MOVIES - June 11, 1990

Film Justice: New Jersey Chief Justice Robert Wilentz, who annoyed officials in Trenton when he blocked filming of “Bonfire of the Vanities” at the Essex County Courthouse, has appointed a committee to decide whether New Jersey’s courthouses should be used as movie sets. Officials said that the move was designed to establish policies that could be used as a guide in the future. The committee includes representatives of the film industry, the academic world and the news media. Wilentz has been hit with a federal suit charging that he violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech when he stopped Warner Bros. from filming scenes from “Bonfire” in the courthouse. The scene, subsequently filmed at a Queens courthouse in New York, showed Morgan Freeman as a black judge dismissing charges against Tom Hanks as a white stockbroker accused of killing a black teen-ager in a hit-and-run accident. Wilentz also objected to another sequence that showed black spectators rioting in a corridor outside a courthouse.