Robert Townsend’s Double-Feature Sunday

Robert Townsend, the triple-threat creative force behind “Hollywood Shuffle”--the 1987 groundbreaking satire of the movie business--is caught in a Sunday evening TV shuffle.

Townsend’s latest directorial projects, Showtime’s “Holiday Heart” and NBC’s “Livin’ for Love: The Natalie Cole Story,” will square off against each other. “Holiday Heart” will premiere on the pay-cable station at 8 p.m., while NBC will broadcast the musical biography at 9 p.m.

“I’m battling me,” Townsend said with a chuckle last week during a break on the set of his upcoming “hip-hip opera” “Carmen Brown,” based on “Carmen Jones.” “I’m proud of both my babies. Out of all the weeks and all the weekends for something like this to happen . . . this is just bizarre. And each of my babies is different.”

Townsend said he is proud of both films, but he acknowledges that “Holiday Heart,” a gritty family drama with doses of humor and sentiment, is a bit of a departure for someone who is usually associated with family comedy (the WB’s “The Parent ‘Hood,” in which he starred and helped create) or lighter fare such as this year’s NBC movie “Little Richard” and his films “The Meteor Man,” “B.A.P.S.” and “The Five Heartbeats.”

“I like these challenges as a director,” said Townsend. “The bottom line is that I need to push myself. All my movies have been different in tone and texture. I’ve done family films, political satires, things just for kids. I always want to be a chameleon.”

“Holiday Heart” stars Ving Rhames as the title character--an aging drag queen who performs in nightclubs in the evening but leads the church choir during the day. Holiday, heartbroken over the loss of his lover, becomes involved with Wanda, a drug-addicted mother (Alfre Woodard) and her 12-year-old daughter Nikki (Jessika Quynn Reynolds). Together they form an unusual but loving family, which is disrupted with the entrance of Silas, a flashy and controlling drug dealer (Mykelti Williamson), into Wanda’s life.

Though the film has several comedic moments, “Holiday Heart” also has many dark sides, including Woodard’s graphic decline as a woman under the influence of narcotics.

“I wanted this to be like a foreign film,” said Townsend. “My favorite movies are foreign films. This is a story where you think you really know the characters, but you really don’t know them at all. These are all really complex people. I wanted to put a human face on nontraditional characters. It’s this nontraditional family that comes together to raise this little girl.”

Woodard described working with Townsend as a “wonderful experience,” though he challenged her in ways she didn’t expect.

“Robert and I have been friends for years, and our children are friends,” said Woodard. “There is a shorthand artistically that allowed him to communicate what he wanted me to do. But I consider myself a much different mother than Wanda, and he saw the panic in my eyes when he asked me to do certain things. The first thing we would do is laugh about it, and he would say, ‘I know, I know. Just trust me. Don’t worry.’ ”

Townsend said that he didn’t think audiences would have trouble accepting the formidably built Rhames, who has played macho, larger-than-life figures such as the drug dealer in “Pulp Fiction” and fight promoter Don King in “Don King: Only in America” as an overly sensitive gay drag queen belting out Supremes songs to admiring drag club customers.

“When Ving first read this character, he just got it,” explained Townsend. “He’s known as this macho guy, and this forced him to deal with other levels. He’s a wonderful actor. He immersed himself in the research. We went to drag clubs. We hung out.”

Rhames was pleased with his “Holiday Heart” experience, though he wished the project had not been so rushed: “There was little rehearsal time, and I liked that better than the actual shooting. There were some things done out of sequence that I would have preferred not to have happened, that would have made me approach some scenes differently. But Robert really does have a strength in working with actors.”

Townsend resisted suggestions by executives at both networks to put on his acting cap as well as his directing cap: “They had asked me to appear, but I just wanted to let the actors play in both movies. Because Ving was taking on such a totally different role, I wanted to support him 100%. It was the same with Natalie Cole, who plays herself in the movie. I just wanted to devote myself to them.”

But he hasn’t ruled out acting again in the future. He is working on a couple of scripts. He fondly remembers his days on “The Parent ‘Hood,” but added that the show just ran out of stories.

“It’s been heaven to just go and play in these different projects,” said Townsend. “I love creating. And doing a movie like ‘Holiday Heart’ just allowed me to push more and more.”

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“Holiday Heart” can be seen Sunday night at 8 on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14-VLD (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with special advisories for violence, coarse language and suggestive dialogue).