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Independent black filmmakers find a broader audience and better promotion on premium TV channels.
By ERIC DEGGANS
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 17, 2001
She has a growing career as an independent filmmaker, thanks mostly to the success of The Watermelon Woman, her semi-autobiographical 1997 film about a black lesbian struggling to make a documentary about a little known 1930s-era black film actress.
But when it came time to find a venue for her latest work -- an emotional tale about a woman fighting to bond with her mother as both serve time inside a maximum security prison -- Cheryl Dunye didn't trust Stranger Inside to the tender mercies of the indie film scene.
She got it on television.
"Looking back on what happened with Watermelon Woman, you have this great piece, wonderful acting and performance, but you can't compete at the indie box office with Hollywood," said Dunye, whose Stranger Inside debuts at 9 p.m. Thursday on HBO. "Knowing that, I was happy to say "Let's go to HBO."'
Indeed, Dunye's film is among a handful of ambitious premium cable projects offering a different look at black characters and relationships this month.
The Black Starz! cable channel offers the Spike Lee-directed one-man show A Huey P. Newton Story (debuting at 9 p.m. Monday), and Showtime's black-centered family drama Soul Food returns for a second season June 27 at 10 p.m.
In the case of Stranger and Newton, both began as film projects that wound up on premium cable channels, aiming for a wider audience beyond the typical film festival crowd.
Viewers have seen this happen before, most recently with HBO's adaptation of the Terry McMillan novel Disappearing Acts and the sardonic look at black-centered TV shows Dancing in September.
Without commercial TV's pressure to satisfy advertisers, premium channels have become a small haven for ambitious filmmakers of color hoping to transcend the boundaries the networks place on storytelling.
"How many times do you see a film (on TV) that's just one guy sitting in a chair?" said Roger Guenveur Smith, creator-star of A Huey P. Newton Story. His 90-minute solo performance unfolds as if the Black Panther Party co-founder were sitting in a chair talking to an assembled audience.
"How many times do you see (rapper) Biggie Smalls quoted in the same breath as William Shakespeare ... or a black man analyzing the works of Bob Dylan?" asked Smith, who has developed the Obie-award winning play during 600 stage performances since its 1994 debut. "This piece challenges the audience to listen. It doesn't accommodate breaks to get up and go get popcorn."
With the clout of a major cable TV outlet behind them, such works get the kind of promotional attention independent filmmakers can only dream of. Black Starz! committed $3-million to promoting Newton, while advertisements for Stranger Inside have run near HBO's most popular programming.
And actors of color often relegated to playing servants and sidekicks get a chance to shine in stories focused on their slice of the American experience.
"HBO is like black filmmaking school," gushed Dunye, who enlisted R.E.M. lead singer and Being John Malkovich producer Michael Stipe as one of her film's three producers through a friend. "The black actresses I talk to say they love HBO. At least they get to play leads, and they're not crack (addicts)."
Certainly, it's tough to imagine Stranger Inside appearing anywhere other than the home of Oz and The Sopranos. The film centers on 21-year-old Treasure Lee (Third Watch's Yolanda Ross), a hard-as-nails delinquent who stabs a fellow inmate at a minimum security prison so she can be placed in the same maximum security lockup as her mother, a notorious lifer named Brownie.
As Treasure gets to know the mother she was taken from as an infant, Dunye offers a clear-eyed view of life in lockdown at odds with the titillating women-in-prison movies once made by sexy stars such as Linda Blair and Pam Grier.
In this world, women sneak into the prison chapel for sexual interludes, sell drugs with the aid of well-bribed guards and bond in tight gangs that mimic a family dynamic. And as Treasure moves into Brownie's family, she pushes out rival Kit (Rain Phoenix) with disastrous consequences.
"In some African-American communities, prison is just another place people call home ... where whole families are inside together," said Dunye, who developed the script with help from real inmates at Minnesota's Shakopee Women's Correctional Facility.
"I wanted to look at, "Who is invisible today?"' said the filmmaker, who avoided name actors and pretty faces in favor of a cast of hard-edged women with the look of those doing serious time. "I wanted to treat women in prison the same way I treated the circumstances of being a black lesbian (in Watermelon Woman) ... looking at how invisible they are."
Dunye knows she'll take flack from some who bemoan yet another film about black folks killing each other in prison.
But by showing the twisted mother-daughter dynamic between Brownie and Treasure -- shattered by a surprise ending that reframes the entire film -- she hopes to redefine the boundaries of family, prison and punishment.
"The question is: How can you play with a genre that is so touchy and still come out with good art?" said Dunye. "So much of cinema today is not about caring, it's about the spectacle. I want people to think a little bit more."
That's also the goal Roger Smith set for A Huey P. Newton Story, which will also air on some PBS stations and the African Heritage Network after debuting on Black Starz!
Built on a stream-of-consciousness monologue that Smith developed after extensive research into Newton's life, the film outlines the paradox of a man who co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in his 20s, served time in prison for manslaughter, earned a doctorate in his 30s and was shot dead in 1989 on the same Oakland streets where he formed the party.
"We don't react immediately to people like Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton. ... They come with a certain baggage," said Smith, a veteran of Spike Lee movies such as Summer of Sam and Get on the Bus. "Huey, in a sense, is my Hamlet."
Focused on a bare bones production -- "one man, one chair and 20 cigarettes," Smith said and laughed -- director Lee adds texture by cutting in archival footage of protest marches, concerts, classic film scenes, police raids, Branford Marsalis saxophone solos and more.
Newton on hippie fashion: "White people in America are a trip -- they exterminate the Native American and then try to dress up just like him. What kind of necrophilia is that?"
Newton on language: "I don't think the human language has caught up with the rest of the human evolutionary process. Because every time we try to express a deep thing, a heavenly thing, a godlike thing, it seems like we come up short. You wind up making an investment in the Hallmark corporation."
Smith's Newton also explores how the Panthers' taste for rough language and violence may have distanced the party from the black mainstream and why people feel compelled to tear down their own leaders.
Despite its insights, Smith's portrayal is showy and overly mannered. He builds the character on personal tics and rapid-fire monologues that suggest a man with so much energy he's bursting out of his own skin.
And one might question the wisdom in making a hero of a man who struggled with drug problems his entire life and died a few months after pleading no contest to charges of taking $15,000 earmarked for a community school.
"I'm trying to demystify the man," countered Smith. "Hopefully, people will see Huey's revolution was motivated by love. As he says in the piece, "The Panthers weren't anti-white, they were anti-wrong."'
But the most important quality of this performance is that it reached television at all.