Floyd Webb still remembers a game he played at Boy Scout camp during the summer of 1967, when he was 14. “We had to guess what time a clock was set,” he says. “It was in a paper bag so none of us could see. I tied with another guy who happened to be white. They sent us outside so they could set it again. I guessed the time exactly the second time. The first thing they asked was how did I cheat? The scoutmaster reluctantly gave me a prize. I never took it out of the box.”
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“I started Blacklight because nobody else had done it,” says Webb. “There is a great need to showcase a variety of black images, positive and negative. The American media has historically done a very poor job of that.”
Webb first became interested in film as a child watching PBS specials. “I saw something on Channel 11 about making films when I was eight or nine.” But PBS wasn’t the only thing he watched. “I wrote scripts for Lost in Space and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” he says, flashing a dimpled grin.
“I became a part of a radical leftist antiracist clique. We published an underground newspaper and opposed the school administration. We were all students in the top ten percent of our class. My father returned from Vietnam again, this time with a Super-8 movie camera. I used it to film the riots.”
When he returned to the U.S. he became a member of Chicago Filmmakers, which inspired him to make an experimental film, Flesh/Metal/Wood, now part of the Saint Louis Art Museum’s “Black On Black” exposition. He also joined the Black Filmmakers Foundation, a New York group that distributed and promoted black independent films whose members included aspiring filmmakers Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Charles Lane, and Warrington Hudlin.
