WHO GETS TO TELL A BLACK STORY? (Part 4)

A White Journalist Wrote It. A Black Director Fought to Own It.

Editing by Committee

When the shoot ended, Mr. Simon, Mr. Mills and Mr. Colesberry moved to
Manhattan and set up shop in an editing studio in TriBeCa to work on
their cuts. Mr. Dutton kept his distance, often working on his own
cuts in a midtown hotel. His creative juices flowed better there, he
said. But it also felt awkward in TriBeCa, "those guys tiptoeing around me."

Under the rules of television, the producers had the power to overrule
Mr. Dutton on cutting the series. He submitted his director's cut of
each episode, then they took it and made theirs. Mr. Dutton disliked
many of the flashbacks that had been shot: "I'd say 3 percent work.
The other 97 percent don't," he said one day. He took some out -- and
the producers put some back.

He also chose particular takes of certain scenes, only to have the
producers replace them with selections of their own. They were
eviscerating one of the characters, Mr. Dutton complained privately.
He hated their musical choices, too. Using blues music for the title
theme was, to him, "the typical white-boy idea of what black life is
like."

Still, he kept his complaints to himself. The producers had the right
to do what they were doing. So why bother objecting?

By late December he was not sure he would be showing up in Pasadena in
mid-January to help promote the series at a semiannual meeting of
television critics. "I could say, 'I wish you guys well, but I'm
unavailable,' " he said. "I could be shooting a picture in London."
Or, he said, he could be on his farm in Maryland, shoveling manure.

But on Jan. 19, there he was in Pasadena. Minutes before the preview,
he stalked into the room at the Ritz Carlton where the HBO contingent
was waiting. He seemed barely able to bring himself to say hello to
Mr. Simon, Mr. Colesberry and Mr. Mills. "I didn't know why Charles
was so mad," Mr. Simon said later. "I thought it was the cuts."

Mr. Simon resolved not to let the day end without inviting Mr. Dutton
to have a drink and talk things over. Mr. Dutton had plans but took
Mr. Simon's cell phone number, just in case. It felt as though the ice
was cracking, Mr. Simon said later. Then Mr. Dutton never called. When
they bumped into each other the next morning, Mr. Dutton explained
cheerfully that he had been out late.

Back on the East Coast, HBO asked Mr. Dutton at the last minute to
film a personal preamble to the series, describing his reasons for
making it. The idea worried Mr. Simon and Mr. Mills; they did not want
HBO apologizing for the series in advance. They shipped a draft script
to Mr. Dutton. But he sent back a message saying he would write the
preamble himself.

Then, two days before he was to shoot it in Baltimore, an HBO
executive informed Mr. Simon, Mr. Mills and Mr. Colesberry that Mr.
Dutton did not want them there. They were stung but complied. So, on a
cold Saturday in early March, Mr. Dutton returned one more time to
Montford and Oliver and filmed his 90-second introduction, alone.

"I didn't need two cents from anybody," Mr. Dutton said later. "I
didn't want five opinions on how we should shoot it or any genius
ideas for rewriting. I don't even know why anybody wanted to be there.
If they wanted to be there because they were worried about what
Charles Dutton was going to do, then that's indicative of the entire
shoot."

"The Corner" had its premiere at 10 p.m. on Sunday, April 16. Apart
from a few lukewarm notices, one in The New York Times, the reviews
were unanimous in their admiration: "ferociously written," "superbly
directed," "spectacularly acted," "unblinkingly honest." In The
Washington Post, Tom Shales called the series "an act of
enlightenment, raw and shattering and strangely, inexplicably, beautiful."

Week after week, the ratings were unusually high for HBO in that time
slot, especially in African-American households. There was none of the
black backlash everyone had feared. Sales of Mr. Simon and Mr. Burns's
book surged. People seemed stunned by the series' realism. Watching it
at home, Mr. Dutton found himself struck again by the writing.

"I have to say the writing is absolutely brilliant," he said, looking
back on what Mr. Simon had accomplished. "Without a doubt, he captured
the hell out of those lives. Whatever painstaking efforts he had to go
through, to sit and live for a year on those corners, it is totally a
credit to him to have put it down on paper in the noncompromising way
that he did.

"That's what makes the piece as beautiful and strong as it is. That he
didn't take any weak shortcuts to appease a certain element of
society, that he presented it just as it was told to him and just the
way he observed it and just the way he analyzed it. In a nutshell,
it's absolutely remarkable what he did."

With distance, Mr. Dutton believed he had let the strains of the
production cloud his judgment. He had failed to see that Mr. Simon had
been as nervous about the project as anyone, maybe more so, he said.
Mr. Simon was probably worried about career, life, limb, everything,
if it had come out badly.

Mr. Simon, meanwhile, continued to raise the Pennsylvania Avenue idea
with Mr. Dutton when they saw each other. He had been rereading
Shakespeare's history plays and had begun trying to contact Melvin
Williams in prison. He was planning to write an outline and send it to
Mr. Dutton. It had begun to seem possible that they might eventually
work together again.

"I can't express to you how minimal whatever problems Charles and I
had were compared to how I felt when I went onto that corner in 1993,"
Mr. Simon said. "People were a lot more direct about not wanting us
there on that corner than Charles was when I was on set. The trick was
coming back every day. Most people's opinions changed. To an extent, I
had 60 days with Charles. I think by the 60th day his impressions
might have been different. If not, I would suggest 60 more might help.
Or 120.

"Now, racially, in this country, you don't usually get that kind of
prolonged experience. Either people bend over backwards to get along
or they don't and they steer clear. But I've sort of been trained --
and you could call it crassly manipulative, because I want the book or
I want the movie to be better -- to stay put."

"If he thinks I was a bastard to work with, I don't think he was so
easy to work with, either," he said a couple of days later. "But I
would still do it a second time, based on the quality of the work that
occurred. I know this: This time directing for him, he has directed
something that's better because I wrote it, and I've written something
that's better because he directed it.

"If we come out of it the second time and we've managed not to acquire
some degree of understanding of our own foibles and insensitivities
and misunderstandings, if we wind up in this exact same moment, then
we're idiots. We ought to be able to learn."