Blues for Black Actors

By RICHARD CORLISS

America's largest minority seeks roles and role models

Consider two of this month's releases. One is a science-fiction comedy with more than its share of gags, chills and good feelings. The other is an electrifying whodunit from a veteran director whose films have received 31 Oscar nominations. In a simpler world these two movies--John Sayles' The Brother from Another Planet and Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story--would pass through the theaters with the usual benediction or indifference from critics and the public. But because the films have casts composed almost entirely of blacks, because Sayles' comedy is set primarily in Harlem and A Soldier's Story in a Negro barracks in 1944, a lot of hopes and anxieties are riding on them. It is one of the black man's burdens: convincing a skeptical Hollywood Establishment that his experiences are worth putting on film and that they will attract an impressive number of moviegoers, black and white.

One might think that the debate had already been settled by the box office performance of last year's films. Black actors starred in three of 1983's six biggest hits: Eddie Murphy in Trading Places, Richard Pryor in Superman III and Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. This summer's two out-of-nowhere hits, the rap musical Breakin' and Prince's Purple Rain, suggest that movies with black themes can attract large mixed audiences. And yet these are a few glittering tokens; for most black actors and audiences, roles and role models are scarce. Though blacks constitute about 12% of the U.S. population and account for an estimated 20% of movie tickets sold, only 6.3% of the actors working in films in the two-year period ending June 1983 were black. Of the 142 films released by the major studios last year, fewer than a dozen had blacks in starring roles. Having seen it all before, blacks know not to ask for too much. "We aren't trying to reinvent the Hollywood wheel," says George Crosby, president of the Association of Black Motion Picture and Television Producers. "We just want to add spokes that will strengthen it."

Is the neglect a matter of economics or racism? "Hollywood is too dumb to be racist," charges Actor Yaphet Kotto (Blue Collar, Brubaker). "This town is all about dough--that's the crime." For Leon Isaac Kennedy (Penitentiary, Body and Soul), the problem is the industry's "blockbuster mentality. They want 100% of the audience pie. They'd rather not go for slices.

And we get the crumbs." Universal Pictures Chairman Frank Price, who is grooming a young black for the rank of high-level executive, argues for Realpolitik: "If you say, 'Let's make X number of black pictures,' you're not being financially responsible." That depends on just what number X is. There is a market; there is a need. As Norman Jewison notes, "All people need heroes. And Hollywood isn't providing blacks with any."

Jewison is white, but he has trudged this weary road before: in 1967 he directed In the Heat of the Night, a crackling confrontation between black man and redneck that won an Oscar for Best Picture. A Soldier's Story is his tautest, funniest, bitterest work since then, with a sparkling cast. For this, credit is due largely to Playwright Charles Fuller, whose A Soldier's Play earned the Pulitzer Prize and just about every other drama award of 1982, and to the Negro Ensemble Company, where the play was first staged. Every actor, from Adolph Caesar as the frog-voiced, wonderfully malign drill sergeant to Howard E. Rollins Jr. as the haughty black lawyer assigned to investigate the sergeant's death, puts subtlety and pride into his performance. Rollins is scarily imposing: he suggests a Sidney Poitier who refuses to ingratiate himself to anyone, least of all the audience.

There is a suggestion of man meeting role here. A Soldier's Story looks like an act of love for everyone involved--including Jewison, who peddled the project to three studios before Columbia Pictures bought it on the condition that the director work for free instead of receiving his usual $1.5 million salary--but for Rollins it is a late second chance. Like LeVar Burton after Roots and Louis Gossett Jr. after An Officer and a Gentleman, Rollins found himself a celebrity but not a hot commodity after his Oscar-nominated role in Ragtime (1981). He did not make another feature until A Soldier's Story. "People have been a little slow to pick up the phone," he understates. "Most of the scripts I did see used the catchword 'dignified' for my characters. It's another cliche to keep from insulting actors who happen to be black. Why can't we just be people?"

Compare Rollins with Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor, and the new ghettoizing of black stars is immediately apparent. Murphy and Pryor have parlayed their popularity into lucrative deals with the major studios, but they are basically comics: hip new models of the vaudeville Negro. "I don't think the country is ready for black leading men," Murphy declares. "White guys won't accept their ladies' going nuts over a black actor." Notes Playwright Fuller: "Americans trust black people when we sing, dance or tell jokes. It's when we stop laughing that people get itchy." So starring roles for blacks lean toward the comic and away from the romantic, which spells hard times for serious actors and serious films. Says Jewison: "There has to be room for films that don't have Richard Pryor in a chicken suit."

As history indicates, it could be worse, and it has been. In D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), the major Negro roles were played by whites in blackface. Hollywood's first black star, Stepin Fetchit, fitted the stereotype of the slow, sly, shuffling Negro. Meanwhile, the industry mostly ignored Paul Robeson (too strong, too smart, too sexy, too damned uppity) and denied Lena Horne her best potential movie roles, as the mulatto heroines of Pinky and Show Boat, handing the parts instead to Jeanne Crain and Ava Gardner. It was not until the rise to stardom of Sidney Poitier in the 1950s that blacks had a bankable movie hero. "To this day," argues Film Historian Donald Bogle, "Poitier remains the most important black actor. The image he presented made white audiences take black Americans seriously, at least while they sat in the movie theater."

Outside the theater, blacks were becoming hard to ignore, and their impact was refracted on the screen. "When schools were being desegregated," recalls Danny Glover, a likely Oscar nominee for his performance as the hobo in Places in the Heart, "you saw Poitier become a film star. And in the wake of the Watts riots and the push for community control, you got blaxploitation." These were the low-budget gangster and horror movies that, along with prestige efforts like Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues, detonated the explosion of black films in the early '70s. Suddenly directors like Gordon Parks and Melvin van Peebles had broken the color barrier, and Cicely Tyson and Diana Ross were crossover stars.

Too soon the fad faded in red ink and rancor. The same black community leaders who would urge Paramount Pictures to suppress Ralph Bakshi's "racist" film Coonskin (and, a decade later, Sam Fuller's White Dog) were condemning blaxploitation as image suicide. Moreover, white liberal producers, reluctant to portray black men as rapists and dopers, failed to come up with alternatives. "If you're not working," says Actor Stan Shaw (Roots II), "you don't "get better."

John Sayles knows a number of black actors and knows that "there's a steady stream of work if they're willing to shoot people or get shot at. For actresses it's worse: you get to play hookers and once in a while a nurse." He resolved to use part of his MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant to help finance The Brother from Another Planet, a $350,000 satire about a black extraterrestrial who lands in Harlem. A white man shooting in Soultown with a cast that was 80% black could easily fall prey to presumption and condescension. The pleasant surprise of The Brother is how gracefully Sayles earns smiles and sympathy for his hero (Joe Morton) and his lank, loping comedy. In a rattling subway car, a cardsharp announces his next trick--"Wanna see me make all the white people disappear?"--as the subway doors open at the last uptown express stop before Harlem.

Some Hollywood executives believe that the same thing would happen if theater doors opened on a flurry of black movies. So it is seen as encouraging that in its first week A Soldier's Story broke house records in three of the five theaters showing it. "If the film is a success," says Charles Fuller, "there just might be room for other stories acknowledging that America is a multiracial society. Because we are part of the life of this country. We breathe. We buy Cottonelle. We go to the movies."

If film reflects life, it can also help shape it. Actor Paul Winfield (Sounder, White Dog) recalls growing up in Seattle in the 1940s. "All the blacks would sit in the movie theater balcony," he says. "Nigger heaven, they used to call it. Then one night we saw Stanley Kramer's Home of the Brave, the first picture we'd seen in which a black was not a Stepin Fetchit, and we resolved never to sit in the balcony again.

The power of seeing a black face in a real role affected the whole city as I knew it." It remains for Hollywood to put more real black faces on the nation's screens, and for black actors to keep fighting to show their faces. As the tough sergeant growls in A Soldier's Story, "Not havin' is no excuse for not getting."

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elaine Dutka/New York, Denise Worrell/Los Angeles