RICHARD WRIGHT’S ‘NATIVE SON’ FINDS ITS SPOT IN SHOW-BIZ SUN

The actors on location in the old Highland Park Police Station sit at the witness table with heads down, arms locked over their ears.

Oprah Winfrey, fresh from her Oscar-nominated portrayal of Sofia in “The Color Purple,” and Victor Love are playing mother and son in the remake of Richard Wright’s powerful, brutal and tautly written novel “Native Son,” and they’re seeking silence.

For the moment they happen to be alone, waiting for other actors to troop in. They’re trying to blot out the commotion of film crews, the lights and the sounds as they prepare for a segment in Scene 139: a crucial, emotional jailhouse confrontation in which the accused murderer’s mother, who is black, pleads with the murder victim’s mother, who is white, for the life of her son, Bigger.

The framework of “Native Son” is race. Bigger kills Mary Dalton (Elizabeth McGovern) without premeditation during an acute moment of panic. In the taking of life, he finds meaning for the emptiness of his own. Bigger then deliberately kills his black girlfriend, Bessie (Akosua Busia, who played Nettie in “Color Purple”). But it is the first victim--the white victim--who becomes the focus of public attention.

For the third year in a row, following “Soldier’s Story (1984) and “The Color Purple” (1985), Hollywood is tackling an important, relevant and possibly controversial theme dealing with black America.

With cameras ready to roll, Winfrey sucks in deep breaths, as if ready for a down-hill ski race. Hands manacled, a nasty bruise on his forehead, Love bottles his emotions. His face, reflecting the screenwriter’s description, is like “an African mask.”

“Please, ma’am, please,” says Mrs. Thomas kneeling before Mrs. Dalton, as both women try to fight away tears. “Please, I know I got no place with you. But please, don’t let them kill my son. . . . “

“Mama, no!” cries Bigger involuntarily.

As portrayed in Wright’s 1940 classic, Bigger Thomas has become a metaphor for the consequences of alienation, anger and fear in the urban, ghettoized North.

“He is a dispossessed and disinherited man,” Wright wrote in the book’s forward nearly a half-century ago. “. . . and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth . . . looking and feeling for a way out . . .

“Bigger was attracted and repelled by the American scene,” continued Wright, who died in Paris in 1960 after a self-imposed exile. Wright joined the Communist Party during the Depression, gradually experienced disillusionment and eventually became an outspoken anti-Communist after World War II.

“He was an American,” noted Wright of Bigger, “because he was a native son; but he was also a Negro nationalist in a vague sense because he was not allowed to live as an American . . . His hate had placed him, like a wild animal at bay . . . “

Richard Wesley, the 40-year-old black screenwriter who adapted the book for Diane Silver Productions, says he understands why Wright called the anti-hero “Bigger”--the name a rhythmic reminder of the hated epithet. In the script Wesley kept close to the plot and mood of the novel, muting the Communist element as well as some of the gorier violence.

“On a certain level, Bigger Thomas is indeed the black nightmare of white America,” says Wesley, a 1967 graduate of Howard University who has written plays for Joseph Papp and movies (“Uptown Saturday Night,” “Fast Forward”) for Sidney Poitier. “Wright deliberately wrote him in a way in which it was impossible for anyone to have a kind of fawning liberal sentimentality about him. You had to take him on his own terms. . . .”

Unlike Steven Spielberg’s glossy film version of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Color Purple”--costing $15 million, according to one inside estimate--”Native Son” was put together on a spare $2-million budget. It’s bound to attract attention for Silver, a producer seemingly out of nowhere, who somehow has managed to garner a major work and an intriguing cast for this, her first feature film. Shooting ended on Friday.

On the set, Silver speaks so softly that at times she’s barely audible. Sentences get buried under shy sputters of laughter. Ellipses populate her thoughts. One senses a certain vagueness. Her attire is a bit unusual, even for location--near-ankle-length skirts, peasanty shawls. Nevertheless, those involved on the project say it would not have happened without her.

“She has this very quiet confidence,” says Wesley. “Everyone’s going, ‘Oh it can’t be done, and she says, ‘Oh yes, it will . . . fine . . . good, it’ll be done.’ And she’d just go ahead and do it.”

Silver grew up in Chicago--”on the far North Side--middle class, upper-middle class, a white ghetto, all right?” When she was about 7, her father, an automobile dealer, took her to nearby Evanston, “and showed me where black people, who were doctors and businessmen lived, and he said if anybody ever tells you that poverty is endemic to blacks,” she’d know otherwise.

In 1965 she went down to Alabama for the civil rights cause and marched in Selma.

After graduating from the University of Illinois, Silver went to New York, became a magazine writer and eventually moved to documentaries.

Silver first read “Native Son” eight years ago and figured that someday she’d do it as a movie. She hadn’t read the book earlier, she said, because “under (then Chicago Mayor) Daley’s Administration, it was taken off the required (school) reading lists.”

The idea of a movie gained momentum when she discussed it with a director friend and they were talking about how “the networks and movie studios are not into doing anything meaningful.”

Then she went off to sell her idea.

Silver got PBS’ “American Playhouse” to back development and hired Wesley and Jerrold Freedman, who has worked mostly in televison, as director. “Native Son” was originally slated for TV. However, after reading Wesley’s script, Lindsay Law, “American Playhouse” executive director, said, ‘This is wonderful; it’s a feature.’ We drank champagne,” Silver said.

But that also meant she had to seek production money elsewhere. How did she do it?

“With great difficulty,” she replies, laughing. “Every studio turned it down twice. Sometimes with heartbreaking angst that somebody else didn’t believe in it.”

She eventually put together a combination of a cassette advance from Vestron (the videocassette manufacturer), a distribution advance from Cinecom (an independent theatrical distributor) and more money from “American Playhouse,” which will air the film two years after its release.

“Once we were under way,” she says with a grin, “we were offered a lot more money. But we were already locked into (our) deals.”

The success of “Soldier’s Story” helped her timing, but only to a degree. “I was talking to somebody at one of the major studios who said Americans cared about racism in the military, but they didn’t care about racism in America.”

The cast came on board because of the caliber of “Native Son.” Carroll Baker, who plays McGovern’s mother, got the script in London. “As I flipped through it I got so involved.. . . “

“I think good material is hard to find at any time,” says Geraldine Page, this year’s best-actress Oscar winner for “The Trip to Bountiful,” who is cast as the Dalton family maid. “And everyone who read this script was really excited by it.”

Page recalls the Mercury Theatre adaptation of “Native Son” on Broadway that was produced by John Houseman and directed by Orson Welles, with Canada Lee in the title role. (A “Native Son” movie starring Wright himself was also filmed in Argentina and still shows in art theaters.) Like the other principals, Page is working for scale. “I love my role. It’s pithy. “

The “Native Son” title role is the first movie role for Love, 28, a classically oriented actor who grew up in Harbor City and got a degree from Los Angeles City College.

Matt Dillon plays Jan, Mary’s boyfriend, and John Carlin (Harvey Lacey on TV’s “Cagney & Lacey”) is (Boris) Max, Bigger’s defense attorney.

So tight is the budget that cast and crew had to leave Chicago before shooting was finished and substitute locations here. Most of the scenes in the book and movie are set on Chicago’s predominantly black South Side, where many of the same tenements and conditions Wright wrote about still exist. “We had great cooperation in Chicago,” Silver recalls. “We were even going to have Mayor (Harold) Washington play a bartender. . . . “

Asked whether she is concerned that “Native Son”--viewed on a surface level--might fuel racist stereotypes of a violent black man--one of the issues involved in the controversy over “The Color Purple”--Silver replies softly: “Our movie? . . . The message of the movie is that the danger lies in the fear we all have of each other.”

“I just don’t think that the majority of people who will see this movie will carry that kind of myopia into the theaters with them,” Wesley says. “I know that that kind of question has been raised of ‘The Color Purple’ and questions have even been raised about Adolph Caesar’s performance of Sgt. Waters in ‘Soldier’s Story.’ There’s something more important to be dealt with.”

Wesley didn’t like “Native Son” when he first read it as a college sophomore.

“I could relate to the various aspects of poverty and despair inside the black community, because I witnessed it growing up. But the tremendous violence and rage within Bigger was alien to me. I was part of that generation of young black writers who more or less tended to turn our backs on ‘Native Son.’ ”

A grandson of two Baptist ministers, Wesley came home with dismay from his 1967 graduation from Howard University to a Newark, N.J., exploding in riots.

“Since that time however, conditions have changed inside the black communty so that everday real-life Bigger Thomases are being talked about more and more,” Wesley notes. “In a sense, Richard Wright’s prophecy is bearing fruit. He portrayed a reality that a lot of people tended not to want to deal with.”

Wesley’s own involvement is testament to his changed attitudes.

In 1983, with the movie “Uptown Saturday Night” and any number of black-issue plays to his credit, Wesley had dinner in Hollywood with Silver. He aired his problems regarding the novel, and she suggested he re-read it. He remembers talking about “whether or not I really wanted to do (a treatment) from a novel about another young black thug.

“The circle of artists that I was a part of for so many years had wanted to explore aspects of black life. We were interested in providing for young black kids a different type of cinematic role mode model. We want to explore the lives of people like Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X. . . .

“I realize now that it wasn’t the book so much that made me want to do the novel as Diane. She said, ‘Don’t read the novel as Richard Wesley, graduate of Howard University who grew up with a mother and a father and a loving environment, but read it as Bigger Thomas, a high school dropout, who has no money, whose father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan probably and who is completely alienated from his family, from everyone, who has this incredible rage and fear inside of him.’

“When she displayed that kind of sensitivity,” Wesley said, “I thought that I’d like to work with someone like this, because if she could see that, there are probably other things in the story we could find together.”

While writing the script, events occurred that only confirmed his decision. There was the shooting incident involving Bernard Goetz, who was accosted by four black youths on a New York subway. And there was the evening Wesley was walking home from his mother’s house in East Orange, N.J. “As I was coming up this dark street there was this old black woman with a cane coming in the opposite direction. She was carrying this bag of groceries but when she saw me she got off the curb and walked a huge circle around me . . . “

“I think if individuals remain locked in their own prisons of fear and alienation we’ll never be able to break out and reach out to each other. The picture is also saying, Richard Wright is saying, that it doesn’t end with Bigger Thomas. The situation ends when the conditions that created Bigger Thomas are removed.”

Don’t talk movie controversy or protest to Oprah Winfrey.

“Where were people when ‘Shaft’ was out, when ‘Superfly,’ and there were all these black exploitation movies, where were they then? The book’s been out 40 years, and you can’t complain about the treatment of black men, because it was written by a black man.”

“The point of this movie,” says the Chicago talk-show host (whose program will be seen here on KABC-TV opposite “Donahue” in September) “is supposed to help us understand that we breed our own killers. . . . “ She stops herself. “This is 1986, and I don’t buy that. My cry to students--I do five or six speaking engagements a week--is that life may not have handed you all you wanted it to, but it is your responsibility to make a difference. We have the power to make a difference.

“It wasn’t so easy in 1940. That’s why I’m so grateful I was born during the year of desegregation: 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education (of Topeka). What timing!” she grins.

Akosua Busia, when asked whether she thought “Native Son” would exacerbate the image of black violence, answers matter-of-factly: “Quite possibly. Quite honestly, in ‘The Color Purple,’ the women were at least very positive . . . But here Bessie is drunk a lot of the time. And Mrs. Thomas wants her son to get her out of her (poverty) situation.

“But the story is important,” adds Busia whose father, a tribal chief, became the second prime minister of Ghana. “You can’t show Bigger Thomas without the reality, the violence . . . It’s costly to oppress people. My hope is the movie will show how tragic it is.”

“In a certain sense,” says director Freedman, commenting on the movie’s relevance for today, “there’s still a lot of racism in our society. I remember I had a friend in college, the University of Pennsylvania, who is today a prominent novelist. He’s black, and at that time there were very few blacks in college in the ‘60s. And I remember reading something where he was talking about himself and his place in society, and how he felt being a stranger in a white world. And if that’s true of a guy who’s a Rhodes scholar, it’s certainly true of a fellow with no education.”

Freedman said he was talking about John Wideman whose recent book, “Brothers and Keepers,” told his own story and that of his brother Robby, who is serving a life sentence for murder.

When Victor Love, both of whose parents have master’s degrees, first read “Native Son,” he said he didn’t sympathize with or even understand Bigger Thomas. “But now that I’m playing him, I understand him totally. I understand his frustration, his fear. . . . “

“His anger,” prompts Winfrey across the movie-lot lunch table.

“And the fact that he has a dream,” says Love. “It’s symbolized in the script (and book) when an airplane flies over, and he says, ‘I wish I could do that. I could do that if they’d give me a chance.’ Those kinds of things you and I take for granted, he can’t do. . .

“Yes, it has a lot of relevance today. It’s still happening. On street corners in poor areas across the country--not just black; white, Hispanic, poor places--Bigger Thomases run rampant.”