THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 26, 1994 TAG: 9409240041
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 151 lines
CAN AFRICAN-AMERICAN movies ever escape the 'hood?
If the new film ``Jason's Lyric'' is any indication, it may not be easy.
There were high hopes for ``Jason's Lyric.'' For one thing, the film, opening Wednesday at local theaters, was billed as a love story, something new after the repetitive violence of movies such as ``Menace II Society'' and ``New Jack City.''
Theater posters for ``Jason's Lyric'' feature a romantic couple with not a gun in sight. The advance publicity for the movie says it deals with ``the first time we fall in love'' and claims that Lyric, the heroine, is ``a strong, beautiful flower who has blossomed through the cracks in the sidewalks of the city.''
Adding further promise, the setting is Houston, not the usual ghettos of New York and Los Angeles. This looks like something fresh and new, a kind of black version of ``Romeo and Juliet.''
Then, we see the film itself.
It has drug dealers. It has gutter language. It has arguments settled by guns rather than reason. It has a leading lady, Jada Pinkett (from TV's ``A Different World'') who doesn't even make an entrance until 30 minutes into the film. It has the usual gang, making the usual easy money dealing drugs. It has a good brother (Jason, an electronics store clerk) vs. the bad brother, Joshua (the bad seed who's been in and out of jail and is headed there again).
And in one scene, a man is strung from the ceiling and his stomach sliced by a chain saw.
What happened to the love story?
Director Doug McHenry and his energetic cast, assembled at a posh Manhattan hotel ballroom a long way from the 'hood, were also a little puzzled.
McHenry is a money man. He is a Harvard Law School graduate and got into show business via legal accounts. As president of Galazy Films, he helped pioneer black music videos. As a producer, he made ``House Party 2'' and ``New Jack City'' (which earned more than $50 million and made Wesley Snipes a star). ``New Jack City,'' though, is also the film which most flagrantly glamorized drug dealers.
But after all, ``New Jack City'' helped raise the money for more artistic offerings. And could it be McHenry hasn't seen the finished version of ``Jason's Lyric''?
``It's still very much a love story to me,'' he said, in a huff after facing hosts of critics who bemoaned the violence. ``My film is 113 minutes long, and it has only 5 1/2 moments of violence. Would you be happy if we only had two minutes?''
When reminded that it seemed much more violent than that, he admits the real problem he had with the script: ``I wanted to make Jason a hero. He's a guy who has a job in a store and lives in a real house, not a shack. He walks right by the drug dealers and takes a minimum-wage job. But I needed the violence to give him a threat. I didn't want the target audience to write off this movie as being a wimp. I wanted him to be sensitive, but not a wimp. It needed jeopardy.''
But isn't the result the usual stereotypes? Is the violence a dramatic necessity or just another gimmick to sell tickets?
The first-time director is defensive. ``Sure, not many films are made about rich blacks or about historical figures, like George Washington Carver. You'd apparently like those to be made, but could we get anyone in the theater?''
He may have a point. ``The Inkwell,'' a recent movie that dealt with upper-middle class African Americans at a seaside resort, was a box-office flop. Spike Lee's latest film, ``Crooklyn,'' was a much softer, and perhaps more realistic, look at a black family neighborhood. It, too, was a commercial disaster.
When movies like ``New Jack City'' make money but ``The Inkwell'' and ``Crooklyn'' don't, does it mean that we're going to get the same mean-streets image of black America forever in the movies?
McHenry claims ``Jason's Lyric'' needed its blood. ``I wanted the imagery of (director Francois) Truffaut in this film,'' he said. ``But we needed that jeopardy. Bridget Fonda was in a love story this summer (`It Could Happen to You'), and nobody cared. When we up the stakes to life and death, people care.''
Allen Payne, the film's leading man, perhaps puts it more honestly. ``You've got to consider the target audience and what they would accept as a hero,'' Payne said. ``The concern was not to make him too soft. The target audience I'm talking about is not just the black audience - it's 15- to 25-year-old males, the action fans. If they ran out on the first day of this release, and said this was a wimp movie, we'd close by the weekend. In order to make this guy a hero, there had to be something other than just the fact that he needs to make a living for his family.''
Bokeem Woodbine has the film's most vicious role, that of Joshua, the drug-dealing brother. ``There's nothing wrong with making money with a movie,'' Woodbine said with a gap-toothed smile. ``I was lifting 70-pound boxes from midnight to 6 o'clock every morning before I got a job as an actor. I needed $75 to get the rest of my tattoo put on, so I got a job as a stand-in on the set of `Juice.'
``God bless me, but I know what you're saying, man, about this movie. Some cats sitting there watching this movie will get angry and they'll go out and shoot. That's what it's all about. When there's no possible way to get out of the 'hood, it seems simple to shoot someone. Visual imagery is lasting. What is seen in movies is very, very important.''
Woodbine admitted that he worried about the film when he learned that the only quiet scene between the two brothers was to be cut. He took a drag from a marijuana cigarette, oblivious to his public surroundings, as he said, ``I wanted there to be at least one scene in which Joshua, my character, was nice. But that scene was cut. But, still, I wanted to do this movie for Joshua and all the characters like him.''
The actor vows, though, that ``Jason's Lyric'' is his last role ``in the hood. Making more movies on this same subject and in this same setting would be like staying in the 'hood itself. I've got to get out, and I think the movies have to get out - a little. We'll never know if anything else will sell unless we try it.''
The interview site, the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, was a strange setting for some of the cast members, particularly Treach, founder of the hip-hop band Naughty By Nature. Treach wore a green bandana over his head and a 10-pound set of chains around his neck, accessorized by a huge lock. In spite of his success, he still lives in the same Orange, N.J., neighborhood where he was born.
``I think the movie does have a message in that it suggests that when a guy gets a girlfriend, it can make a difference,'' Treach said. ``It's saying that guys could take the initiative and be with somebody, and then dedicate themselves to that person.''
But the more public woes of ``Jason's Lyric'' dealt with sex rather than violence. The Motion Picture Association demanded cuts from two nude scenes between Payne and Jada Pinkett before it would drop its threatened NC-17 rating (many movie chains refuse to show NC-17 films). MPAA even demanded an airbrush be taken to Pinkett's thigh on the movie posters.
Pinkett, clad in a flimsy black lace halter and low-rise, black lace trousers, admitted she was leery of the nude scenes. ``I didn't want to do the scenes if they were just exploitation sex,'' she said. ``Let's face it, the act of lovemaking is not very pretty. If moviemakers were smart, they'd only show faces. That's the passionate part.
``It isn't the most racy scene ever on film. I think some people, maybe these rating people, have trouble with black intimacy. Black people themselves have a problem with seeing black intimacy.''
Pinkett said she feels director McHenry ``bulldozed'' the actors through the movie. ``I felt like saying to him, `Doug, you should place more faith in your cast.' There were ways it could have been made softer.''
Her real problem, she thinks, was in making Lyric soft enough. ``I had to get in touch with my feminine side to play her,'' she said. ``I mean with me, as a woman, if I can't get what I want, I'm going to get something better. This woman was a dreamer, a romanticist. I shared with her the way we women sometimes put up a wall, but when the right man persuades us to take down the wall, then I'm all his. But Lyric needed to be strong, a little like me, to a certain degree. She didn't want to date nobody who was going to come back in a body bag. She let Jason know that. The power of a woman in the 'hood, often is that she can save her man.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Gramercy Pictures
Jada Pinkett and Allen Payne star in "Jason's Lyric," a new film
directed by Doug McHenry. Advanced publicity bills the film as a
modern version of "Romeo and Juliet."
by CNB