Emmy Night: Black--and Blue : Winners Are Pleased but Cautiously Optimistic

Four black actors and one black director carried off a total of six gold Emmy statuettes at the 43rd annual Emmy Awards Sunday, but none of those who talked with reporters backstage seemed ready to say that television has opened up much for minorities.

Asked to comment on the success of blacks in the Emmys this year, Lynn Whitfield said, “It’s about time.”

But Whitfield, whose title role in HBO’s “The Josephine Baker Story” garnered her honors as best actress in a miniseries or special, said that the publicity and positive reviews she received with her appearance on the pay channel last spring have not produced quality jobs for her:

“I haven’t received any offers that are really wonderful.”

James Earl Jones, clutching two statuettes in either hand, said that he wasn’t aware that he was the first black actor to win two Emmys in the same year since Cicely Tyson did so in 1974 for her performance in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” (as best actress in a special and best actress in a drama).

“I tend not to want to count winners,” said Jones, honored for his roles in the ABC series “Gabriel’s Fire” and a TNT cable movie about the 1965 Watts riots, “Heat Wave.” “Because next year there might be none.”

Also expressing caution was producer Stan Margulies, who captured an Emmy Sunday as co-producer of the best miniseries, “Separate but Equal,” and won one in 1977 for the groundbreaking miniseries “Roots.”

“If it’s a trend, it’s been a long time coming,” he said. “ ‘Roots’ was 14 years ago. I thought this would happen much quicker.”

Whitfield expressed hope that the success of “The Josephine Baker Story” and the spate of Emmys would be helpful.

“Eighteen million people saw ‘Josephine,’ a film that was not a black project but about a woman who was black,” she said. “We need to see more projects like that. I’m optimistic.”

Whitfield appeared backstage with her husband, Brian Gibson, who won an Emmy for best direction of a miniseries or special for “Josephine Baker.” The husband-wife team, who met and married while shooting the HBO project, have optioned the life story of black radical Angela Davis for a film.

Gibson said there are currently two ways a black woman can be cast in Hollywood, as either a black woman or a woman who happens to be black. “When we get to the point where we don’t even think about color, we will have reached a breakthrough,” he said. “But we’re not really there yet.”

The venerable Ruby Dee, who won a supporting-actress award for her role in the TV movie “Decoration Day,” said that she too is looking to produce and act in projects based on the novels of black women. “They’ve been optioned, but never get done,” she said.

Margulies and co-producer George Stevens Jr. dedicated their Emmys for the ABC miniseries “Separate but Equal,” about the courtroom battle over desegregation in public schools, to former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The movie, broadcast last spring shortly before Marshall announced his retirement from the high court, focused on his role as an attorney in the case that led to the Supreme Court’s historic Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954.

“There’s a shortage of heroes today,” said Stevens, who also wrote and directed the movie. “I think the nation will miss Thurgood Marshall. His crowning achievement was this case.”

“The story reminds people of how things used to be, and that we have made great progress,” Margulies said. “But it also lets people know that they can still change things.”

Although Jones won an Emmy for “Gabriel’s Fire,” as did supporting actress Madge Sinclair, the show is being revamped this season. He said that he did not consider it a mistake for ABC to overhaul the weighty crime drama about an ex-con and a woman district attorney. Renamed “Pros and Cons,” it is being lightened up and turned into a buddy-buddy series, now co-starring Richard Crenna as a private eye.

“There was always a lag getting the story going,” Jones said, because the district attorney, played by Laila Robins, worked from the courthouse. “Now you have two private eyes in the same office together.”

Jones also said it would have required a novelist to describe the relationship between “an older, black private eye and a beautiful, young, Caucasian woman who’s his boss.”

Both winners of the comedy acting Emmys demonstrated an ability to ad lib without being backed by an army of writers.

Burt Reynolds, honored in his first season in CBS’ “Evening Shade,” called his utter shock at having won “the second best feeling you can have.”

“I think I’m going to mount it on the front of the Mercedes,” he said. Actually, he said, “I’m going to put it next to my 14 People’s Choice Awards.”

Asked about his self-deprecating humor, Reynolds said, “My father used to tell me, ‘Make fun of yourself because there are too many people out there who can do it better than you if you don’t.’ ”

Unlike Reynolds, “Cheers” star Kirstie Alley said that she plans to display her Emmy in her front room--but not until she and her husband have filed down the wings of the angel on the statuette. They’re dangerous to have around children, she explained, tongue in cheek.

When asked if that meant she was planning on having a child, Alley answered “no” and muttered that she hoped that wouldn’t start a tabloid rumor.

She refused to answer directly the question she left the Emmy Awards TV audience hanging with: What was “the Big One” that both she and Reynolds would be getting once they got home? “Well, I know we’re trying to have a baby (on ‘Cheers’), so Ted (Danson) is giving me the Big One,” she said.

Alley said she also hopes to convince Kevin Costner to co-star in a theatrical movie in which she plans to appear next spring. “I want him to give me the Big One in the movie,” she said.

One question that arose several times during the evening was whether “Cheers” would return after this season, its 10th. “Your guess is as good as everyone else’s in this room,” said Bebe Neuwirth, who picked up her second consecutive supporting-actress Emmy for her portrayal of Lilith on the NBC comedy. “I don’t know; I really don’t know.”

James Burrows, who won an Emmy as best comedy director, did not lend much support to the notion of a “Cheers” spinoff: “Brandon (Tartikoff, former NBC programming chief and now chairman of Paramount Pictures, which produces the program) talked about that,” Burrows said. “I think Brandon is going to be behind the bar. That’s the spinoff,” he quipped.

Burrows said “Cheers,” TV’s No. 1-rated television show last season, remains popular because the “characters evolve, which belies comedy. The only thing that remains the same is the bar.”

Several winners expressed concern that the commercial networks are reducing the number of one-hour dramas; ABC alone last season canceled “thirtysomething,” “China Beach,” “Equal Justice,” “Twin Peaks” and “Cop Rock.”

“The programming is getting safer and safer, and that could be the death of network television,” said Thomas Carter, who won a dramatic-series directing Emmy for “Equal Justice.”

“In the last few years, ABC has put on some of television’s most imaginative programming. We need to encourage that, not discourage it,” he said. “I don’t want to see the networks programming shows from the ‘70s, but that’s what seems to be happening--referring indirectly to the glut of new sitcoms on ABC next season.

David E. Kelley, who won Emmys as a writer and producer of “L.A. Law,” echoed Carter. “We can only hope the networks will be more imaginative and put some dramas on in the future,” he said.

Kelley, who has departed “L.A. Law” after writing more than 70 scripts over the past five years, explained his decision: “When you go home at night and start talking in Grace Van Owen’s voice, it’s time to move on.”

Timothy Busfield, who won a supporting actor award for his role as Elliot on “thirtysomething,” said that he doubts the one-hour drama will be back as a TV movie. “There’s a buzz,” he said. “MGM approached me and said there was interest from another network, but without (creators) Ed (Zwick) and Marshall (Herskovitz), for me at least, there’s not a chance. It’s their show.”

The Big Winners

COMEDY

‘Cheers’

Burt Reynolds, ‘Evening Shade’

Kirstie Alley, ‘Cheers’

DRAMA

‘L.A. Law’

James Earl Jones, ‘Gabriel’s Fire’

Patricia Wettig, ‘thirtysomething’

MINISERIES OR SPECIAL

‘Separate but Equal’

John Gielgud, ‘Summer’s Lease’

Lynn Whitfield, ‘Josephine Baker’