COLUMN ONE : New Black Films, New Insights : As studios open their gates to African-American filmmakers, fresh and powerful social messages are making their way onto the screen.

Tre and his teen-age friends are obsessed with sex, constantly deceiving their parents and still puzzling over an uncertain future. If the complexities of their lives ended there, the main characters in “Boyz N The Hood” would look much like their predecessors in the slew of coming-of-age movies that Hollywood churned out in the 1980s--films like “Risky Business” or “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” or “The Breakfast Club.”

But when Tre goes to sleep at night he has to close the window to shut out the sirens and gunfire on his South-Central Los Angeles street. One neighbor is an emaciated crack addict; another is an ex-con. Gangs with guns cruise the block.

The most profound problem for the teen-agers in the hugely popular John Hughes movie “Breakfast Club” was alienation from their affluent parents. For the kids in “Boyz N The Hood,” it’s watching friends get shot.

With films chronicling white suburban teen-age Angst on the wane, and with big-budget action pictures falling short at the box office, Hollywood is cracking open the door to new faces with fresh stories. One result is that African-American filmmakers are getting a shot at telling stories like “Boyz”--the best shot they’ve had in the history of cinema.

“Hollywood has done the white story so much, they’re doing sequels now. They can’t even think of anything new to say,” says Mario Van Peebles, director of the controversial inner-city thriller “New Jack City.” “There are so many good stories with minorities that have not been told. There’s a lot of richness there.”

At last count, at least 19 films by black directors were slated for release this year, with another 20 starring black actors. Although that is still a tiny share of the 400-plus films released each year, it represents more movies by African-Americans than in the entire decade before. Two of the five U.S. films accepted for competition at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival this year had black directors: Bill Duke’s “A Rage in Harlem” and Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever.”

In an era still dominated by special effects extravaganzas and feel-good romance and comedy, these black-themed films provide some of the most compelling social and political material in Hollywood today. These filmmakers view themselves as artists, not political pundits. But because their films take on sensitive public issues like race, the breakdown of the family, violence and drugs, they invariably send strong social messages--a trend missing in mainstream Hollywood since the more artistically liberal 1960s and ‘70s.

And major studios are demonstrating a newfound willingness to bring those messages to mainstream audiences. Studio executives say that they were inspired not so much by the past success of major actor-directors Sidney Poitier, Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor, but rather by newer faces--such as Lee (“Do the Right Thing”), Reginald and Warrington Hudlin (“House Party”) and Robert Townsend (“Hollywood Shuffle”).

The reason is economics: At a time when movie production costs are soaring, profitable films are the exception rather than the rule. Over the past four years, these young filmmakers proved to Hollywood that making cheap movies aimed at a core black audience can mean lucrative business.

The latest crop of black filmmakers ranges in age, outlook and background from “Boyz” director John Singleton, a 22-year-old USC Film School graduate from South-Central Los Angeles who talks with revolutionary fervor about police abuse and economic exploitation, to “Talkin’ Dirty After Dark” director Topper Carew, a successful 47-year-old producer with an architecture degree from Yale, who talks about the need for blacks “to get rich so we can help others.”

These filmmakers show their audiences many different sides of black life--much the way novelists like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker do in literature--at a time when race remains arguably the most divisive feature of American life. “What we haven’t had in Hollywood are a group who not only make social statements, but who are also concerned about charting the contours of African-American culture, revealing what black people say to each other in moments of intimacy,” said Duke University English professor Henry Louis Gates.

Regardless of their individual perspectives, these filmmakers share a conviction that being black in America is a more precarious experience than is typically portrayed in mass market entertainment like the “Cosby” show.

“I’m an American, but being a black American, my experience is a particular one, my struggles have been particular,” says Duke, director of “A Rage in Harlem.” “My people have literally not been able to sit down and eat lunch at the same counter as you, or use the same water fountain. My mother and father told me stories from the South, where they saw people lynched, hanging from trees. . . . Those are different experiences (from whites), and I don’t want to ignore that.”

Some films do no more than entertain while giving audiences an in-depth look at black life. In Carew’s “Talkin’ Dirty After Dark,” set in a Watts comedy club, “there’s a rhythm and a cadence to the dialogue that are musical, that recall sounds peculiar to Africa, and to the black church,” the director said. “Americans are not going to get in their car and go to Watts at midnight but they will want to see this.”

But in other films, there are strong messages--more often than not aimed at black audiences. Matty Rich’s “Straight Out of Brooklyn” is a bleak portrayal of life in a New York housing project, in which a teen-age boy comes home at night to find his frustrated, angry father beating his mother and raging about the oppression of “the white man.”

“Remember me?,” he yells in one drunken tirade. “I’m the one you destroyed and now you’re going to destroy my goddamned son.” The college-bound son gets caught up with a deadly crime in an effort to help his family.

Rich could have concluded his film with a statement about racism. Instead, he ends with this quote: “First things learned are the hardest to forget. Traditions pass from one generation to the next. We need to change.”

Rich, who financed his $80,000 film by soliciting contributions through a Brooklyn radio station, said he blames part of the ghetto’s problems on black middle-class flight. “Why do you have to leave when you make it?,” he asked rhetorically. “Why can’t you stay and build that garden?”

Some filmmakers gently ridicule the notion that all problems in the black community can be reduced to racism. In the upcoming “Hangin’ With the Homeboys,” directed by African-American/Puerto Rican Joseph Vasquez, a black teen-ager draws audience laughs by insisting to anyone who will listen, “You’re doin’ this to me cause I’m black, right?”

In Lee’s critically acclaimed “Do the Right Thing,” a Greek chorus of middle-aged black men sit on a street corner fuming over the Koreans who own the neighborhood grocery store--that is, until one of them points out that no one prevented African-Americans from turning the same abandoned warehouse into brimming shelves of fruit and bread.

Likewise, the slick thriller “New Jack City” is laced with references to the growing gap between rich and poor, and the greed of the 1980s. But audiences are encouraged to scoff at the villain’s speech about white oppression causing him to turn to drug dealing.

“ ‘New Jack’ wasn’t pointing the finger at white folks per se,” said Van Peebles. “If anything it was pointing the finger at ourselves and at the system.”

As in “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” the final message of “New Jack City” puts change in the hands of inner-city residents: In the end, it is an elderly black man who makes a dramatic attempt to reclaim his community from the drug lords.

Still, the reality of racism--often in the form of police abuse or indifference--permeates black-themed films. It’s the South in the 1960s when the “Five Heartbeats” are harassed by police on an abandoned highway. But it’s the 1980s in New York when a white policeman kills a young black man by using excessive force in Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.”

Even in a light comedy like “House Party 2,” now in production, directors George Jackson and Doug McHenry examine racial bias--in this case the social stigma black students may carry by entering college under an affirmative action program. McHenry drew on his own feelings as a black student attending Stanford, where he was aggravated that white students who were admitted on the strength of family ties to the campus “didn’t have to walk around campus with that same stigma.”

Some of these filmmakers also ridicule white fears of blacks and other ethnics. “Hangin’ With the Homeboys” opens with a subway fistfight between black and Latino teen-agers that has the surrounding white professionals popping out of their skins. Suddenly, one of the black kids leaps up out of the staged brawl and announces in his best Shakespearean voice, “Thank you for attending another performance of Ghetto Theater.”

White audiences aren’t always going to react well to these messages. In Michael Schultz’s upcoming film, “Livin’ Large,” an inner-city youth who pursues his dream of becoming a TV news reporter comes into contact with a white world that is vile and corrupt. It’s a comedic look at a TV news operation, but audiences may read it as a harsh commentary on white society, particularly because the teen-ager hallucinates about himself becoming whiter and whiter as he begins to sell out his friends and values to get ahead.

Schultz said “Livin’ Large” is meant to show young people that they don’t need to lose their identity, or their soul, to achieve success. “We all want to make it,” Schultz said. “The question is how you keep your integrity in the corporate world.”

Many of these films have elements of morality plays aimed at youthful audiences of all colors. “New Jack City” is first of all a violent action-adventure thriller. But it is laden with anti-drug scenes, ranging from unflattering portrayals of drug addicts to the downfall of the story’s hip drug kingpin.

“The Five Heartbeats” is an upbeat look at the lives of a Motown music group. But writer-director Townsend wanted to send his own anti-drug message, so he wrote in a character who turned to the church after a life marred by drugs and homelessness. “Some people might say, ‘Ooh, a Christian message, I don’t want to hear about it,” Townsend said. “But others might say, ‘Wow, there is an alternative’. . . . Too many films cater to the decadence of people. There is not a lot of morals, not a lot of values.”

Almost by definition, the coming-of-age films by young urban blacks reflect a view of American life starkly different from those by whites. The central character in Ernest Dickerson’s “Juice,” now being filmed in Harlem, is a promising young black man with dreams beyond the streets who nevertheless is sucked into the crime and violence that pervades his life.

“There’s a big difference between being young and white in this country, where the issue is fun, and young and black, where the issue is survival,” said Armond White, film critic for Brooklyn’s City Sun newspaper.

Young urban blacks may find resonance in Singleton’s “Boyz N The Hood.” But Columbia Pictures Vice President Stephanie Allain said she also hopes that adult audiences will gain insights into the escalation of gang warfare. “For a minute in the film, you’re rooting (for revenge),” Allain said. “There’s this chain of violence in South-Central and you look at one link of it and you understand it, you understand the whole chain.”

Noticeably missing from many of these films is a female perspective, or strong roles for women. One problem is that black women directors are hard to find. Euzhan Palcy received some acclaim for “A Dry White Season” two years ago, Julie Dash is attracting attention with “Daughters of the Dust,” and Debbie Allen will direct a film later this year.

For the most part, the new crop of young black filmmakers coming into Hollywood today are being granted enormous creative control over their films. At Universal Pictures, Lee has had “final cut” authority, so studio executives cannot dictate how he edits the film--something historically reserved for veterans like Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg.

While Columbia did not grant the same authority to Singleton, “he’s been left on his own to make the movie he wanted to make,” said Columbia’s Allain. “I don’t know many 22-year-old filmmakers with that kind of autonomy.”

In part, some studio executives acknowledge, this enormous creative control stems from the fact that the white men who dominate Hollywood’s power structure don’t feel they know enough about black culture to meddle.

Whatever the reason, African-American directors are using that creative control to push the boundaries of filmmaking, particularly on race.

Lee is at the forefront of that movement. In “She’s Gotta Have It,” he challenged stereotypes by making a black woman, rather than a man, sexually aggressive. In the upcoming “Jungle Fever,” Lee takes on one of Hollywood’s great taboos--interracial romance.

“Rage in Harlem,” a hip adaptation of a Chester Himes gangster novel, is by no means a message movie. But Duke said he consciously cast Robin Givens’ lover (played by actor Badja Djola) as a tall, dark-skinned man with the kind of looks “that scare most white people.”

“I show he can love people and people can love him,” Duke said.

While there has been a dearth of black-themed films in the past decade, there was a brief period in the early 1970s when Hollywood paid some attention to this side of American life. And black audiences, at least, responded.

In 1971, black director Melvin Van Peebles, Mario Van Peebles’ father, could convince only two theaters in the country to play his provocative film, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song.” But the first shows sold out and soon theaters started calling him.

Refusing to heed the advice of skeptical studio executives, white producer Robert Radnitz and director Martin Ritt pressed ahead with “Sounder” in 1972, the story of a black sharecropper family that became a hit and earned four Academy Award nominations.

During that period, studio executives were impressed enough with Gordon Parks’ autobiographical “The Learning Tree” that they gave him a chance to direct Hollywood’s first urban black thriller, “Shaft.”

“Shaft” and imitators that followed--dubbed “blaxploitation” films--brimmed with sex and violence. Some black leaders decried the portrayal of African-Americans. But huge black, and white, audiences turned out.

“The overwhelming majority of them portrayed the crudest side of black life,” director Schultz said. “But I was glad to finally see something that dealt with black life. I never saw myself reflected up on the screen.” Film critic White added that these films gave blacks “an entertaining fantasy of revenge against your white oppressor.”

Hollywood furiously churned out blaxploitation movies--generally hiring white directors--and the audience quickly tired of them. By the late 1970s, blaxploitation films had dried up.

Many black directors--like Melvin Van Peebles, Ivan Dixon, Gilbert Moses, Oz Scott and Stan Lathan--turned to stage or TV when they couldn’t hold Hollywood’s attention. Charles Burnett worked outside the system, making independent films like the critically acclaimed “To Sleep With Anger.” Within the studio system, Schultz carved a niche for himself with youthful black comedies like “Car Wash,” “Cooley High” and “Krush Groove.”

Although the rebirth of interest in black films can be traced partly to the success of Lee, Townsend and the Hudlins, Hollywood studio executives also were inspired by the experience on TV, where “Cosby” is the No. 5-rated show, talk show host Arsenio Hall has a huge following, and the Wayans brothers--who are now pursuing their own feature films--are cult favorites with “In Living Color.”

The timing was also right: By the late 1980s, Hollywood was brimming with talented, young, black filmmakers with degrees from top schools such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale and the film programs at USC and New York University.

That doesn’t mean that all of the black-themed films have been, or will be, commercially successful. Despite heartening advance screenings, “The Five Heartbeats” sold only $6 million in tickets during its first three weeks in theaters.

Black filmmakers blame the studios for not knowing how to market their films. Studio executives acknowledge that they have a lot to learn, but they also say that it is hard to attract white audiences to these films, unless--as one studio executive put it--they have “an edge.”

Another obstacle is the indifference of the foreign marketplace--increasingly an important source of revenue for Hollywood--to black films. “The financial and foreign money people said they wanted some white people to star in our film (‘A Rage in Harlem’),” noted Miramax co-owner Harvey Weinstein. “We resisted.”

“New Jack City,” which has sold an impressive $38 million in tickets so far, clearly has the “edge” that major studios seek. But events surrounding its opening could create new roadblocks for black films.

At a Westwood showing several weeks ago, a riot broke out among teen-agers who had waited in line for hours before being told that the film was sold out. The incident happened just days after the disclosure of the police beating of black motorist Rodney G. King--apparently one factor behind the disturbance.

Several black filmmakers, noting that the same controversy has not surrounded incidents such as a shooting in New York during a showing of “The Godfather, Part III,” say they worry that movie studios and theater owners will use the Westwood riot as an excuse for not making or showing black-themed films.

“You’ve won at the box office, you’ve won with reviews, so how do (studios) change the rules?” asked director Mario Van Peebles. “They say, ‘I know, I know. The kids cause riots. You can’t show this movie because the kids cause riots.’ ”

There is also a palpable fear among many of these filmmakers that Hollywood will try to shut the door on them by holding black films to a higher commercial standard than white films.

But Mark Canton, production chief at Warner Bros., which released “New Jack City,” is optimistic that this time black filmmakers are here for the long haul. “Black filmmakers have a lot to say,” Canton said. “It’s more a time of the heart today. I think society is more willing to be open, to examine other cultures.”

1991 FILMS BY BLACK DIRECTORS FILM: New Jack City DIRECTOR: Mario Van Peebles STUDIO: Warner Bros. DESCRIPTION: Drug lord and his gang take over a New York City neighborhood RELEASE DATE: Now playing FILM: The Five Heartbeats DIRECTOR: Robert Townsend STUDIO: 20th Century Fox DESCRIPTION: Charts the lives and loves of five men in a 1960s musical group RELEASE DATE: Now playing FILM: A Rage in Harlem DIRECTOR: Bill Duke STUDIO: Miramax DESCRIPTION: God-fearing undertaker gets caught up with sexy con woman and her gang RELEASE DATE: Opens today FILM: Straight Out of Brooklyn DIRECTOR: Matty Rich STUDIO: Samuel Goldwyn Co. DESCRIPTION: Teen living in New York housing project gets caught up in deadly crime in an effort to better his family’s life RELEASE DATE: Opens May 31 FILM: Livin’ Large DIRECTOR: Michael Schultz STUDIO: Samuel Goldwyn Co. DESCRIPTION: Ghetto teen sells his soul to get ahead in the course of pursuing his dream to become a TV newscaster RELEASE DATE: Opens July FILM: Jungle Fever DIRECTOR: Spike Lee STUDIO: Universal Pictures DESCRIPTION: Interracial couple tries to keep relationship intact despite attacks from friends, family and neighbors RELEASE DATE: Opens June FILM: Talkin’ Dirty After Dark DIRECTOR: Topper Carew STUDIO: New Line DESCRIPTION: A look at life inside a Watts comedy club RELEASE DATE: Opens June 21 FILM: Hangin’ With the Homeboys DIRECTOR: Joseph Vasquez STUDIO: New Line DESCRIPTION: The all-night adventures of a quartet of Hispanic and black friends RELEASE DATE: Opens June FILM: Boyz N The Hood DIRECTOR: John Singleton STUDIO: Columbia Pictures DESCRIPTION: Teen deals with parents, girls, friends and the violence of the streets as he grows up in South-Central L.A. RELEASE DATE: Opens July 12 FILM: True Identity DIRECTOR: Charles Lane STUDIO: Disney-Touchstone DESCRIPTION: Aspiring young actor goes undercover to prove that a missing Mafia kingpin is actually still alive RELEASE DATE: Opens Aug. 2 FILM: House Party 2 DIRECTOR: George Jackson and Doug McHenry STUDIO: New Line DESCRIPTION: Sequel to hit comedy starring popular duo Kid ‘n Play RELEASE DATE: Opens November FILM: Juice DIRECTOR: Ernest Dickerson STUDIO: Island-World, Moritz-Heyman DESCRIPTION: Talented Harlem teen is torn between his ambitions as a disc-jockey and his loyalty to a violence-prone friend RELEASE DATE: Opens fall FILM: Go Natalie DIRECTOR: Kevin Hooks STUDIO: Warner Bros. DESCRIPTION: With help from a street-smart mail clerk, ambitious investment banker discovers his black roots on way to getting the girl RELEASE DATE: Opens fall FILM: DIRECTOR: Daughters of the Dust STUDIO: Julie Dash DESCRIPTION: American Playhouse Turn-of-the-century story about a family of women who emigrate to the northern United States RELEASE DATE: Seeking distributor FILM: Street Wars DIRECTOR: Jamaa Fanaka STUDIO: Independent DESCRIPTION: Graduate from elite military academy forms ghetto air force to fight inner-city crack houses RELEASE DATE: Opening unknown FILM: Chameleon Street DIRECTOR: Wendell Harris Jr. STUDIO: Independent DESCRIPTION: Detroit man impersonates doctors, journalists and lawyers before being caught RELEASE DATE: Opening unknown FILM: Up Against the Wall DIRECTOR: Ron O’Neal STUDIO: African-Amer-Images DESCRIPTION: Independent film directed by star of popular 1972 movie “Superfly” RELEASE DATE: Playing regionally FILM: Perfume DIRECTOR: Roland Jefferson STUDIO: Independent DESCRIPTION: Relationships between five women friends who open a cosmetics company RELEASE DATE: Playing regionally FILM: The Three Muscatels DIRECTOR: Romell Foster-Owens STUDIO: Independent DESCRIPTION: Family-oriented spoof on “The Three Musketeers” RELEASE DATE: Seeking distributor