In 1972, legendary director William Greaves set out to record history. With the help of Jean Hutson and Regina Andrews, two librarians at the Schomburg Center of Research in Black Culture, he threw a cocktail party in Duke Ellington’s apartment, convening a joyful group of surviving Harlem Renaissance artists, writers, and musicians. That day, Greaves and four camera operators (including his son, David) filmed the conversations, recitations, and deliberations of Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, Eubie Banks, James Van Der Zee, and other luminaries in colorful 16mm film, capturing a once-in-a-lifetime moment that resembled life 50 years earlier.
As Greaves began piecing the documentary together with David, he realized the still period photography he’d collected and the film they’d just shot didn’t match aesthetically. Greaves eventually incorporated the stills into a 30-minute 1974 documentary From These Roots, but the live-action footage sat unused for decades. At least until 2022—eight years after Greaves died—when his widow, Louise Archambault Greaves, obtained a grant from the Ford Foundation to digitize and assemble the unfinished archive. Before Louise died a year later, she handed the project’s keys to David and his daughter, Liani Greaves, to complete the film with editor and producer Anne de Mare.
The result is Once Upon a Time In Harlem, a minor miracle—or, as New Yorker film critic Richard Brody wrote last year, “one of the greatest cinematic works of creative nonfiction” that he’s “ever seen.” Leaning into his father’s experimental style and double-screen formats (a nod to his masterwork Symbiopsychotaxiplasm), David captures the bustling spirit of the apartment’s lively, candid figures, intermixing occasional talking heads and history with the handheld immediacy of their cross-room talk. Like his father intended, David pulls you into snippets of intimate discussion, then pivots as real-time interruptions funnel into larger group recollections. It feels like one living, breathing document, layering a 1920s community onto a 1970s landscape seen through today’s lens.
As Once Upon a Time in Harlem begins its theatrical run, I caught up with David Greaves inside NEON’s Manhattan office. In a thoughtful, at-times-emotional interview, he reflected on his memories working with his father, piecing together the archive, and learning more about that foundational era of Black life.
The Film Stage: When your dad started this documentary in 1972, you were a 26-year-old camera operator. You’re watching all these luminaries walk into Duke Ellington’s home. What do you remember about preparing for that day?
David Greaves: Well, that’s so funny. You’re the first person to ask me about preparing for that day, because that’s the part I remember. I don’t remember the day itself because I was working. When I saw myself and others in the rough cut, the outtakes, and in the mirrors, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. That was me.” I remember my father telling me that I was going to be one of the camera people. And I knew this was a big deal. In preparation for that, I usually read a book called Family of Man. It was a family of images. And so I always go through that for framing and that kind of stuff. But the actual shoot itself: I cannot give you a moment.
How familiar were you with all of these people in the room? Did you know everyone by name and their backgrounds?
No, I only met two people. One was Richard B. Moore. He was a mentor to my father. I met him at his bookstore one time. And then, of course, Eubie Blake, because we did From These Roots, and Eubie did the music for it. It was incredible. What had happened was that I picked him up and brought him to the studio. And there was a heavy rock band there, heavy metal. So finally they finished and then we went in. And then Eubie walked over to the piano. And he’s 89 years old. And the little guys were like, “OK, watch this old guy.” And then Eubie sat down.
I’m sorry—I will tear up if I tell this. He sat down to play, and [my dad] said, “Eubie, the men are coming back from the war. Play it.” Eubie hit it. “Eubie, the people are migrating from the South.” Eubie hit it. “People are enjoying…” Eubie hit it. Those guys were like, “What the hell?” I mean, the whole atmosphere in the control room changed.
He knew every cue for what you wanted.
Dad just told him what to do, and he’d hit it. It was unbelievable! You had to be there to see that.
David and Liani Greaves at the 64th New York Film Festival. Photo by Sean DiSerio.
As you were filming Once Upon a Time, what was your relationship like with your dad and his filmmaking? Did you understand what he was trying to achieve with a lot of his films, or were you just kind of along for the ride?
I didn’t meet my father until I was 12. I first worked with him one Christmas break. I was finishing up The First World Festival of Negro Arts and I rolled up the outtakes of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. He was telling me about the things he was doing. “Gee, that sounds more fun than spending another couple of years in the library.” So I said, “Yeah, let me go to Columbia instead of California for graduate school.” So I went to Columbia. I worked with him for, like, 15 years or so. They say in the film, “It is the now when you’re there.”
When we did Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, it got all these awards, and I just thought that if you do a film, you get awards. I just thought that was the way things worked, because Voice of La Raza, we got awards. The hallway was lined with awards. And so my father obviously was very good at it, and I was sitting next to him all the time, taking my notes and stuff. I guess he’s in my brain because, when I started to go back over this footage I said, “Oh, I want to go back and see something.” And my hand shot out to where the control panel would be on the editing machine some 50 years later. I realized that’s the same thing that was going on in my head in terms of being back in the editing room.
You mentioned the idea of not knowing when you’re “in an era” when you’re in the middle of it. Was that also the case for you as you filmed the cocktail party? Did you realize how special this would be at that moment?
Well, when I was preparing for it, I knew it was going to be special. I knew it was going to be a special time. But I did not know what it would be now. It was a film that we were doing…
You were expecting this to come out the following year.
Yeah, exactly. You’re working on the film now, and you don’t know what it’s gonna be 50 years later when people look at it. “Oh, Jesus, I had no idea that was happening.” I compare it to a story I was reading—they have a new telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which is more powerful than the Webb. It can see as close to the Big Bang as you can get—but it can’t see it itself. This film is like that. It brings you as close to the Harlem Renaissance as you can get. You can’t see it, but it’s as close as you can get. In the film, Richard B. Moore says, “Everything converged, and there was this little glow of light and learning.” And that’s what we’re looking at: the glow.
Your dad really struggled for decades with how to structure and format this footage into the movie he wanted. Why do you think he struggled with this so much?
He and my stepmother, Louise Archambault Greaves, wanted to show the effect of the Renaissance throughout the decades, because they were filming up to the early 2000s, shooting digitally at that point. So I think that’s what that was. But he never returned to say, “Let’s just do this.” He did an original rough cut, but he didn’t go beyond that. And I don’t know; I can’t give you a thinking of why he chose not to just complete it with the footage we had. But his treatments involved some contemporary talking heads—Sidney Poitier, Brock Peters doing narrations and stuff. So we decided to just stay with that time. And that worked out.
This entire restoration started with Louise receiving a Ford Foundation grant in 2022. How did you become involved with completing it after that?
After she got the grant, the film and the footage were restored. And then she passed. The footage was completed and the restoration was completed. The first meeting, I remember, we had at Bill Bland’s office, who did the restoration, and I said, “I’m not just gonna turn it over to an editor.” But it was when we were up at Firelight Studio with Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith when Marcia said, “OK, so who’s gonna direct this?” I said, “I will.” I couldn’t imagine turning it over to anybody else.
It felt personal to you.
Sure. I couldn’t see anybody else doing this. And Louise and I had spoken about it. She would say, “We’re gonna get you a director. What about so-and-so?” Well, he didn’t know Bill. “What about so-and-so?” I was quiet during all her discussions. I just kept my mouth shut. She couldn’t make that final decision. And she gave a note to me. She said, “At the end, y’all will do it.” So, in the end, that’s how it came.
At the start of this project, how did you start thinking about what to highlight in 60,000 feet of film? Did you start with scenes you loved and then go from there?
Yeah, I went through it chronologically, and I was looking at my early notes. And a lot of the things I saw in the early notes are in the film. You’re cutting it down, cutting it down. And a funny thing is that my father, when he was teaching me and helping me with my algebra, said, “Start at the introduction, start at the first page, and just go from there.” So I’m looking at my early notes of “How to Make a Documentary.” That was in my mindset. You don’t know everything. Let me just start at the introduction. And there was even a time when we had no money, and I said to Anne de Marre, “I’ll edit it.” She said, “David, an editor will make it sing.” And she did. She’s a super editor—brilliant—and she’s the one that makes it seamless throughout.
Behind the scenes of Once Upon a Time in Harlem
I love the double box, like you use in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.
Oh, yeah. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm gave us the license to do whatever we wanted. You wanna have slates in the frame? That’s fine. You wanna have the director giving direction? That’s fine. We had multiple cameras. Why don’t we use it and put them both up there? So the split screens grew out of the license that Symbiopsychotaxiplasm gave us. And then, of course, we had the archival footage, some of which is new, but a lot of this stuff that I had originally shot.
It really captures the overlapping conversations that would have happened in that salon.
Yes, yes, yes.
I thought it was a really interesting way to capture the feeling of it, as opposed to just one frame.
Well, you know, you can see the reactions. It’s theatrical, if you will. [My dad] said that at the end of it, “The film has to be theatrical and move at a snappy pace.” Which is what we did. He had four cameras. He had gotten this group of incredible people together. He got all this creative energy into one spot, and knew that something would happen. Like with Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, you bring all these creative people together, something’s gonna happen. It just grew out of that energy. And they look beautiful on screen.
And the interviews give context to what they’re talking about.
You see the importance of the librarians. Regina Andrews at the library. These guys would come in and she’s fascinated by them. So you have a beautiful young lady fascinated by you and your work, wanting to say, “Hey, do you want to come up to the place? We’re gonna have some people here.”
They were almost the facilitators.
Oh, absolutely. They were like the nucleus that these folks began to circle around and collaborate. And she says, “You see Langston writing prose, Arna Bontemps doing sketches…” That group contained Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen. So they were critical.
I think about celebrities who are so used to phones and being recorded all the time. Our understanding of how to present ourselves has changed so much with this new reality. When you look back, it does feel like nobody really noticed the cameras. Was that refreshing to watch back?
There were only a couple of instances when the cameras were mentioned. I think when we even put one of them in the film. Ida Mae Cullen said, “Thank you, Bill.” And then one other time when Bruce Newton just said, “Oh… [Gesturing to the camera].” But that was it. It wasn’t like people were like, “The camera’s on now…” They were just interacting and we were just capturing it.
Yeah. It felt almost like a high school reunion.
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And the camera people were all experienced with cinema verite. Dad had worked with them for years. I worked with them on camera for years, too, so at that point it’s a matter of having people who are experienced. My father always said, “You can tell a lot about a cameraman if he’s afraid to go in close. That’s where all the action is. You’re all right in there.” And in his interviews on Regina, or on Richard B. Moore, when we recite “If We Must Die” at the end of that—he zoomed in close to catch that, you know?
Yeah.
So the camera people knew what to do. The sound people knew. These are guys we traveled around with all the time. So it’s experienced people with an incredible cast of characters and you bring all that energy together.
Was there a specific moment or interaction that has still stuck with you since you’ve wrapped this project?
My daughter will tell you, and Anne will tell you that. If I had my druthers, Dad would always leave things in the cut long after I knew they had to come out. I’d say to myself, “Why is he leaving it in there?” And the same thing with Richard B. Moore and me. This guy is incredible. You can hear Dad off-camera say, “Give me another magazine. You’re costing me a lot of money, Mr. Moore.” [Laughs] Because it costs money to just put in another 10-minute mag. But Richard Moore is incredible with the history that he knew. And then, of course, there’s Leigh Whipper. There’s another one with his Haile Selassie speech. I love that speech. And he recited it straight through.
At 96.
Yes, 96 years old. He said, “You want to hear it?” And he began. He just bangs it right out. I said that you can’t have the whole thing in, so I cut it down and I said, “What points would Vladimir Zelensky say if he were in the same position?” Then it became kind of easy to cut down, to be honest. “Oh: Alone, without help from the oppressor, a nation leading an army without arms.” Those were the things that would resonate. I thought people would think of that politically, but the reaction has been like, “Look, he’s still going!” [Laughs]
Once Upon a Time in Harlem premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival. Photo by Sean DiSerio.
The other powerful moment for me was the real lament from a few people that the younger generation had forgotten the significance of the people in that room. What did you make of that indictment at that time? Why did your generation struggle to remember these luminaries?
It wasn’t really spoken about. It wasn’t really studied. Students come up to me now and say, “Yeah, I had no idea this existed.” And I think that for us then—they had the Black Arts Movement. It was very much going on at that time. And I was reading a thing from Ishmael Reed. If they had seen the film at that time, they would have said, “Oh, those were revolutionaries. We’re just following their path.” So I think that would have been very illustrative. I think that would have had a big, big effect.
I suppose every generation kind of feels like they’re revolutionaries.
That’s right. “We’re important.” Yeah, there was other stuff going on.
When you look back at the salons and dialectics happening at that time, what do you miss most about it?
It reminds me of when I was growing up in my grandmother’s house. People would come over and talk when I was a little kid and you had the bridge parties, smoking, all that. And it took me back. It does remind you of that kind of period, those kinds of interactions. And I think that today, something like this may be happening, could be happening now, but there are no cameras there to record it. So that 50 years from now, people would say, “Oh, yeah, I didn’t know Barry Jenkins was thinking about this.”
It seems like your dad never even had to play moderator with them.
Oh, yeah, no. These folks were ready to talk to each other. “Remember such and such and so-and-so and that.” We tried to put him in there whenever we could, whenever he was talking. And so [my dad] said, “What about so-and-so?” “What about the lynchings? What about this?” And they don’t speak about that, except for Richard Moore in his interview. They freelance. They spoke about what they wanted to speak about when they wanted to speak about it. He used them. But when he did that, we have his voice. When he says, “Oh, let Aaron Douglas talk about…” So you do hear him making those comments…
It’s a little conscientious, just to kind of make sure everyone is participating.
Yeah, exactly. And the librarians again played another significant role. “Everybody quiet down.” And they would usher people in, take people out, so they’re playing the same kind of role. There’s two of them—Jean Hutson and Regina Andrews—and needless to say, when they spoke, as Richard Moore says, “Nobody interrupts the librarian.” So they were very much respected, and when they wanted to move people around, they were able to do that.
The New Yorker critic Richard Brody has been a big champion of your dad’s work for years. He wrote that if William Greaves “had been able to complete the movie soon after shooting his footage, it would have literally changed the course of history, and for the better. It would have brought the Harlem Renaissance and its luminaries greater prominence during an era that was neglectful of those movements.”
Right.
What do you make of that idea? Had your generation been able to watch a documentary like this, what impact do you think it would have made?
As I said before: I think that they would have realized that there was this previous time and these previous groups of people who were also very much interested in the arts, the time they were in, what was happening, the lynchings, and everything else. I think they would have been more respectful of their predecessors, and I think it would have changed. I’m not going to say “changed the course of history,” but it changed how they thought about themselves. And they would have appreciated and maybe stood up a little straighter and said, “Hey, we are part of something.” I think that would have happened.
I’m sure your dad has been with you in this whole filmmaking process. What did it feel like when this was completed? How do you think he would have felt about this?
I think that he would have said, “That’s my boy. That’s my thing.” I think he would have appreciated the work.
That’s all you want to hear.
That’s all a son wants to hear.
Once Upon a Time in Harlem is now in limited release.
The post “I Couldn’t See Anybody Else Doing This”: David Greaves on Bringing Once Upon a Time in Harlem to Life first appeared on The Film Stage.
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