MOVIES : Against the Odds : Stephanie Allain is one of the few minorities to crack Hollywood’s executive circle; studios are long on programs, short on execution

The first time Stephanie Allain met John Singleton, the 21-year-old film student sat in her office at Columbia Pictures as she voiced a few minor criticisms about a screenplay he had written called “Twilight Time.”

With every suggestion, Singleton bristled.

“He looked at me, like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Allain recalled. As she continued her critique, Singleton would break in: “Excuse me? I don’t see anything wrong with that!”

But from that encounter, a friendship was born that would catapult the careers of both young African-Americans. For there was another script Singleton refused to show Allain that day, but which she eventually brought to the attention of her bosses at Columbia. It was “Boyz N the Hood.”

“Basically, Stephanie is now the only person I feel is qualified to give me comments,” said Singleton, the Oscar-nominated director who currently is working with Allain on “Poetic Justice,” another film for Columbia.

As a vice president of production, the 32-year-old Allain is one of only two African-Americans today who are in the upper ranks of film development at a major studio--and both are working at Columbia.

“African-Americans have been as far away from that as they have in the development of nuclear bombs,” said Doug McHenry, who produced “New Jack City.” “Although we have been in front of the cameras, we really haven’t been behind the camera much.”

With the exception of Sony Pictures Entertainment, no blacks hold creative positions at the level of vice president or above at Disney, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount and Warner Bros., according to Sandra Evers-Manley, president of the Beverly Hills/Hollywood NAACP.

And it isn’t only blacks who are scarce. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. said they have no ethnic minorities at the level of vice president or above on the creative side, although there are minorities in junior executive and business affairs positions.

Disney refused to comment about the ethnicity of its executives, although sources said there were no ethnic minorities at the level of vice president and above on the creative side with the possible exception of Hollywood Pictures President Ricardo Mestres. Disney refused to discuss his ethnic background.

Spokesmen for Fox also declined to provide information on the ethnic natures of its executives.

Evers-Manley said that the studios have taken strides to bring in people of color on the business side. For example, Richard Nanula, an African-American, is senior vice president and chief financial officer at Walt Disney Co., the top financial post under Disney chief Michael Eisner. Bob Holmes is executive vice president of music at Sony. Tami Masuda, an Asian-American, is executive vice president of worldwide advertising at MGM.

Manley said several studios are beginning to hire minorities at the junior executive level and only time will tell if they advance in the system.

At the same time, some studios have programs in place that seek to attract minorities at the creative level.

Each year, Paramount funds the Eddie Murphy Fellowship, in which four graduates of Howard and Hampton universities are brought to Los Angeles and given one-year contracts to spend a year as a screenwriter.

“They have an office, telephone and computer and they have mentoring from our production executives,” said a Paramount spokesman. “By the time they leave, they have meetings with a variety of people around town and it gives Paramount the first chance to meet these people and look at their work.”

In the first two years, the spokesman added, people in the fellowship (now beginning its third year) managed to get agents.

The studio, in cooperation with the Black Filmmaker Foundation and Hollywood craft unions, also hired 10 African-Americans as observers during the filming of Eddie Murphy’s film, “Boomerang.” The program allowed them to watch employees perform their tasks in such jobs as lighting, sound and photography.

At Disney, a writer fellowship program geared toward minorities is now in its third year. Under the program, 20 to 30 men and women are brought to Los Angeles to write for one year, paid an annual salary, and put to work with an executive at the studio.

“The goal is to increase the talent pool,” said Helene Hahn, executive vice president of business affairs. “I do think (the program) has had an impact. One of our writers (Reggie Bythwood) who worked with us the first year now writes for ‘A Different World.’ ”

But as far as penetrating the studio system itself, progress has been slow.

Columbia Pictures Chairman Mark Canton conceded: “All the major studios have to face the fact that minorities are not well represented in terms of the inner workings of the studio executive system.”

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It is at Sony Pictures Entertainment, parent firm of Columbia and TriStar Pictures, where minorities currently hold several key production positions. At Columbia, Teddy Zee, an Asian-American, is an executive vice president of production, while Allain and Kevin Jones, both African-Americans, work on the next rung down as vice presidents under production chief Michael Nathanson. At TriStar, the senior vice president of production is Chris Lee, an Asian-American.

Canton, who was named head of Columbia last year, said he sees it as his “mandate” to provide opportunities for minorities.

“I’m from the ‘60s generation,” Canton said, “and I think that what you are seeing is this generation that stood for certain things in the ‘60s now has an opportunity to make changes in the structure of the business. Some of us haven’t forgotten the things that we advocated. Logic tells you that if you are more diverse in a creative industry, you are going to have a better creative mix.”

Canton said that while he expects Allain and Jones to look for new talent among minority filmmakers, he also hopes they can find the next “Lethal Weapon” and “Batman.”

Jones, who joined Columbia seven months ago after leaving a vice president of production position at Paramount, said he is now working on “16 to 17 things at various stages of development,” including projects with Sidney Poitier and one with director Walter Hill on the life of Geronimo.

As for Allain, she not only is working closely with Singleton on his next film but recently fended off other studios and persuaded Robert Rodriguez, a 24-year-old Latino filmmaker from Austin, Tex., to sign a two-year deal at Columbia.

Allain said she received a tape of a $7,000 film Rodriguez had made called “El Mariachi” and took it home to watch while she and her family sat at the table eating dinner. “All of a sudden, all of us were glued to the TV set watching this movie,” she recalled. “It was so much fun, the rhythm of it, the camera movement, the story that was being told. So, I called him (Rodriguez) up and said, ‘Hey, this is quite a movie. What is going on in your life?’ ”

Rodriguez said he was contacted by several studios, but went with Columbia--before ever meeting Canton or Nathanson--after Allain flew to Texas to talk with him.

“She stressed that Columbia was like a family,” Rodriguez said. “I’m from a family of 10. She knew what buttons to push. . . . I was born and raised in San Antonio, and she made sure I would be able to remain living in Texas and not have to live in Los Angeles. That was a big factor.”

Rodriguez said he chose Columbia because of the freedom it gave Singleton with “Boyz.” Other studios, Rodriguez said, wanted to turn his little film into “cliched Hollywood stuff.”

Today, Rodriguez is ensconced at Columbia’s Culver City studio blowing up “El Mariachi” into a 35mm film that he intends to present at the Toronto Film Festival.

“What is fun for me is working with young talent, first-time directors and lower budgets,” Allain said. “Coppola doesn’t need me. Scorsese doesn’t need me to give him notes.”

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Allain did not set out to be in the movie business. Raised in Los Angeles in a middle-class family (her father is a Xerox biochemist, her mother a schoolteacher), she was a pre-law student at USC who “couldn’t find myself.” She later went to UC Santa Cruz, where she studied literature, and attended CalArts in 1983. During this time, she studied modern dance but gave up the idea of a career when fellow dancers told her they were making only $200 a week in New York. “Oh, oh,” she thought, “this is where I’m headed.”

Allain went to work as an associate editor at San Francisco Review of Books and also wrote articles on dance and theater for San Francisco Ballet magazine.

“Then I got pregnant,” she said. She was 24.

After returning to Los Angeles, she began the path that would lead to a movie career.

“It’s so hard to get into the business if you don’t know anybody,” she said. “I knew some people who said someone somewhere was looking for a reader.” It turned out to be a literary agency.

“I came in pregnant and said, ‘I really want to do this,’ and he said, ‘I’ll give you a job.’ ” By day, she worked as a medical receptionist. By night, she was a reader making $25 per script and $50 per book.

In 1986, a year after her son, Wade, was born, Allain landed a three-day-a-week job at Creative Artists Agency reading books and graduated a year later to the “primo job” of reading scripts.

From CAA, she went to 20th Century Fox as a story analyst in 1987. “It was so easy,” she said, “Seven to 10 scripts a week. That wasn’t a lot. I do that in a weekend now.”

While at Fox, Allain met a production executive named Amy Pascal, who asked her to read scripts.

“Being a reader is such a solitary, thankless job,” Allain said. “I mean, you’re in a room all day, you don’t see anybody, you don’t talk to anybody. You just read a script. You have to analyze and type up what you think the merits or detractions of the property are and then you send it off and you never hear back and then you get another one.”

Pascal praised her work and when Pascal left Fox to work for Dawn Steel at Columbia, she asked Allain to come too.

“I was still like a glorified reader under Amy, but she brought me into the meetings and I watched her talking to writers and producers and saw how to get the most out of a script and how to attack the problems in a script,” Allain recalled.

“Right around the spring of 1990, I heard about a young black guy who was going to film school at USC. He had already been signed by an agent, so I called up the agent and said, ‘Let me read a sample by this kid, John Singleton,’ ” Allain said. “So I read the script he had written. It was called ‘Twilight Time.’ It was a lyrical piece about five black women who come together at their mother’s funeral and basically pack up her belongings and as they are cleaning up the house, all this dirt surfaces about what happened in their childhood. Five black women and this is written by a 21-year-old man. I said, ‘I have to meet this guy.’ ” Singleton had another hot script she had heard about too, but he danced around the question when she asked him about it.

“We talked a little while,” Singleton remembers. “I pitched her ‘Boyz,’ but at this time I was baiting people about ‘Boyz’ (and) I wouldn’t give her the script.”

“He said, ‘You can’t read it because I want to direct it and I want to wait until I’ve directed some things,’ ” Allain recalled. “He said, ‘The studio system will just snap it up and put another director on it.’ ”

But Allain eventually had an agent slip her a copy. “I sat down and read it and I was crying and laughing,” she said. “I just remember the elation. I gave the script to all the executives one by one.”

Allain said some executives had hesitations about making a movie about three black kids in South-Central, but then-studio chief Frank Price liked the story and gave it the green light.

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After Singleton signed with Columbia, Price promoted Allain to a production vice president post so she could oversee the development of the script. She then brought in Steve Nicolaides, who had worked on Rob Reiner’s films, as producer.

During the filming, Singleton said Allain sent him so many script notes with ideas and suggestions that it is now a running gag between them. But Singleton said he will listen to Allain’s criticism because she understands what he is trying to convey in his films.

“The people who are doing the movies, they don’t necessarily understand the films I do until after they see the film,” Singleton said. “All they know is it has high potential to turn a profit.”

Allain is different, he said. “Stephanie is not the traditional executive. She is more bohemian. She has come out of the literary world. She’s about quality stuff.”

For that reason, Singleton said, he tolerates Allain’s steady stream of script notes.

“We have battles, but not battle battles.”