CSUN Panel to Examine 50 Years of Blacks in Film

While opportunities for African American actors, writers, producers and directors have increased over the past 50 years, some of the stereotypical roles played by black actors have endured.

In the last five years, for example, for every uplifting film, such as “Soul Food” or “The Best Man,” that portrays blacks in a positive light, there are many more that show them as lazy, lecherous or criminal--and sometimes all three.

How can those negative images persist in a time when black filmmakers have enough creative control to make such blockbusters as “Scary Movie” directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans and “The Original Kings of Comedy” produced by Spike Lee?

A panel of African American filmmakers and educators will explore this and other questions today during a forum at Cal State Northridge. Before the discussion, the university’s film department will screen a student-produced documentary on 50 years in black film, as well as the commercially produced features “Trouble Man,” “Sounder” and “Boyz N the Hood.”

“It’s very fortunate that we have more control over the type of films we make and the type of roles we create,” said producer Robert Hooks, whose film credits include “Trouble Man” and “Passenger 57.” “It’s very unfortunate that with that control we still create some of the same negative roles we had 40 years ago.”

Hooks and his son, actor-director Kevin Hooks, will participate in the panel discussion, along with actors Brock Peters, who gained acclaim for his portrayal of an accused rapist in the 1962 movie “To Kill a Mockingbird”; Tommy Davidson, who stars in “Bamboozled,” Spike Lee’s biting satire on blacks in film; and Lillian Lehman, who is also a CSUN theater professor.

Group Seeks Parity in Roles

Lehman, Peters and Robert Hooks were founding members of the Emmy Award-winning Media Forum, a group created in the 1980s to stir Hollywood’s ethnic conscience. They take credit for bringing to light the moral ambivalence of performers who opposed apartheid but worked in Sun City, South Africa. They hoped their work would bring about parity in film roles.

“All that time, I was hoping, crossing my fingers that black actors would not be co-opted by what we saw growing up,” Peters said. “But the young ones have.”

Instead of shucking and jiving, Peters said, today’s young actors are hip-hopping and re-creating drive-by shootings.

“The bad thing is, that has nothing to do with the white establishment or how the industry works,” Peters said. “It has everything to do with African American success stories who give nothing back. They have a community of artists trying to reach up for their help, but they can’t be reached. They have gone into the abyss of success.”

Lehman, who has played judges in several movies and TV shows, has been an outspoken critic of the roles offered minorities and women. She said today’s African American filmmakers concentrate on comedy for the sake of comedy, disregarding the images their jokes perpetuate.

“You get tired of the same age jokes, the same black jokes,” Lehman said. She has turned down TV roles that would have had her playing the aggressive, sex-starved older woman rejected by the younger man.

“They have to change everything about an actor to make the joke work,” she said. “We have beautiful, desirable black women chasing some young guy and she never gets him. There’s never any balance.”

And there never will be until African Americans own their own studios or collectively insist on a reevaluation of the film roles available, Robert Hooks said.

“It’s OK to have negative images as long as you offset them with positive images,” he said.

Series to Feature Black Republican

Robert Hooks, whose TV credits include “NYPD Blue,” founded the Negro Ensemble Theater. His Toluca Lake-based production company, Rock Creek Entertainment, is working on a comedy series for cable TV, tentatively called “Token,” about a sole African American Republican in Congress.

Hooks, Peters and Lehman applaud the success of black filmmakers, such as the Wayans brothers and Martin Lawrence, whose brand of comedy appeals to wide audiences, and they recognize a short A-list of leading actors who have brought strong, positive images to film--Denzel Washington, Danny Glover, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, Morgan Freeman, Wesley Snipes, Alfre Woodard, Cicely Tyson and Angela Bassett.

“Every black performer should be political, because of what we had to go through to get there,” Hooks said.

The free screenings begin at 2 p.m. in the university’s Oviatt Library.

The panel discussion begins at 8 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center at CSUN.