...and director of TROUBLE MAN and THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Dixon.html He's great in CAR WASH; the dramatic scene where he talks sense to Bill Duke is, for me, the most memorable in the film.
The obit doesn't mention his roles in "Twilight Zone." He had the lead role in "The Big Tall Wish," as a boxer whose humiliating defeat is transformed into victory thanks to the wish of a boy who idolizes him. (I can't recall if the boy was his son or not.) When the boy explains to him what happened, he refuses to believe it and...
He also played a preacher in "I am the Night--Color Me Black," where the sky goes black over a town that's about to hang a man.
Dixon plays a mean, psychotic bastard who tortures a nude Marlene Clark in CLAY PIGEON, a forgotten slab of major studio sleaze also starring Robert Vaughn, Telly Savalas, Burgess Meredith, John Marley, Jeff Corey, Peter Lawford, and Tom Stern, from the creator of THE MOD SQUAD (Buddy Ruskin). I'm not surprised this one hasn't turned up on DVD yet.
Worldly Remains did a long, excellent interview with Dixon a few years back. I remember it delving into a lot of his directing work for TV, including some ROCKFORD FILES anecdotes.
As far as I know, nobody has ever written much (if any) about it, but Dixon appears to have been something of a television pioneer. When he began directing TV, there were virtually no other black television directors. Michael Schultz (who's still working!) is the only other one who comes to mind. Some of Dixon's and Schultz's earliest credits were on James Garner shows (NICHOLS and THE ROCKFORD FILES), and I'd be curious to know whether Garner made it a point to seek out black directors. I suspect there is a very interesting story behind Dixon's rise from a supporting actor on a sitcom to a busy feature and TV director.
TROUBLE MAN, by the way, is a darn good action movie with well crafted violence and charismatic work by Robert Hooks. Neither Hooks nor Dixon seem to have done any other blaxploitation movies; maybe they found the genre distasteful.
As an actor, Dixon is very good in "So Long, Patrick Henry," the first televised episode of I SPY (Robert Culp wrote it), as an American athlete (patterned after Jim Brown, IIRC) who had defected to China, but whose life is in danger from Red Chinese agents. I'd love to see "The Final War of Olly Winter" from CBS PLAYHOUSE (good luck on anything like that ever coming to DVD) and, now, CLAY PIGEON, which I never heard of before today.
The fine NOTHING BUT A MAN is airing on HDNet Movies this month.