black private eye John Shaft is hired by a crime lord to find and retrieve his kidnapped daughter. Featuring a Grammy and Academy Award-winning soundtrack by the legendary Isaac Hayes, the film is a staple of the Blaxploitation film movement and helped make star Richard Roundtree a household name.

Screening in partnership with Lifelong Learning through Wake Forest University

Megan Francisco is an Assistant Professor of Music at Wake Forest University. She holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Washington and a master’s degree in religion and music from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Her scholarship explores intersections of music, gender, and media. Her publications include an article on opera and Battlestar Galactica in the Journal of the Society for American Music and a chapter on Mahler’s influence on Leonard Bernstein in Leonard Bernstein in Context. She is currently completing a monograph examining the musical evolution and cultural significance of superwomen in live-action film and editing a collected volume on the music of Battlestar Galactica.

Please visit our accessibility page for more information. Beyond the description, trailer and quoted reviews on our website, other sources of information about content and age-appropriateness for specific films can be found on Common Sense Media and IMDb. We encourage you to research our films at your own informational interest level via the internet.