Studios Mix, Match Black, White Stars

“What is black and white and red all over?” The answer to that homonymous riddle is newspapers, a question any school child could answer back in the days when newspapers really were read all over.

Here’s one a little more current: “What’s black and white and green all over?”

The answer: buddy movies pairing black and white stars.

That’s not so much a riddle in Hollywood these days as a maxim.

Ever since Eddie Murphy teamed up with Nick Nolte in the 1984 blockbuster “48 HRS.,” the studios have been trying to mix and match stars by race. Warner Bros. hit it big with its Mel Gibson-Danny Glover “Lethal Weapon” series. Fox had a slam dunk with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in “White Men Can’t Jump.” And Columbia did very well by Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins in “The Shawshank Redemption.”

The reason is obvious. If white audiences don’t resist movies with white stars sharing heroism honors with black stars, why not add some color, use all of the palette, and expand the audience?

Minorities have always been reliable customers for Hollywood’s Anglo-Saxon products, but they turn out in even greater number for movies with personal references.

Last year the studios released four big-budget movies featuring co-billed black and white stars. Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt shared the honors in “Seven,” Bruce Willis made room for Samuel L. Jackson in “Die Hard 3.” Harrelson and Snipes were reunited for “Money Train.” And Glover co-starred with Ray Liotta in “Operation Dumbo Drop.”

Another four will be released this year. In August, Freeman and Keanu Reeves team up in Andy Davis’ high-tech thriller “Chain Reaction,” while Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin make a prison break in Kevin Hooks’ “Fled.”

Later, Glover joins Joe Pesci for a buddy outing that is detoured by an encounter with a pair of babe detectives - one black, one white - in Chris Cain’s “Gone Fishin.” And old-timers Ossie Davis and Walter Matthau will hook up as Central Park pals in the filmed adaptation of Herb Gardner’s stage comedy “I’m Not Rappaport.”

Like most trends, this one bears both good and bad tidings. It’s certainly good that white audiences and black youths are becoming accustomed to seeing positive black figures in mainstream movies.

However, we’re still a ways from racial parity. In most instances, the dominant partner is white.

Glover created a wonderful character for the “Lethal Weapon” films, but it’s always Gibson leading the way. In “Rising Sun,” Snipes is treated like Charlie Chan’s clumsy son by wise-old-owl detective Sean Connery. In “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” and “Unforgiven,” Freeman plays variations of Tonto to Kevin Costner’s Robin and Clint Eastwood’s William Munney.

Historians may argue this color barrier was broken in movies nearly 40 years ago, with Stanley Kramer’s “The Defiant Ones.” But the relationship between handcuffed fugitives Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis develops entirely out of - and as an attack on - racism. They become buddies despite a mutual distrust based on skin color.

The same is true of the grudging friendship that evolves between Poitier’s Northern cop and Rod Steiger’s Southern sheriff in Norman Jewison’s “In the Heat of the Night.”

Even the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor comedies worked off racial attitudes and stereotypes. When it came to typical friendships, Poitier was more interested in working with his friends Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby, which he did in the three comedies launched with the 1974 “Uptown Saturday Night.”

Cosby, by the way, teamed up with Robert Culp for “Hickey & Boggs,” but that 1972 film was such an obvious extension of their popular TV series “I Spy” - well ahead of its time, by the way - that few people turned out for it.

Whatever you think of Eddie Murphy, we have him to thank for knocking a few more boards off the color barrier in mainstream film. His success, if not his deeds, opened some big doors, through which marched Snipes, Freeman, Glover, Jackson, Fishburne, Denzel Washington and Damon Wayans, all of whom have become stars in their own right, and each of whom has taken his turn, with varying results, at Hollywood’s new game of mix and match.

Ironically, the open-market economy of modern Hollywood that has opened up this trend is likely to doom it. The escalating production costs for action movies and the escalating salaries of stars are making the buddy movie unaffordable. At least the buddy movie with costars of equal stature. You want to make a movie with Tom Cruise and Wesley Snipes? Mortgage your state.

Pretty soon, you can revert to the riddle, “What’s black and white and red all over?” Only this time the answer will have to do with the color of ink.