WHO GETS TO TELL A BLACK STORY? (Part 1)

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

BALTIMORE -- David Simon was white but he knew he could write black
people. Maybe not all black people but the ones he had known in
Baltimore, where he had been a crime reporter for 14 years. He had
spent a year on a Baltimore drug corner and written a book that had
done something almost unheard of: It had shown black inner-city drug
addicts as complex and startlingly human.

So Mr. Simon was not thinking much about his whiteness when he walked
into the Los Angeles offices of HBO in January 1998 and set about
trying to interest three white programming executives in the
improbable idea of making the book into a television series.

No one talked about race at that meeting. At least, not directly. No
one remarked upon the fact that Mr. Simon was white and that nearly
everyone in his book was black. Nor did anyone mention that HBO was
not about to make a series about black drug addicts created by, as one
HBO executive put it later, "a bunch of white guys."

Instead, the executives asked Mr. Simon a lot of questions. How did black
people in Baltimore react when his book, "The Corner: A Year in the Life of
an Inner-City Neighborhood," came out? What did the mayor, who was black,
say? What would happen if HBO were to make the series, and shoot it in
Baltimore, and protests broke out?

Then they asked him to suggest a writing partner.

He offered two names. One was James Yoshimura, an Asian-American playwright
and
television writer he had worked with on "Homicide: Life on the Street," the
NBC series based on Mr. Simon's first book. The other was David Mills, an
African-American writer and friend of Mr. Simon's since college, who had
recently been nominated for two Emmys for episodes of "NYPD Blue."

Mr. Simon suggested Mr. Yoshimura and Mr. Mills for the same reason,
he said later: He liked working with them. He did not feel he needed a
black writer to help him tell a black story. He had spent his career
as a white reporter in a mostly black town. He had a good ear and had
paid attention in a way he knew most white people did not.

He was not unaware, however, that Mr. Mills might have special appeal
for HBO. It was apparent from the line of questioning that a black
writer was high on HBO's priority list. And, as Mr. Simon put it, as
soon as the bait was dangled in the water, the fish leapt onto the
hook.

At the mention of Mr. Mills, a look shot between two of the
executives, Kary Antholis and Anne Thomopoulos. Mr. Antholis had been
following Mr. Mills's career. He had even mentioned him to Ms.
Thomopoulos -- as a smart writer who had worked at the highest levels
of television, and who also happened to be black.

Do you know David Mills? one of them asked Mr. Simon.

Yes.

Could you get him to work on this project?

Sure.

Within minutes, Mr. Simon had a deal, HBO had a miniseries and Mr.
Mills had a new job as Mr. Simon's writing partner and fellow
executive producer.

The Risk and the Buzz

A miniseries about drug addicts was risky television. But it appealed
to Chris Albrecht, the president for original programming at HBO,
because HBO defined itself by doing what broadcast networks would not.
That approach had earned HBO the admiration of critics, lots of Emmys
and an expanding audience of subscribers, a fifth to a quarter of them
black.

"The Corner" would not need a mass audience on HBO, because HBO did
not make its money off commercials. What HBO wanted was attention and
buzz. If the series could be shot quickly in the summer and fall of
1999 and put on the air the following April, it would be in Emmy
voters' minds when they voted in June.

But no matter how good "The Corner" might be, Mr. Albrecht said later,
there would be black people who would want to know why HBO was doing
it at all. They would forget "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge," "Laurel
Avenue," "The Tuskegee Airmen," "Miss Evers' Boys." The question would
be, Why are you portraying black people that way?

HBO needed African-Americans involved for two reasons, Mr. Albrecht
said: for creative reasons and for public relations.

"I really still wanted to find somebody who would be my . . . " Mr.
Albrecht recalled later in his office in midtown Manhattan, choosing
his words, "who would be an additional, uh. . . . " He paused, then
used a vulgar expression for a person capable of detecting pretentious
nonsense. "You know?"

He wanted Charles S. Dutton to direct "The Corner."

If anyone knew Baltimore's corners, it was Mr. Dutton. He had grown up
in the city and spent his early years on its streets, where rock
fighting -- snowball fighting, except with rocks -- earned him the
lifelong nickname Roc. His only sister was a recovering cocaine
addict. His only brother, who died of AIDS in 1993 at age 44, had been
a heroin addict for nearly 25 years.

What had saved Charles Dutton was prison. He dropped out of school at
12 and pleaded guilty to manslaughter at 17, after stabbing a black
man who had pulled a knife on him in a fight. He served two years.
Then he was sent back for weapons possession, fought with a white
guard, and ended up serving another seven and a half.

The tale of his redemption is well known. He grabbed an anthology of
plays by black playwrights on his way into solitary confinement one
day. By the light under the cell door, he read "Day of Absence," a
social satire by Douglas Turner Ward. He was so taken with it, he
organized a production, starred in it and discovered what he had been
put on earth to do.

He formed a drama group that performed Shakespeare and Arthur Miller.
He got his high school equivalency certificate and a junior college
degree in prison, went to Towson State University in Maryland and Yale
Drama School while on parole, and won his first Tony nomination for
his performance in the August Wilson play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"
on Broadway in 1984.

After a performance of "The Piano Lesson" by Mr. Wilson in 1990, Mr.
Albrecht introduced himself to Mr. Dutton. He then lured him to Los
Angeles to star in his own television program, "Roc." The sitcom, in
which Mr. Dutton played a garbage man, Roc Emerson, appeared on Fox
for three tumultuous seasons starting in 1991.

Mr. Dutton was not overjoyed with Hollywood. On stage he had felt he
could change the world, he said earlier this year. He had found the
closest thing he knew to a utopian, race-neutral place. But he arrived
in Hollywood suspicious of half-hour television and determined, as he
put it, that no one would make a monkey out of him in prime time.

To accomplish that, he spent much of his three years "stomping,
kicking and being a despot," he recalled. Then he moved on to movies,
everything from "Cry, the Beloved Country" and "Alien 3" to "Cookie's
Fortune" and Spike Lee's "Get on the Bus." And he became an outspoken
critic of racism in Hollywood.

"There isn't a single black person in Hollywood with any power," he
said last fall. "This isn't paranoia. Because if I stood in a room
with every major black star, just talking, then I would hear the same
things out of their mouths that are coming out of mine.
Multimillionaires. The main thing you'll hear is, 'Whenever I take a
project, I can't get it done unless I have a white partner.'

"In other words, if Denzel Washington, Danny Glover, Morgan Freeman,
Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne, if they went to a studio and said,
'I want to do the movie of Hannibal.' They'll say, 'Yeah, well, we
have to call in Al Pacino or the latest young Italian actor to play
Scipio,' the guy who defeated Hannibal many years after all his
conquests. And, damn it, that's who the story will center around."

In the world beyond Hollywood, Mr. Dutton, who is 49, was widely
admired. A striking figure with a stocky build, shaved head and
eloquent face, he often traveled the country, speaking at small black
colleges and in prisons. He was respected by working-class and
upper-middle-class blacks alike, and by many whites.

HBO sent the scripts to Mr. Dutton and no one else.

At first he said no. He had directed just one movie, an HBO film
called "First-Time Felon." But he was not interested in another urban
drama, especially one about drugs. "I had a certain bitterness and
anger with family members who allowed themselves to be destroyed that
way," he recalled. "I had to ask myself, do I want to take this
emotional journey through this world?"

Yet the scripts intrigued him. What he admired about the story was
that it was told from the addicts' perspective, not some glamorized
dealer's. It made clear what he had long seen as the hypocrisy of the
war on drugs. And it could serve, he said, as a raw reminder of an
element of society that Americans chose to forget.

HBO offered him two episodes. Then four. Then all six. The shooting
schedule would be a killer, but doing all six might give him a degree
of control that television directors rarely had. He would take a bath
financially, he said later, because he made his real money as an
actor. But he wanted to prove he had the stamina and the concentration
to pull it off.

In what he would later call a momentary lapse of sanity, he said yes.
He had come to respect Mr. Simon and Mr. Mills, he said shortly after
accepting the job. But, as he also said, there would not be one moment
when he would forget that "it's a white writer and a white producer
and it's HBO and a black director."

And no matter how many supportive black people HBO would line up, the
job of defending the miniseries would fall to him. "I'm going to have
to be the person saying, 'Hey, y'all, it's cool,' " he once said,
chuckling at his impersonation of himself. " 'Ain't no sense in
gettin' upset. This is a goooood movie. Go watch it. Order HBO!' "