Dolemite (1975): 15 Shocking Facts You Totally Missed

Dolemite (1975): 15 weird facts you never knew The entire Dolemite character was born from a homeless man named Rico who wandered into a Hollywood record store spitting drunken rhymes for soup money. Rudy Ray Moore paid him just to keep performing, then built an entire cultural phenomenon out of what he heard. When Hollywood said Moore was too old and too unknown to lead a film, he poured roughly $100,000 of his own comedy album fortune into making Dolemite himself. If it flopped, he was going to be in debt to his own record label for years. One of the film's most memorable performances came from Ben Taylor Rackstraw, a man actually hustling on the sidewalk of Western Avenue when writer Jerry Jones pulled the car over and offered him the role of The Creeper on the spot. He never acted again. Director D'Urville Martin reportedly directed most of the movie while lying on the floor drunk, telling the crew after every take that he saw no reason to do it again. The film was shot inside the Dunbar Hotel, a legendary Black Los Angeles landmark that had been reduced to a graffiti covered ruin overtaken by squatters. Moore recruited most of his kung fu fighting cast directly from strip clubs around Los Angeles. Cinematographer Nicholas von Sternberg was 21 years old and fresh out of UCLA. His father was Josef von Sternberg, the legendary director behind Morocco and Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich. The film took over a year to make because Moore kept running out of money and had to hit the road performing comedy shows to fund the next round of shooting. Chuck Norris Karate School even got a special thanks credit. Nicholas von Sternberg laughed so hard on set that the crew literally threw sound blankets over him to muffle the noise during takes. Trade papers Daily Variety and Hollywood Reporter kept misspelling the title as Dolomite. And Dolemite, made for maybe $100,000, went on to gross somewhere between 10 and 12 million dollars. Roughly 100 times its budget. And the bonus: the infamous visible boom mics that fans have joked about for decades? They were never supposed to be seen. Original theatrical prints cropped them out. It was VHS transfers in the 90s that revealed them by accident. When Vinegar Syndrome finally restored the film in 2016, they included both versions on the same disc, the corrected widescreen cut and the "boom mic edition," because fans had grown to love the flaw so much that fixing it would have ruined the experience. ⏱ Timestamps in the chapters below 👇 Which fact surprised you most? Drop it in the comments