Blacked Out Despite The Notable Successes Of Some Minority Actors, Hollywood Shows Little Progress In Achieving Racial Balance

One year ago, the Rev. Jesse Jackson used the Academy Awards as a vehicle to protest the film industry’s exclusion of blacks and other minorities.

This year, he could recycle his script with virtually no rewrites.

Although some Hollywood observers find cause for limited optimism, many agree that nonwhites continue to face enormous challenges in launching and sustaining an acting, writing or directing career.

And while a few new films such as “Rosewood” and “Set It Off” honestly explore black life, they are rarities in an industry - and a society - with a new and troubling awareness of deep racial divisions.

“Change has been minimal at best. Very, very minimal,” said Frank Berry, an NAACP official in Los Angeles. “There is so much room for improvement, for growth, we don’t want to focus on Band-Aid cover-ups.”

It is true that A-list actors such as Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington consistently find work. It’s true the historical drama “Rosewood” got studio backing. And unconventional projects such as “Set It Off,” a heist film with black women as the heroes, are nurtured by smaller companies.

But the number of minority Oscar nominees, which initially provoked Jackson’s criticism, is little changed.

Cuba Gooding Jr. of “Jerry Maguire” and Marianne Jean-Baptiste of “Secrets & Lies,” both black, are the only minority actors nominated this year. A handful of nonwhite nominees are found in categories such as best documentary short.

Oscar’s record is defended by Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis, who said worthy performances are recognized without regard to color.

“It seems to me the good news this year is not that there were two black performers nominated, but the two black performers deserve to be nominated,” he said.

If they had been made out of a “sense of organizational obligation,” he said, “we would have started down a very unfortunate path.”

But there are subtle signs of Hollywood’s awkward handling of race. “Ghosts of Mississippi,” about the murder of black civil rights activist Medgar Evers, received an Oscar nod for James Woods’ portrayal of Evers’ killer, Byron De La Beckwith.

A nomination for the actor playing Evers was unlikely. The character received bare minutes of screen time as Hollywood chose to tell the story mostly through the eyes of the white participants.

“As we said last year, the Oscars are the end of the process, and the paucity of nominations is a reflection of the need to have more people of color involved at the beginning, middle and final stages of film work,” Jackson’s Rainbow-PUSH Coalition said in a recent statement.

“We said a year ago and we say it today: Hollywood must do a better job in reflecting the cultural diversity of society.”

The coalition, which staged Oscar-night protests in 20 cities last year, is weighing possible action during this year’s ceremony March 24.

Statistics show few minorities are involved in the movie business, particularly at the screenwriting and directing levels.

Blacks represent just 2.6 percent of the Writers Guild of America’s membership, as they did a year ago. In the past five years, employment of black writers has increased by only about 1 percent. Hispanics account for about 1 percent of guild members, with Asians about .5 percent.

By comparison, blacks make up 12 percent of the U.S. population, while Hispanics represent about 10 percent and Asians about 3.5 percent.

“I don’t know what you could point to to say things are getting better,” said Zara Buggs-Taylor, the guild’s executive administrator for employment diversity.

Directors Guild of America statistics also show that minorities consistently are bypassed in hiring. According to the latest figures available, for 1995, less than 4 percent of directing work went to nonwhites.

Among actors, recent years have brought some improvement. Between 1991 and 1995, employment of black actors in the Screen Actors Guild increased from 11 percent to 13 percent of the guild total. For black actresses, there was a 3 percent increase, to 13 percent.

Among minorities overall, employment for actors rose from 15 percent in 1991 to 19 percent in 1995; for actresses, the figure went from 14 percent to 18 percent.

The NAACP’s Berry said the organization plans a comprehensive examination of the “deep-rooted problem” of movie industry discrimination, which might result in a future plan of attack including “picketing to lawsuits to anything in between.”

Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of Medgar Evers and current chairwoman of the national board of the NAACP, contends her late husband would have recognized the importance of Hollywood activism.

“It’s all a part of the struggle. I think Medgar would be one of the first to identify the lack of many positive role models and stories about African-Americans in the entertainment industry,” she said.

Hopeful observers see potential for change. They cite Jackson’s protest and media scrutiny such as People magazine’s “Hollywood Blackout” cover story last March as catalysts.

Black reaction to O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder acquittal “was such a huge shock to white people,” said Jesse Rhines, an assistant professor of political economy at Rutgers University. “They realized there’s something so fundamentally different, not just in terms of skin color, but in the cultures, the perceptions of the world.”

Rhines, author of the book “Black Film-White Money,” says he feels an unprecedented optimism that in this post-Simpson world, Hollywood is finally ready for the black perspective. He points to director John Singleton’s “Rosewood” as one proof.

“This is an African-American view of the way blacks have been treated historically,” he said.

“I think we’ve gotten some movement,” agreed Buggs-Taylor of the Writer’s Guild. Studios are more willing to meet to discuss the issue, she said, with some calling to suggest setting up programs to encourage minority and women writers.

The Writer’s Guild has taken heat for cooperating with Jackson’s affirmative-action campaign, with some industry insiders calling his tactics counterproductive.

Buggs-Taylor sharply disagrees.

“A lot of folks who didn’t like Jesse’s approach want to think interest has been chilled,” she said. “All I see them (the studios) doing is responding. I think they don’t want to have this light shone on them.”

Independent and small-studio films, which dominated the best-picture Oscar category this year, are offering black filmmakers an alternative.

Theodore Witcher, writer-director of New Line Cinema’s upcoming black romance “love jones” - voted audience favorite at this year’s Sundance Film Festival - is among those seizing the opportunity.

“I don’t think we could have gotten the movie made anywhere else,” Witcher said. Companies are realizing that niche pictures, made at a reasonable price (under $10 million for “love jones”), can be profitable.

Others are taking even more indirect routes to break down Hollywood’s barriers.

Last March, actress Sheryl Lee Ralph was a veritable poster child for Hollywood’s exclusion of blacks.

Prominently featured in the People magazine article, Ralph recounted her difficulties in finding movie work after a dazzling, Tony Award-winning Broadway turn in 1982’s “Dreamgirls.”

Flash forward to the present: Ralph is writing, directing, producing and co-starring in the movie “Secrets” and angling for studio backing. Hollywood has not undergone an abrupt change, but Ralph did.

“I called up Alfre Woodard. I called up Robin Givens. I called up Victoria Rowell. I said, ‘Read this script. If you like it, call me back.’ Next thing I knew we were shooting it,” Ralph said, using studio space borrowed from her UPN sitcom, “Moesha.”

“Sometimes you can’t wait for somebody to give you permission,” she adds. “Sometimes you have to take the permission and know, ‘Hey, I can go there.”’