There could hardly have been a more fitting place to talk about preserving history than the historic Harlem headquarters of the New York Amsterdam News, where David Greaves and his daughter, Liani Greaves, recently sat down to discuss “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” the documentary William Greaves began filming in 1972. His family has now completed that work more than half a century later. Around us were old Amsterdam News covers and other traces of a newspaper that has been documenting African American life for more than a century. A publication that began in 1909 with six sheets of paper, a lead pencil, a dressmaker’s table and a $10 investment, is now one of the country’s most enduring African American newspapers.
That history is entering another phase. The Amsterdam News Educational Foundation is leading plans to preserve and reimagine the newspaper’s Frederick Douglass Boulevard headquarters as a national center and community space devoted to the history of the paper and the broader role of the Black press in advancing civil rights. Sarah Bahr reported in The New York Times on the surviving evidence of newsroom life inside the building — old typewriters, reporters’ notebooks, printing materials, historic front pages, microfilm, press passes and the former darkroom — and on plans that include museum galleries, a recreated 1930s newsroom, archival research space and a community lounge while the Amsterdam News continues operating from the building.
The setting made sense for another reason. Greaves had brought with him a small, worn 1931 volume of “The Negro Field,” its pages yellowed and frayed from decades of handling. He opened the book to a newspaper directory listing African American publications across the country and there, among papers serving communities from Baltimore and Atlanta to Chicago and New Orleans, was the New York Amsterdam News. Greaves explained that his father, a professional musician, and other musicians relied on the guide when traveling from town to town; when they arrived somewhere unfamiliar, they could use it to locate the African American newspaper and, through the paper, connect with the local community. Sitting inside the Amsterdam News office building in 2026, holding a directory that listed the Amsterdam News in 1931, made the argument for preservation in the most tangible way possible: somebody had kept the book, somebody had kept the newspaper, and because they had, the connection could still be made.
In August 1972, William Greaves brought together an extraordinary group of artists, writers, musicians, intellectuals and activists associated with the Harlem Renaissance inside Duke Ellington’s Harlem townhouse. Eubie Blake, Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Arna Bontemps, James Van Der Zee, Richard Bruce Nugent, Noble Sissle, Regina Andrews, and John Henrik Clarke were among those assembled. These scholars weren’t reconstructing the period from a distance, but rather people who had lived through it and helped create it. Behind one of the cameras was Greaves’ 26-year-old son, David, who had already been working with his father and would continue doing so for roughly 15 years as an assistant, cinematographer and editor while studying film at Columbia University and learning, as much as anything, inside William Greaves Productions.
Fifty-four years later, David returned to those images as the director charged with finishing the movie his father had left behind. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” which runs 100 minutes, is strongest when it trusts what William Greaves captured rather than forcing the footage into a tidy historical argument. The guests interrupt one another, laugh, remember differently and occasionally disagree about people and events they all experienced. Their affection and rivalries are still there, as are the contradictions, and the film is richer for refusing to flatten them into representatives of a single approved version of Harlem Renaissance history.
William Greaves, the Harlem-born filmmaker behind “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One,” spent more than five decades making films and television programs concerned with African American history, politics and culture, including “Nationtime,” “Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice,” “Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey” and “From These Roots,” an earlier documentary about the Harlem Renaissance. He died in 2014 without completing this film, but his wife and creative partner, Louise Archambault Greaves, refused to let the material disappear. Louise, who co-founded William Greaves Productions with her husband in 1963, spent decades involved in the production, distribution and preservation of his work and continued searching for the right way to finish the Harlem footage until her own death in 2023.
The surviving archive amounted to approximately 60,000 feet of 16mm film; after Louise died, the responsibility for completing it passed to David and his daughter, Liani.
Liani came to the project with a filmmaking and production history of her own. Her career began in the 1990s, when she worked on the Columbia Pictures feature “I Like It Like That” and assisted director Jeff Pollack on New Line Cinema’s “Above the Rim.” She later moved into music-video production, becoming a director’s representative to Hype Williams at Big Dog Films and working around projects involving artists including The Notorious B.I.G. and Brandy before expanding into nonprofit production, fundraising, and cultural programming. In 2005, she returned directly to the Greaves filmmaking legacy when she worked with her grandfather and Steve Buscemi on “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2” and she now serves as vice president of William Greaves Productions.
David and Liani came back to Greaves’ footage by different routes, but Louise was the bridge between them. She had spent years trying to determine what form the material should take and continued pursuing its completion near the end of her life, leaving David and Liani with a responsibility that was both artistic and personal.
There is also an irony in David’s relationship to the original 1972 gathering: despite having operated a camera that day, he remembers relatively little of it because his attention was focused on the work of shooting. Decades later, he can occasionally spot his younger self in the surviving footage. A 26-year-old cameraman once recorded elders remembering the Harlem Renaissance; more than half a century later, that cameraman is himself an elder deciding how another generation will finally see them — while his daughter stands beside him helping finish what his father began.
Three generations of the Greaves family ultimately meet inside “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.” Greaves conceived and filmed the gathering, David photographed it as a young man and returned decades later to direct its completion, and Liani helped carry her grandfather’s unfinished work to the screen. Louise, whose insistence that the footage survive connected one generation to the next, remains central to the story even though she did not live to see its release.
The film was conceived as an act of preservation because Greaves understood that he was filming elders whose firsthand memories could disappear with them, but what makes “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” so impactful is that preservation never turns those people into monuments. They remain funny, stubborn, sharp, affectionate, contradictory, and extremely sure of their own memories.
Photographer James Van Der Zee studies the grand piano inside Duke Ellington’s townhouse and, when someone asks him to play, admits, “Off the record, I haven’t touched the piano in four or five years now,” before beginning a melody. It is one of the film’s smallest scenes and one of its most revealing because, for a few moments, Van Der Zee is not simply the celebrated photographer whose images helped define Harlem, but a man sitting among friends, slightly hesitant about whether he still has it in him. Eubie Blake recalls Bill “Bojangles” Robinson trying to shake Charles Lindbergh’s hand at an event honoring the pilot and being rebuffed, then passing along Robinson’s warning never to be the first to extend your hand to a white man you do not know. Journalist Gerri Major describes her own sense of professional responsibility with equal clarity when she says, “If I can’t do something to help us, I don’t want to do something that would hurt us.”
Other memories return the Harlem Renaissance to its libraries, studios, parties, and relationships. Regina Andrews remembers a gathering for Jessie Fauset, while Arna Bontemps recalls entering the 135th Street Library before he was famous and being recognized because he had published in The Crisis. Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Marcus Garvey enter the conversation because somebody in the room remembers them, while artist Ernest Crichlow recalls traveling from Brooklyn as a teenager to Augusta Savage’s basement studio and finding what he describes as heaven. Later, somebody calls out, “Please, someone talk about Zora Neale Hurston,” and Richard Bruce Nugent answers. The film does not need to stop and announce that history is happening because the people who made that history are simply talking to one another.
That quality is what separates “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” from the conventional archival documentary. The people interrupt each other and contradict one another, and their memories do not always match, which is precisely why the material feels alive. They lived through the same period but did not experience it in identical ways, and the film respects them enough to leave those differences intact. For me, there is pride in seeing this community together, but the greater pleasure comes from watching these celebrated figures refuse to become statues. Some documentaries make you feel like a fly on the wall but “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” made me feel as though somebody had pulled out a chair.
Richard Bruce Nugent offers one of the film’s most profound observations when he says, “While you’re living it, it is the now,” and that thought gets to the heart of what the documentary has achieved. These women and men were not living “history” while they were inside Duke Ellington’s townhouse; they were living their present, arguing, remembering, making art, working and trying to understand the world around them exactly as we do now. The historical label came later, but Greaves’ camera preserved something more elusive than a date or a roster of famous names: it preserved their presence.
That is why the film feels less like a frozen record than a perpetual moment. They remain there speaking, laughing, disagreeing and remembering because the camera allows them to keep doing it, and the fact that Greaves died before completing the film and Louise died still trying to bring it into the world only sharpens the point. David and Liani did not abandon the work when it became difficult or when one generation could no longer carry it. They picked it up and kept moving, which is why the film ultimately becomes not only a record of the Harlem Renaissance but an argument for preserving the stories of our ancestors even when that work takes decades.
Memory, when it is tended to rather than merely admired, becomes a kind of immortality. These women and men were in the now in 1972, and when we watch them in 2026, they are in the now again. That is profound, and, in the truest sense of the word, it is groovy.
David and Liani Greaves spoke with the Amsterdam News about returning to the 1972 footage, completing William and Louise Greaves’ work, and preserving the different memories of the people who gathered inside Duke Ellington’s townhouse.
AMN: David, you were 26 years old and one of the cameramen filming that gathering in 1972. More than half a century later, you returned to the footage to direct the completed film. What did you see in it this time that you couldn’t have understood that night, and how did that discovery guide your choices as a director?
DAVID GREAVES: In 1972, I was young and working alongside my father, so I understood that something important was happening, but I don’t think I could fully appreciate the weight of what was being preserved. Coming back to the footage decades later, I was looking at people who had lived through the Harlem Renaissance and were speaking from firsthand experience about a period that had already transformed American culture.
What struck me was how alive the room still felt. These weren’t people delivering history lessons. They were remembering, disagreeing, laughing, correcting one another and sometimes seeing the same period very differently. As a director, I didn’t want to impose too much on that. I wanted audiences to experience what it felt like to be in that room and to understand that history is not always neat or unanimous. Sometimes its richness comes from those different memories existing beside one another.
AMN: Liani, William Greaves was your grandfather, and David is your father. As you worked with David to complete William’s unfinished film, what did the footage reveal about your grandfather as an artist that you hadn’t known as his granddaughter?
LIANI GREAVES: I knew my grandfather as my grandfather, and of course I knew that he was a filmmaker. But working so closely with this material allowed me to understand his artistic instincts in another way. You can see how deeply interested he was in people — not simply famous names or historical figures, but in the way people talked to one another, remembered things and challenged each other.
There is tremendous patience in the footage. He trusted conversation. He understood that if you created the right environment and allowed people space, something honest could emerge. That gave me a much deeper appreciation for the way he worked.
Completing the film also became very personal for our family. My grandmother, Louise Greaves, who was my grandfather’s longtime collaborator, spent years trying to find the right way to finish it. She continued that work until her passing in 2023. In many ways, bringing the film to completion is part of carrying forward what both of them began.
AMN: The guests have different memories of the Harlem Renaissance, and their conversations don’t always arrive at a shared conclusion. How did you decide what context to give viewers while preserving the feeling of being in the room with them?
DG: We wanted to give audiences enough historical grounding to understand who these people were and why this gathering mattered, but we were very careful not to overexplain what was already happening naturally in the room. Part of the power of the footage is that these people were not speaking for history books. They were talking to one another.
LG: And sometimes they remembered things differently, which was important to preserve. Memory is personal. Two people can live through the same moment and carry very different versions of it with them.
We wanted viewers to feel almost like another guest at the gathering — to listen, observe and come to understand these people through the conversation itself. The contemporary material helps connect that history to Harlem today, but the heart of the film remains those voices and what happened when they were brought together.
AMN: Tell us, how did this even happen? 1972 is a long time ago. Father and daughter, what drove the two of you to finally finish this film?
LG: The impetus to finish the film came from Louise Greaves, my grandmother and my grandfather’s longtime collaborator, who worked on finding a way to complete it until her passing in 2023. Integrating contemporary footage of Harlem and African American culture with the original vision proved difficult until time and separation from the material allowed us to make it work.
AMN: That confirms it. I felt the ancestors in every frame. In a sentence, what is “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” about, and why is the Harlem Renaissance still relevant?
DG: The film focuses on the Harlem Renaissance because my father wanted to capture and preserve a generation that otherwise might have been lost to history.
AMN: Facts. I hope other creatives are inspired to turn their cameras toward their own communities, too. We literally carry cameras in our hands 24/7 now with our cellphones.
DG and LG: (Laughing). We do.
AMN: I love how the librarians are featured in the documentary. Where was all of this priceless footage housed all those years? At home?
DG: No. It was housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
AMN: I love that place. I’m sure the footage felt right at home there.
There are so many famous Harlemites featured in this documentary — journalists, columnists, poets, painters and activists — all inside Duke Ellington’s townhouse, although Ellington himself was not there.
DG: Correct. Ellington was ill and unable to attend, although the librarians had contacted him.
AMN: What I love is this: Some great documentaries make you feel like a fly on the wall, and that is a feat. But “Once Upon a Time in Harlem” made me feel as though I had been transported back to 1972 and invited into the room. I could feel the ancestors nodding and approving, and there is something extraordinary about watching people who helped shape a cultural movement simply talking among themselves, alive again through the camera. It feels like immortality, locked and stacked.
LG and DG: Thank you. We feel blessed to bring them back, in a sense, for audiences in 2026.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
