Guess Who’s Coming to TV : Thurgood Marshall Role Seduced Poitier back

It’s early morning at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills and all eyes in the crowded restaurant are glancing over at Sidney Poitier. It’s hard not to notice him.

Dressed in a pink sweater and dark slacks, the tall, lean actor looks two decades younger than his 64 years, just as if he had stepped out of “To Sir, With Love,’ “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” or “In the Heat of the Night.”

The actor-director was at the famed show biz haunt to discuss his role as Thurgood Marshall in the GM Mark of Excellence Presentation “Separate But Equal,” airing tonight and Monday on ABC. Over the next two hours, Poitier, exceedingly polite and gracious, will talk passionately and thoughtfully of the miniseries, his long career, racial prejudice and young black filmmakers.

Poitier had turned down numerous miniseries and TV movies over the years until now. In fact, “Separate” marks just his fourth acting project for any medium in the past 14 years and his first TV appearance since the 1956 drama “A Man is 10 Feet Tall.”

“I just couldn’t refuse this,” Poitier says. “This is a piece of American history and as such, it ought to be itemized, carved out and preserved in some way.”

“Separate But Equal” dramatizes the events that lead to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools. That watershed moment in American history had began four years earlier as a simple plea for the use of one school bus for black children in the rural South Carolina community of Clarendon County, and became part of the package of civil rights cases remembered as Brown vs. Board of Education.

Marshall, a Supreme Court justice since 1967, had been the chief counsel for the NAACP Legal Deense Fund and led the fight to end school segregation.

Not only does “Separate” focus on an important period of American history, it allowed Poitier, for the first time, to speak words that have lived before him.

“The deliberations in the courtroom in Charleston, where we indeed actually did the shooting, those words were spoken there before by Thurgood Marshall,” he says.

“And then in the Supreme Court, you can’t futz with those words. They are lying on the pages in history. To have the opportunity to give life to them again was terribly seductive.”

Equally seductive for Poitier was the opportunity to portray Marshall, the first black appointed to the Supreme Court. Before agreeing to do the drama, he read numerous books on the man. “He is a very courageous person to do what he did at that time in American history,” Poitier says.

Just before production last summer, Poitier lunched with Marshall. “He spoke of the people he knew, many of whom are (portrayed) in the film. He spoke of the minister who was the school teacher (who originally asked for the school bus) and spoke of the characters around the circumstances that gave rise to the people saying they wanted a bus for their children. When he spoke of them, they came alive for me, and in characterizing them and the time you realize how dangerous a time it was and how much courage it took for him and the people to do what they did.”

Poitier leans across the table. “The guy whose son bore the original case, the difficulties he had ran way beyond him just being dismissed from his job,” he says. “There were men who had to be taken out of town in funeral limousines because they were under death threats.”

Though Marshall never articulated his own courage to Poitier, the actor says he could see the kind of courage he had to have. “He was in the Deep South constantly and he was there for one reason, to challenge the laws, and he did it in the courts.”

Poitier said that during filming in South Carolina the whites and blacks he met agreed “Separate But Equal” illustrated a dark period in American history. It was a period “we had to grow through and mature from, and we have done it to some extent. Things have changed. The mayor of Charleston is a wonderful man and a very healing kind of personality. He does wonderful things for the city and there is considerable input from the minority community.”

For Poitier, the move away from inequality has been “painful and laborious and gradual. It isn’t so much as a movement away from, but a maturation of the nation’s value system. The nation has grown a bit, it has gotten to be a better place, needless to add, with miles to go before we sleep. But there has been movement. Times have changed vastly and times have not changed at all.

Whereas Marshall led the fight to end school desegregation, Poitier was the prime player in the desegregation of the movies. He never played butlers, chauffeurs or shuffling buffoons. His parts weren’t edited out of films for Southern audiences. In fact, he was the first black actor to reach a crossover audience. He was the first (and only) black to win the best actor Oscar (for 1963’s “Lilies of the Field”).

Poitier made his film debut in the 1950 racial drama “No Way Out.” Some of areas of the South, he recalls, didn’t show the movie. “But it was not closed out entirely,” he says. “There were areas in the white community in the South where the pictures (with black stars) played, but they didn’t get uniformly wide distribution in those days. Much of it depended on what the films were about. ‘No Way Out’ was an explosive film about race relations and I am sure it was not shown in every corner of the South.”

Richard Brooks’ classic “The Blackboard Jungle” (1955), in which Poitier played a sensitive but troubled youth in a tough New York City high school, also ran into censorship problems. “That picture has kind of carved a little place for itself in the consciousness,” he says. “But it was recommended by Claire Booth Luce that the picture not be screened in Europe.”

Poitier chuckles. “I am telling you, the U.S. Ambassador to Italy, I think she was, thought it was showing America in a bad light and propaganda and stuff like that.”

“The school systems in many urban areas were as bad as the circumstances in the film,” Poitier says. “We were just not accustomed in America to deal with tough social questions. The question of race was avoided altogether. The word ‘damn’ was not allowed in a film. So that was the mind-set then.

“In such a mind-set, a film like ‘Blackboard Jungle’ could be considered controversial, but to be considered sufficient to have a U.S. ambassador recommend that it be censored or denied exposure? So you see we have grown some. “

After his enormous success in the 1960s, most notably with “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “To Sir With Love,” Poitier acted in just a handful of films in the ‘70s, including the three popular comedies “Uptown Saturday Night,” “A Piece of the Action” and “Let’s Do It Again,” all of which he also directed. During the last decade he has directed numerous films, including the box-office hit “Stir Crazy” and last year’s “Ghost Dad.”

Part of the reason he “stepped back” from acting, he says, was because of the rise of black-exploitation films, such as “Superfly” and “Shaft.”

“The other reason was that life is only interesting if we are only able to, within reason, accept risks,” Poitier says. “When one repeats oneself in artistic terms, one is not accepting risks. And when the exploitation films came into vogue, I could not find real substance in that genre and I stepped aside. I came back with more personal comedies like ‘Uptown Saturday Night,’ which was different than the exploitation films. From there I went on to other things.”

During the ‘70s, Poitier says he had to take stock and ask himself, “What is a useful way to proceed? What is a useful way to spend my time? The most useful way to spend one’s time when one has to pay rent and buy food is to go to work, of course. But if that is not a pressing immediate problem, then it seems one has to have a sense of usefulness of one’s time and my time couldn’t have been spent usefully, repeating myself.”

Poitier now has a three-year deal at Columbia Pictures to produce, direct and even star in movies. “I have six first-draft screenplays being developed presently. One of the mottos of my company is that Hollywood should not be the province of $60- to $100-million movies only, because if we allow that, then many very important questions won’t be aired or explored.”

The actor points out that 10 of his most successful films had extremely low budgets: “To Sir, with Love” cost $600,000 and “Lilies of the Field” an amazing $240,000.

“With ‘Lilies,’ (director) Ralph Nelson, in order to make the movie, put his house up as collateral to United Artists,” Poitier recalls. “We rehearsed that picture here in town. Then we got on a plane and went to Arizona, where he had gone to a deserted area and a built a little church. We were so well-rehearsed that it took us 14 days to make the movie.”

Poitier says he is impressed with the new crop of black filmmakers such as Spike Lee and Robert Townsend. “It gives me great pride and joy, having been a party to a movement of sorts, because to have these young men creating ideas and putting them on film and having the opportunity to put them on film is a plus factor that could only have been dreamed of when I started.”

Columbia Pictures, where he now has his office, used to be the old MGM lot. “When I worked the Metro lot--aside from the janitor crew at night--myself and the black gentleman who was the shoeshine person were the only two (black) people on that lot and today I operate as a producer-director on that lot.”

“The guys who were forerunners to me, like Canada Lee, Rex Ingram, Clarence Muse and women like Hattie McDaniels, Louise Beavers and Juanita Moore, they were terribly boxed in. They were maids and stable people and butlers, principally. But they, in some way, they prepared ground for me. And in my 42 years (in Hollywood), I like to think I may have turned a pebble or two for those who have come behind me.”

“Separate But Equal” airs tonight and Monday at 9 p.m. on ABC.