Media Blamed for Black Films’ ‘Violent’ Label : Movies: Filmmakers and theater owners debate how to market black films to mainstream America by combating audiences’ fears of violence.

Concerned with what they called an emerging media-fed stereotype that “black films equal violence,” a group of prominent black filmmakers met with movie exhibitors here this week and proposed a variety of solutions to ease tensions at theaters playing their movies.

The filmmakers challenged exhibitors to cooperate with them by showing a series of public service announcements they intend to produce, and chided them for giving in to unreasonable fears of violence that the filmmakers said have been created by an irresponsible press.

“The media has begun a pre-release witch hunt with black films,” producer George Jackson told an audience of almost exclusively white exhibitors attending a seminar on black films Thursday. “You see cameras setting up outside theaters waiting for violence to happen. Sometimes, it’s a self-fulfilling (prophecy).”

Doug McHenry, Jackson’s partner in the company that produced last year’s “New Jack City,” blamed a lazy press for sensationalizing isolated incidents while ignoring the causes for them. There were numerous instances of violence, including deaths, accompanying the openings of both “New Jack City” and “Boyz N the Hood” last year.

“Some of the films we have made attract black youths,” McHenry said. “What happens when they get together is not the films’ fault. They take their beefs with them. . . . The press is more concerned (with covering) violence outside the black community than inside.”

McHenry pointed out that “New Jack City” opened the week after the nation was repulsed by the videotaped police beating of black motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles and said anger over that event fueled some of the problems at theaters showing “New Jack City.”

From then on, he said, the press anticipated violence, and by setting up cameras at theaters opening black films, they encouraged unthinking youths to give them what they expected.

The seminar’s agenda included a wide-ranging assortment of issues growing out of the sudden emergence of commercial black films. When you compare profits to their actual costs, black films accounted for four of last year’s 10 most successful movies. Together, non-star-driven black films sold more than $200 million worth of tickets in the United States in 1991.

Questions facing the movie industry--filmmakers, distributors and exhibitors--is how to market black films in mainstream American theaters without losing white audiences to unreasoned fears. Despite the strong accusations made against the press by the blacks on the panel, many exhibitors privately say incidents of violence at theaters showing “New Jack City” and “Boyz N the Hood” were not over-reported.

“They said there were just a few problems blown out of proportion,” said one national exhibitor who asked not to be named, “but in fact we had at least some kind of problem at every theater (showing “New Jack City”).”

John Singleton, who received Oscar nominations this week for writing and directing “Boyz N the Hood,” got into a brief but heated debate with fellow black filmmaker Robert Townsend (“Hollywood Shuffle”) when Townsend suggested that trailers for “Boyz” seemed to be promoting violence over content.

“The first trailer I saw for (“Boyz”) showed the violence . . . the shooting,” Townsend said. “I didn’t see anything about the father-son relationship. . . . We’ve got to get to the human aspects of these films.”

Singleton shot back that it was his idea, not executives at Columbia Pictures, to focus on the violence in the first “Boyz N the Hood” trailer. “I wanted that action crowd,” Singleton said, adding that if they’d sold “Boyz” as a relationship movie, no one would have gone to see it.

Whether the trailer for “Boyz” provoked violence or merely heightened interest in seeing it, the incidents themselves left indelible fears in moviegoers’ minds, the panelists agreed, and that anxiety affects business for all movies. Whites afraid of what might happen at multiplexes showing Ernest Dickerson’s “Juice” won’t go to see “Beauty and the Beast,” either, they said.

Some of the panelists blamed those fears for the box-office disappointment of “Juice,” which brought in $8 million during its first weekend, then disappeared from the box-office radar. Warrington Hudlin, whose 3,000-member Black Filmmakers Foundation intends to work with McHenry and Jackson to prepare the filmed public service announcements, called “Juice” an example of “media assassination” and told the exhibitors it was time “to reel in the press.”

One agitated Detroit exhibitor rose to debate the issue, saying the filmmakers seem to want the press to promote their films while ignoring the potential consequences of attracting youths with pitches for violence.

The fact that only about 300 of the 3,000 exhibitors at the convention this week attended the black-film seminar was not lost on the panelists. McHenry said it says something about the attitude of exhibitors that they filled the same auditorium a day earlier for a discussion of how to better their bottom line.

But clearly, the bottom line is what’s on the minds of black filmmakers and their distributors, too. Although African-Americans account for only 12% of the population, they buy 24% of the tickets sold to movies, according to Hudlin, and the success of black films last year established a lucrative marketplace for a burgeoning new movie industry.

One thing the panel agreed on is that this is not a trend. Black filmmakers finally have a foothold in the movie firmament and the sooner audience tensions ease, the better. As Townsend said, the message to black and white audiences is the same: “It’s just a movie, folks, just a movie.”