America Behind the Color Line (32 page)

It’s time for us to look forward and start inspiring ourselves to greater heights—but never forget. We need to tell the stories from back then, but don’t just tell the stories where we got lynched and we got killed. We know that happened—we know that. The movies have been done. Tell the story of Frederick Douglass. The guy came from nowhere and was one of the most brilliant minds of all time—became a great speaker and wrote his best-seller and became the most famous black man on the face of the earth. Put it on the big screen. Motivate me.

You got people like Dick Parsons, president of AOL Time Warner, the biggest media company in the world. That’s a great story. You got Bob Johnson. He started BET, and a lot of people think he’s the first black billionaire, but I heard he’s not. I heard there’s a lot of other black billionaires. They just don’t say anything #8217;cause they don’t want anybody messin’ with them, asking them for money. They don’t want to get in no trouble. Oh, man! There are lots of billionaires you’d never know about. There’s so many different stories, success stories that we should tell. And the more black entertainment there is, the more black writers, the more different stories will be told.

Sadness and grief are part of our history. We’ve seen too much tragedy and sadness. Sometimes black people don’t go to see a movie like
One True Thing
because it’s too sad! It’s time to move on, though not to forget. Without Martin Luther King and other heroes putting their lives on the line, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to become an actor or a comedian.

The first time I ever watched the Academy Awards was when Halle Berry and Denzel Washington both won, and the only reason I watched was because they had been nominated. They’re great actors, and there’d been a lot of political pressure about them getting the awards. I was surprised they both won, and I was happy for them. But I don’t think that Halle and Denzel getting the Academy Award means anything significant has changed in Hollywood for our people. Maybe that’s ’cause I don’t judge awards to be giving you credibility. I think your fans give you credibility. I think your peers give you credibility. And I think when people come up to you and say, you changed my life, and man, I loved that movie—it was something, that one little thing you did, it made me think about something when I walked out and I’m still thinkin’ about it—right there, that’s the award you want. It don’t matter how prestigious the award is. An Academy Award would be nice, but I’ll take that other award too. That’s the main award I want.

In the future of black America, and the future of black Hollywood, there’s gonna be bigger and better stories. The story of Gettysburg, the story of the American Revolution, the stories of men like Frederick Douglass. There’s gonna be black stories. We want to see the biblical stories of black people instead of just slavery, like that’s all our history. That ain’t all black history. History—black history—goes back thousands and thousands of years, and I think black America is gonna tell stories like those, stories that are on another level. We have a culture of our own here in America that’s bigger than just doin’ a cookout.

SAMUEL L. JACKSON
In Character

I’ve been very fortunate. All my films have been moderately to wildly successful. I’ve been lucky enough to be in films like
Star Wars
and
Jurassic Park
. So when studio heads start totaling up my box office figures, I can go, hey, man, I’m in
Star Wars II
. And they go, yeah, but that’s a George Lucas film. And I say, yeah, but I can guarantee you a lot of people came to that movie to see me. I have a whole new fan base now. It’s totally cool to walk the street and see little kids go, “Mace Windu!” People call me and tell me their kids want my action figure. They’re glad their kids now have somebody to emulate in another kind of way. The kids come home and put pillowcases on and become Jedi Knights and say they’re Mace Windu. It’s a good feeling to be the guy they want to emulate, because when I was a kid, I went home and wanted to be Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and Errol Flynn. All of a sudden kids want to go home and be me. It’s like, right on. Totally.

It never occurs to me now to think about whether parts are race neutral, because my managers and my agents know they can send me anything and I think I’m capable of doing it. Unless it says a character is specifically not black, then it’s fine for me to do it. I’ve chased things that were written as other ethnic groups because I guessed the people that wrote them thought in terms of those ethnic groups or the producers hadn’t made up their minds what the character was. Most times when people read things, they read them in the mind-set of the culture they’re part of. When I read parts, the character automatically becomes black, but that’s not an issue for me. It’s just a fact that if I want to be that character, then we assume the character is black and everybody’s dealing with that fact. In terms of
The Red Violin,
François Girard had always perceived my character as African American. The only reason I got the part was ’cause Morgan Freeman didn’t want to do it. So after Morgan, Girard came to me, and I was so honored he put me in the same sentence with Morgan that I just couldn’t refuse doing it. Not to mention the script, which is gorgeous.

I’m not going to stop being black and start being famous, because I’m a famous black person. I can walk in someplace and be six different people on any given day. I could be Morgan, I could be Fish, I’ve been Wesley sometimes, I’ve been called everybody, Eddie Murphy, I could be a lot of different people on any given day. So I’m always black and I’m always famous. I’m one of them. There’s no separation there. Sometimes being black and famous allows me to get away with things that other people can’t get away with. If I’m sitting in a restaurant eating and three sisters come to my table and go, oh, we just love you; can we get your autograph? And I go, do I have to put my fork down right now, or are you gonna wait for me to do it later? They go, oh, I’m sorry. It’s like, you got home training, right? I can get away with that. If a white actor does it, he’s arrogant. I don’t have bodyguards and I don’t have any of those things around me, because I’ve been black a long time and I’ve been taking care of myself. I know how to treat people and I know how to back people off me. If you come at me the wrong way, then I look at you like Jules Winnfield or Ordell, and people back away. See, Ordell is really who I am. That’s who I really wanted to be when I was growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I was perceived as Ordell. I was that kind of guy. I was that kind of likable but that kind of dangerous.

I can still be that guy. I’m very used to being that guy from riding the subways late at night in New York, coming from Brooklyn to go back to Harlem from the Billie Holiday Theatre. It still happens on the train. Guys get on the train; they size you up. You’re reading a book. There’s something about people with books, even though people in New York read. But if you’re black and you’re reading a book, you might be soft. So if somebody stops and they look at you, you close the book and you just look back at them and it’s kind of like, oh, all right, I can go back to my book now. Not to mention the fact that there’s an open knife at the side of the book.

I think it’s significant for the growth of the business that a black actor like me is being cast in race-neutral parts when twenty years ago I wouldn’t have been. It’s significant for young actors who have aspirations to be things other than criminals and drug dealers and victims and whatever rap artist they have to be to get into a film. The things I’ve done and Morgan’s done and Denzel’s done, that Fish has done, that Wesley’s done, everybody’s done, have allowed us to achieve a level of success as other kinds of people. We’ve been successful in roles as doctors, lawyers, teachers, policemen, detectives, spies, monsters— anything that we have been able to portray on-screen in a very realistic way that made audiences say, I believe that, and that brought them into the theaters to see us do it. This has allowed young black actors the opportunity to become different kinds of characters in the cinematic milieu we’re a part of.

Before, I used to pick up scripts and I was criminal number two and I looked to see what page I died on. We’ve now demonstrated a level of expertise, in terms of the care we give to our characters and in terms of our professionalism—showing up to work on time, knowing our lines, and bringing something to the job beyond the lines and basic characterizations. Through our accomplishments and the expertise we have shown, studios know there is a talent pool out there that wants to be like us, and hopefully, these young actors will take care to do the things we did.

I choose characters that are interesting, that give me the chance to delve into aspects of myself I haven’t explored and to grab hold of observations I’ve made about people that I’ve always wanted to use and incorporate into a character. Or I find traits that make a character interesting. I read the script and see that well, this character feels this way and therefore he must do this. I make up a lot of things about characters that I bring to the role. Acting is an experiment that allows me to do things Sam doesn’t normally do. That guy can be brave where Sam wouldn’t be brave, or that guy can be angry where Sam would be kind of introspective, or that guy can take a risk where Sam wouldn’t take a risk. Or that guy can kill somebody in the trunk of a car when Sam wouldn’t do it because Sam loves his freedom.

Luckily for me, when I left Atlanta and got to New York, there was a great pool of actors there. I used to sit around and watch Morgan and watch Adolph Caesar, watch the Robert Christians of the world. What they were doing made me understand there was something deeper to what I wanted to do. I could recite lines and do the right facial expressions. But there was something else there that allowed you to forget you knew them as those individuals, that allowed them to become those characters. And there are kids out there who are still doing those things. I was at the Actors Studio recently, and there are all these bright young faces out there waiting to come into this world we’re in. We were lucky enough to get in the door and create the opportunity for ourselves to do all the things we’ve done. Now these young people are sitting there trying to figure out how to get in there, and they’re going about it in the right way. They’re in acting school. They’re sacrificing a lot of their time to learn stage left, stage right, upstage, downstage, characterizations, dramatic beats here, there, and everywhere. And they’re being usurped by guys who do bad poetry to music, only because people who produce movies want a sound track and an audience that’s already built in to what they’re trying to do. All these rappers are getting the opportunities these kids should be getting, because of economics. And I told the kids, it’s just something you have to overcome.

There was a time when I was trying to figure out if I needed to get a stand-up comedy routine so I could get discovered. All the comedians were getting all the acting jobs I wanted, so I figured I’d better get funny and then they’ll realize I’m serious. But instead of getting funny, I got lucky. I did
Jungle Fever
right in the middle of my thoughts about stand-up, when I was about to have somebody write a comedy routine for me, even though I think I have a pretty sharp wit myself.

Acting is a matter of craft, first and foremost, for me. There was a time when I totally lost sight of this. When I first started, I was in movie theaters all the time, watching movies and wishing I could be on-screen. The ultimate goal of every actor is to be a movie star. You get to that point where it’s the pinnacle. That’s where the money is, that’s where the fame is, and that’s where the work is. But the time came when I realized, okay, I’m getting a little older; maybe I need to focus on getting a TV series. And then when that doesn’t happen you say to yourself, maybe I better get on one of those soaps. At least I’d get paid every week. Then when that doesn’t happen, you say to yourself, what I need is a good national beer commercial—something that gets a residual check coming in regularly.

But as I continued to work in New York with the Negro Ensemble Company, I ended up in Charles Fuller’s
A Soldier’s Play,
which won the Pulitzer Prize. I was with a great ensemble of people that included Denzel and Adolph Caesar and James Pickins and Brent Jennings, just a wonderful group of people, Eugene Lee and all those guys. And it became about the work. When I left NEC, I went to the Yale Repertory Theater to do August Wilson’s
Piano Lesson,
which also won a Pulitzer. I was the original Boy Willie in
Piano Lesson,
produced by Lloyd Richards. I worked with Lloyd for almost the next two years, through
Piano Lesson
and
Two Trains Running
. The focus was on the work and the characterizations, to the point that I wasn’t going to movie auditions and I wasn’t going to television auditions; I was just doing these plays and grabbing hold of the work every day. I left there and went back to NEC and did Charles Fuller’s series on African Americans before and after the emancipation of slaves, and it was about the work, the work, the work, the work. I was getting better and better at my characterization, and better at grabbing hold of the keys in the language, at making the language sing for an audience so they would understand what I was saying and be into the characters in another kind of way.

By the time
Jungle Fever
happened, in 1991, I had a whole new way of working, through what I’d done onstage and in
Coming to America
and other films, and I was able to go inside Gator in another way. Not to mention I had already done all the research for Gator in my personal life. I was focusing on my approach to the work, and on doing the work, and I forgot about being a movie star. Becoming a movie star was just a by-product of all the preparation and things I had done to get there.

The mechanical things come first, and all the artistic things come later. There is no such thing as a natural. Movie acting is so much easier than theater, only because you don’t have the suspension of belief. The set’s there. Everything’s there. They do close-ups. In the theater, you have to make the person in the back row believe you’re in the Wild West on a blank stage, and it takes a lot of work to do that. It’s body language; it’s vocal inflection; it’s cooperation with the people who are onstage, which is another thing you don’t have to learn to do in movies. You don’t have to learn ensemble play. In film, I’ve worked with actors who constantly ask the director, what size is this? Are we right in here? It’s like, so what are you going to do, change your performance because the cameras are moving closer? And they do. It kind of makes me wonder, hm-mm, what are we doing here?

I use every take as a rehearsal. I do the same thing over and over and over again. It makes it easier for the editor and easier for the director. It makes it easier for the sound guy. It makes it easier for everybody. I’m used to doing that, because when I got into theater, I was told it was a collaborative effort between us all, even though a theater is a dictatorship. The director runs the ship, but you have to work with that actor over there, and you’ve got to work with the guy in the lighting booth who’s calling the cues. You got to be in the right place so that when the lights come on, the audience can see you. You got to be over here so that when an actor comes out, he can present himself to the audience even though he’s talking to you. There are lots of things that are integral to what you’re doing and that you have to be conscious of in the midst of doing this artistic thing that people claim they get lost in. You can’t really walk around in character all day, because it’s a job. There are certain things you have to do in the midst of that job that don’t allow you to lose yourself in that character, and one of them is hitting your mark. So when people say they get lost in a character, I just say, yeah, yeah. You’re not crafty; you’re lying about what you’re doing.

There was a time when black actors went into predominantly white institutions, into drama departments where they ended up being spear-bearers and they weren’t going to play Hamlet. There was no way they were going to end up being the lead in
Streetcar
or be able to do a Chekhov play. We do
Othello,
you got a shot. So that was that. But there have always been a number of places in New York where you could go and learn stagecraft, ’cause that’s what it is. You have to learn the mechanics of what you’re doing out there. It’s a craft, like everything else. There are certain things you have to learn to do to build a bookcase. You’ve got to know how to use a saw. You’ve got to know how to use a hammer and nails. You got to know how to go stage left, stage right; you got to know how to countercross. You’ve got to know how to listen actively so the audience knows that you’re listening to that person over there and their attention goes that way. There are certain mechanical things you have to be able to do, along with the artistic act of creating a character that’s believable and enjoyable and compelling.