Oscar and the Supporting Actor : It’s Either Fame or Money--or More of Both

Morgan Freeman’s name may still be relatively unknown to the public, but his career has been changed more than any of the other Academy Award nominees for the best supporting actor this year.

At age 50, Freeman has landed his first starring role in “Lean on Me,” a Warners movie set to begin production in May. Freeman will play high school principal Joe Clark, who was a recent Time magazine cover subject for his controversial exploits in ridding his school of drug dealers and other disruptive students.

Starring roles for black actors--unless they are Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier, Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy--are hard to come by. And Freeman’s agent, Jeff Hunter of Triad Artists, attributes Freeman’s coup at least partly to the nomination.

“Ordinarily, it’s the performance that promotes and the awards are secondary,” Hunter said. But in the case of Freeman’s nominated role, as the tough “Fast Black” in the fast-to-die film “Street Smart,” “It’s a performance that nobody saw,” the agent said.

When “Street Smart” opened in New York last fall, it played at only two theaters for less than two weeks, Hunter recalls. The agent calls it “an extraordinary circumstance” that the movie has the actor on his biggest roll in a 30-year acting career. “If it weren’t for the reviewers,” he says, “This whole thing would never have happened.”

New Yorker critic Pauline Kael’s asked in her opening review line, “Is Morgan Freeman the greatest American actor?,” and pretty much answered her own question in the affirmative. (Kael said she was basing that assessment not only on “Street Smart,” but also on Freeman’s performances in plays, TV and in a small part in “Brubaker.”)

Another coup for Freeman: Last week, “Driving Miss Daisy,” an Off-Broadway stage hit in which Freeman originated a starring role, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama. Freeman would like to have the same role, as the elderly black chauffeur to an elderly, fussy white woman, in a film of the play which is now in development. “The Oscar nomination gives him more credibility in the eyes of the movie’s producers (Zanuck and Brown) and director (Bruce Beresford),” Hunter notes.

Meanwhile, Freeman appears as a drug therapist in the upcoming movie “Clean and Sober,” due out this spring, and he is now appearing on Broadway in the “Gospel at Colonus,” in a role that won him an Obie (the Off-Broadway equivalent of an Oscar) when “Colonus” was staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1984.

In a Calendar interview earlier this year, Freeman said that five years ago, jobs for him were so scarce he considered leaving acting to drive a cab. He recalled losing one role when he followed his agent’s advice--Hunter has been his agent for more than 20 years--to speak his mind when asked his opinion about a script: “Here we have a base in Antarctica and eight of the 12 men there are white scientists. The other four are black--one’s a mechanic, another is a cook, and the others are other kinds of grunts. What do you imagine I think?”

“He has been a man of his convictions,” Hunter said. “He never would take roles that are derogatory to blacks.”

When you’re black, Denzel Washington told Seventeen magazine’s readers a couple of years ago, “Studios don’t get behind you and say, ‘We’re going to make you a star.’ ”

“They don’t,” confirms his agent, Ed Limato of the William Morris Agency.

After a pause, the agent says, “Unless you consider that you have MGM, which decided to make ‘Finding Maubee.’ ” The movie is an action-mystery-romance starring Washington that is on location in Jamaica now. (It was developed by A&M; Films and will have a change of title.)

Washington, 33, is a nominee for his role as the late black South African activist Steven Biko in “Cry Freedom.”

Limato elaborates on Washington’s getting the “Maubee” role: “It’s terribly rare for a studio to back a black actor with a film like this.” He continues, “The only other studio that has constantly been very supportive of Denzel and is constantly sending us scripts is Warner Bros. (which is backing Freeman’s movies).”

For Washington, “There hasn’t really been a deluge of new prizes and scripts because of the nomination,” according to Limato. “That really happened when ‘Cry Freedom,’ was first seen here. He was offered the lead in ‘Maubee’ on the basis of ‘Cry Freedom.’ The nomination is really the icing on the cake.”

Washington’s first film role, as George Segal’s illegitimate son in “Carbon Copy,” was practically a co-starring one. Among other performances, he had a pivotal role in a “A Soldier’s Story,” and won an Obie for the same role on stage. And he had a regular part, as Dr. Philip Chandler, on TV’s “St. Elsewhere.”

Before starting “Maubee,” he starred in a not-yet-released British film “For Queen and Country,” by the makers of “My Beautiful Laundrette.”

Because of Albert Brooks’ success as the newsman who won’t sell out in “Broadcast News,” he may have a better chance at getting mainstream audiences for his usual occupation as the film maker who won’t sell out.

Though Brooks, 40, was nominated for his acting in “News,” he has made a career of writing, directing and starring in subtle comedies directed at small, but loyal audiences (“Real Life,” “Modern Romance,” and “Lost in America”).

Brooks once said that “hell for me would be a place where I’d be given a huge budget and told to make a movie to please (film critic) Gene Shalit.”

However, he’ll apparently get more money than he’s accustomed to for the next movie he makes, which is owed to the Geffen Co.

According to Brooks’ manager, Herb Nanas, shortly after Brooks was named an Oscar nominee, Nanas got a call from David Geffen offering to better the terms for the movie Brooks owes him.

The original contract was “written to stand up,” Nanas said, but tearing up the old contract and upping one’s price after a triumph like the Oscar nomination “is what makes agents and managers and producers all able to harmoniously deal among ourselves,” he said.

According to Nanas, who has represented such past Oscar winners as Sylvester Stallone and Gary Busey, “What the award does for all artists is just changes their economic place in the community. Whatever X amount of dollars he got for being an actor, that money will double or triple.” Even for a nomination? “A nomination will greatly increase the value of an artist in terms of market value.”

“It means higher visibility, and popularity means more people in seats,” Nanas went on. “That’s all you have to go by when you’re negotiating an actor’s price--how many people can you bring into a theater.”

Nanas doesn’t know what Brooks will do next, but, “What I would prefer for him to do, to take advantage of this high level of popularity, is to make his own picture next,” he said. That’s probably what David Geffen would prefer too.

Vincent Gardenia, 64, is the only actor up for a best supporting actor Oscar this year to have been nominated before (for best supporting actor as the coach in “Bang the Drum Slowly” in 1974.) In addition to his nominated role as Cher’s paunchy pop in “Moonstruck,” Gardenia has more than 400 TV shows, 30 plays, two Obies and a Tony (Broadway’s Oscar) under his belt.

The actor is proof that a nomination alone can increase public popularity. Even after his increased visibility from “Moonstruck,” said his attorney and business manager, Jay Julian, “What we note is that when he’s on the street or in a restaurant now, he’s more recognized than he was before the nomination.”

Aside from his nominated roles, Gardenia is perhaps best known for his parts as Archie Bunker’s next- door neighbor on TV, the coach in the Warren Beatty film “Heaven Can Wait,” and the sheriff in the movie version of “The Front Page” that starred Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett.

But Julian doesn’t expect this nomination to change career prospects for Gardenia: “His career is already in place. It doesn’t change his appearance and it doesn’t make him a better actor. He can’t play the role of Tarzan simply because he was nominated.”

Sean Connery, 57, is the big name in the field of nominees. But this nomination, his first shot at an Oscar, has indeed had an impact on his career, according to Connery’s longtime friend, director John Boorman.

“Sean is in tremendous demand at the moment and probably is hotter than he’s ever been in his career,” Boorman says. (He is also an Oscar nominee for best director for “Hope and Glory.”)

If nothing else, Connery’s nomination for the role of lawman Jimmy Malone signifies a break in what has almost been a James Bond jinx on his career. Only seven of the 44 films he’s made were Agent 007 movies, but his roles in memorable movies outside the Bond films, such as “The Man Who Would Be King” in 1975, have been few and far between. Director Peter Hyams adds, “ ‘The Untouchables’ was very popular with young people in America and I think that’s going to affect him very much. A lot of them hadn’t seen (his recent) films like ‘Name of the Rose’ so it has opened him up to an audience that hadn’t known him other than through his earlier work.” (“Name of the Rose” was a hit overseas but it failed to connect with U.S. moviegoers.)

“Few people have made as large an impact in a specific role as Sean did in James Bond, and I think it took many years for people to stop thinking of him in that light and think this is an extraordinary actor,” says Hyams.

Next up for Connery: the role of a career Army officer in Hyams’ completed “Presidio,” due out in June. The actor has been offered the part of Harrison Ford’s father in Steven Spielberg’s third “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” according to a spokesman for Amblin’, Spielberg’s production company. There are also reports of a possible role in a film version of playwright Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” but Connery’s agent, David Schiff of Creative Artists Agency, could not be reached for comment. An assistant to Schiff said the agency has a policy of not doing interviews.

Boorman would like to see Connery take a part in Boorman’s “Getting Ready,” a comedy about a family in which Connery would play the father. “We’ve been talking about it for a long time,” he said. “Though we’ve often seen Sean’s tongue in his cheek and his wryness, he’s not really had a chance to play comedy.”