THIS ‘CHRISTMAS CAROL’ COMES WITH BLACK CAST

Just when you thought TV and the movies had presented every version of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” imaginable, along comes Robert Guillaume in a contemporary, all-black adaptation.

It’s called “John Grin’s Christmas,” and it airs Saturday at 9 p.m. on KABC-TV Channel 7.

ABC is positioning it as a lighthearted variety special, one of a trio of holiday-themed programs that will fill Saturday’s prime time.

But Guillaume, who made his directorial debut on the hourlong program and whose company produced it, believes there is a serious message in this tale of an insensitive black businessman who mends his ways.

“That represents a certain dilemma that faces the black community today: that there is not enough given back to the community,” he said during a break in production here recently. “There’s a crying need for blacks who make it to reinvest.”

John Grin, the Scrooge character, is played here by Guillaume as a negative and very sarcastic fellow. For the sake of timeliness, Grin, instead of saying “Bah humbug!” is prone to statements like, “The whole point of Christmas is charging and borrowing.”

Instead of a disabled boy of the Tiny Tim variety, Grin is confronted with the problem of Alfonso Ribeiro as a “young boy who’s going bad,” Guillaume said. Once Grin sees glimpses of his own dismal future and reforms, he helps Ribeiro’s character of Rocky get an after-school job and earn a scholarship.

“That’s a microcosm of the black businessman and the black youth,” Guillaume said. “What we need is some real economic involvement by black businessmen, with an eye toward hiring blacks.”

That being said, he readily noted that “John Grin” is “lighter than the original ‘Christmas Carol.’ It’s not grim. My impression of John Grin is that, while there’s a certain spiritual negativity, he has a great deal of fun putting people down. It’s not done without some wit.

“He digs at Christmas to hide an essential negativity. But he’s on safe ground because the way people act at Christmas is criticizable.”

Guillaume acknowledges some negativity of his own. “For a long time I wouldn’t consider directing because I’m very volatile,” he said. “My tendency is to get impatient with people who don’t do what I want.”

Tales of his chewing out staffers on the set of “Benson,” his former ABC sitcom, have made the rounds. The temper flashed briefly during filming at a theater in an older section of Toronto, when the production nudged toward overtime.

But Guillaume said he believed he had brought his “passion under control” for this task. “I have to try to keep from being totally insensitive to other people’s ideas,” he said.

The smooth talk laced with heavy doses of irony bring to mind Benson himself, the smarter-than-the-next-guy butler from “Soap” who wound up as a governor’s aide on his own series. In Guillaume, those mannerisms are not without their charms, and he even manages a little self-effacement.

“I didn’t come into this professing to have any technical knowledge,” he said, when asked about his decision to direct. “But I had a feel for the piece.”

Though he has strong ideas about the project--and helped flesh out the characters with writer Charles Eric Johnson--he did not originate the idea at ABC. The network brought it to him.

“We had a commitment to do a variety special at ABC,” said Phil Margo, Guillaume’s producing partner. “Rather than do a three-camera (videotaped) special, they asked if we wanted to do a black ‘Christmas Carol.’ ”

The decision to film in Toronto was made largely to keep the budget down, but Guillaume, who first performed at the O’Keefe Center here in 1961, knew that the Black Theatre of Canada could provide much of the supporting cast.

Indeed, local actor Robert O’Ree received spontaneous applause from the crew--twice--for his brief scene-stealer as a hobo who props himself on Grin’s dresser and wolfs down a piece of chicken with outrageous gusto.

Joining Guillaume from the States were Roscoe Lee Browne, Ted Lange and Geoffrey Holder as Messrs. Past, Present and Future; Guillaume’s son Kevin as toy designer Sam Oliver (the Bob Cratchett character), and Ribeiro.

If Guillaume looks subtly different from his “Benson” days, it’s because the series forced on him at least one habit he was happy to do without. “When ‘Benson’ was canceled,” he said, “I finally didn’t have to shave.”