‘SHUFFLE’: IN THE RACISM BALLPARK

Al Campanis told ABC-TV’s Ted Koppel that there’s a reason there are so few blacks among baseball pitchers and football quarterbacks. The former Los Angeles Dodgers vice president questioned whether blacks have the “necessities” for such heady assignments as running banks or baseball teams and, with his powers of reasoning in full retreat, added that blacks have no buoyancy.

Because Campanis said these things with the benign air of a country grocer, a lot of people felt that Dodger management had been harsh in canning him. But it was precisely that benign manner--ignorance, absence of malice--that set Campanis in the center of the storm over modern racism.

“Ignorance is just as bad as saying, ‘I hate’ or, ‘I dislike’ or, ‘I exclude,”’ says actor Richard Cummings Jr., one of the ensemble of black actors in Robert Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle.” “Ignorance is just as deadly as blatant racism.”

It is not a stretch to connect Campanis’ “Nightline” blunders to the caustically uproarious themes of “Hollywood Shuffle,” a comedy fantasy about a struggling young black actor (Townsend) who dreams of playing generic leading men while auditioning for the jive-talking pimp and drug-dealer roles white Hollywood makes available.

There is little difference between Campanis thinking that blacks don’t have the necessities for management and white Hollywood excluding blacks from management. And there is no difference at all between Campanis believing that blacks lack buoyancy and white film makers believing that blacks are predisposed toward jive.

There’s a wonderful scene in “Hollywood Shuffle” where several black actors try out for roles in “Jivetime Jimmie’s Revenge” while a triad of condescending whites--a producer, a writer and a director--look on with expressions that vary from glee to befuddlement.

When a classically trained British black actor attempts to read the line, “You be messin’ with the wrong dude, bro,” the slack-jawed producer quickly concludes, “You’re the worst actor I’ve ever heard.”

One of Townsend’s fantasy sequences is a late-night TV commercial for a black actors’ school. In it, white Oxford professors teach aspiring black actors how to act “black”--how to shuffle and jive--for the kinds of roles they are likely to be competing for in Hollywood.

It is a wild sendup of the painfully ironic truth that the only knowledge many black actors have of the stereotyped characters they are asked to play comes from the very media they are trying to break into.

“Be a little more Murphy-esque . . . Murphonic,” the director in “Hollywood Shuffle” tells auditioning black actors, with the hope of discovering someone capable of reminding audiences of Eddie Murphy. Townsend, a stand-up comic and occasional dramatic actor (“A Soldier’s Story”), said he has actually had directors tell him to “play it blacker.”

“They will say, ‘Robert, can’t you make it more black?’ or ‘Ethnic it up a little,’ ” Townsend says. “What they want is a voice or movement that fits their perception of black.”

Cummings, now co-starring in the syndicated sitcom “Throb” (KNBC Channel 4 Saturdays at 7:30 p.m.), says he was once fired from a pilot for a TV series because he refused to add the word fool to a line of dialogue.

“I don’t use that word too often,” Cummings says. “Fool isn’t the f-word me and the guys in my neighborhood used. It’s one of those words invented in TV history that black people use.”

There are obviously more ethnics working in film and television today than there were 20 years ago, just as there are more blacks in professional sports. But the stereotypes persist, and in some cases, are more blatantly offensive and onerous than ever.

Writer/director John Hughes has become the pop guru of ‘80s adolescents through a series of facile and patronizing comedies that tap into the very stereotype that teen-agers have of the world around them--including those for ethnics.

The longest-running gag in Hughes’ first hit “Sixteen Candles” is a Chinese exchange student named Long Duc Dong (are you laughing yet?) who all but crosses his eyes while having his face mashed against the oversized chest of the high school behemoth who adopts him.

Granted, film and television are visual media where information is quickly communicated through images. But do writers and directors really deserve the big money for establishing Japanese characters by dangling cameras from Asian actors’ necks and having them bow incessantly? Or establishing Puerto Ricans by putting bass plugs on the men’s ears and dressing them in bun-hugging slacks? Or having Jews smoke cigars and speed-rap about deals?

Hollywood cannot even resist stereotyping itself. You want a sleazy agent, just open an actor’s shirt, give him a gold necklace and tell him to say baby a lot. You want a studio mogul, give him a three-piece suit and a sociopathic personality. You want a writer, dress him in Levi’s and sweat shirt and have him throw a temper tantrum.

There are subtler examples of racism. Eddie Murphy is arguably the only black movie star whose name guarantees box-office success. He has the power to choose his vehicles and to dictate terms. Yet, in “The Golden Child,” Murphy ignored one Hollywood convention by adhering to another.

Murphy, playing the leading man in a romantic adventure, did not have a love scene with his co-star, Eurasian actress Charlotte Lewis. The only possible explanation for that, other than the long-shot possibility that nobody thought of it, is that the film’s producers and its studio execs felt that an interracial clinch would hurt the box office.

“Eddie Murphy has to make that stand. He has to say he’s going to (have a love scene),” says Cummings. “If he doesn’t, nothing is going to change. (Hollywood) has got to show that we can be lovers and it’s OK. The stork just doesn’t drop us off.”

Townsend, who acknowledges having started “Hollywood Shuffle” so he could play the kind of leading men not otherwise available to him, gave himself a love scene with co-star Anne-Marie Johnson. As a sign of its rarity, Townsend says blacks have even reacted oddly to it.

“Blacks are not allowed sexuality in films. In 1987, I’ll be the only black man to kiss a black woman on screen,” Townsend says. “Somebody said to me, ‘Man, you look weird when you kiss.’ Because we’re not used to seeing ourselves kiss on screen, it looks weird. ‘Wow, our lips look funny.’ ”

Cummings, who studied acting at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, says that when he got to Hollywood he discovered that his light skin limited him even within the roles written for blacks.

“Light-skin blacks don’t make good street hoods,” Cummings says. “I got stuff that was the preppy clean guy.”

Cummings and Townsend agree that the most effective way to ending racial stereotyping in the industry is for actors to refuse to propagate them. That is the central conflict for protagonist Bobby Taylor in “Hollywood Shuffle.” Does the young black actor play the stereotype to get his career launched, or maintain his dignity at all costs?

“As an actor, it’s a tough decision,” Cummings says. “You want to make money. You want to have a career. But how do you justify (pushing the stereotypes)? For me, I have an unspoken responsibility and I accept that. I want the respect (of other blacks) and respect for myself.”