Convention Debates Role of Blacks in Hollywood : Minorities: A journalists’ meeting takes another look at charges from a recent NAACP conference that studios block opportunities.

African Americans should not rely on Hollywood film studios to advance the image and economic status of blacks, TV producer Keenan Ivory Wayans told a gathering of journalists in the opening session Wednesday of the 15th annual convention of the National Assn. of Black Journalists at the Century Plaza Hotel.

“We need to build our economic base through black corporate America,” said Wayans, producer and star of the irreverent Fox TV program “In Living Color.”

But Jeffrey Katzenberg, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, said major entertainment companies also must change the way they operate.

“The responsibility must rest with studios who have the power and the money,” Katzenberg said. “We must take it upon ourselves to change the way we do business and to create opportunity.”

The comments reflect in part a response to a report by the Beverly Hills/Hollywood chapter of the NAACP that there are fewer executive opportunities for blacks in the entertainment industry than there were 10 years ago.

Wednesday’s panel, “Blacks in Hollywood,” attracted about one-third of the 1,500 conventioneers and featured none of the fireworks that punctuated a similar discussion at the NAACP conference last month at the Los Angeles Convention Center. There, some panelists charged that racist practices have kept black Americans from key positions in the entertainment industry.

At the outset of Wednesday’s forum, moderator Barbara Rogers, a reporter for KPIX-TV in San Francisco, told the audience, “We want this to be a positive dialogue. That doesn’t mean you can’t ask tough questions, but we don’t want this to be a session that generates more heat than light.”

Mike Medavoy, chairman of Tri-Star Pictures, acknowledged some trepidation about appearing on the 10-member panel. He quipped that colleagues warned him he was “headed for a firing squad,” but he felt it was important to attend.

Part of the problem for blacks, Medavoy said, rests in the “small town” nature of Hollywood. The business is hard to break into, he said, and advancement often relies on personal relationships.

The discussion was one of several scheduled at the conference that focuses on media perceptions of African Americans, and well as on black political clout in the newsroom, America and the world.

“The African American community believes that before significant changes come about, there needs to be more control of the words and images that go out,” said Sharon Richardson, spokeswoman for the black journalists group. “There need to be more blacks in management and ownership.”

Speakers at the five-day convention include Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the first elected black governor in the U.S.; secretary of Health and Human Services Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, the only black in President Bush’s cabinet, and Gay Johnson McDougall, director of the Southern Africa Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.