A Horse of Different Colors : Anthony Drazan’s ‘Zebrahead,’ a film about an interracial romance, has earned both praise and disdain

Virtually everywhere Anthony Drazan has shown his new movie, “Zebrahead,” the first-time director has gotten a heated response. Some audience members end up shouting at each other. Others have left the theater in tears.

Yet the film has no sex and nudity. It shows children relating with their families and offers only one brief moment of violence, hardly a blip on the radar screen in a Steven Seagal film.

Is it possible moviegoers get unnerved because “Zebrahead” is about a white boy who falls in love with a black girl?

“I think it’s still a taboo subject with a lot of people, both black and white,” says Drazan, a 36-year-old New Yorker who based parts of the film on his memories of growing up in a racially mixed Long Island neighborhood.

“Whenever I screen the movie, it provokes all sorts of (emotions). I get up afterward to take questions and I feel like Phil Donahue with my microphone, getting bombarded with comments. People just go at it!”

Populated with young, largely unprofessional actors, the film focuses on Zach, a gawky Detroit high schooler who looks like the Motor City version of white hip-hop star MC Serch.

Distant from his aging-hipster father, his mother long dead, Zach finds emotional nourishment in African-American culture. He talks with the syncopated rhythms of a street kid and has turned his school locker into the local hip-hop record store. His best friend, Dee, is black.

But when Zach falls in love with Dee’s cousin, a beautiful black girl named Nikki, he discovers that his easy familiarity with black culture can’t erase the deep wounds of rage and prejudice.

Thanks largely to Oliver Stone, who helped get the movie made and has a highly visible presentation credit in its ad campaign, “Zebrahead” is getting a big push from Sony’s Triumph Releasing Corp. arm. The movie, shot in 25 days on a shoestring budget last year, received such a warm reception on the film-fest circuit that Triumph opened it Friday in 10 cities, including Los Angeles, booking it in more than 250 theaters.

With a soundtrack due out next week on RuffHouse Records (supervised by MC Serch himself), the film has plenty of marketing muscle behind it. Whether it can find an audience remains to be seen.

“That’s a lot of theaters for a little film,” says a clearly apprehensive Drazan, who’s already survived one serious jab--a negative New York Times review. “I just hope the studio is willing to stay with it for a little while.”

A bright, introspective guy, Drazan ponders these imponderables over lunch at a popular cafe on Crenshaw Boulevard. As he studies the menu, Drazan listens with fascination to a fiery black nationalist speech, punctuated with a stream of references to blue-eyed white-devil oppressors, that booms over the restaurant’s sound system.

Drazan takes it in stride. One of the key characters in “Zebrahead” is Al, an ardent young Muslim who wears Malcolm X glasses, dreadlocks and a white turtleneck--and lives in a nice white neighborhood.

Convinced Zach is a poseur, trying to get down with the brothers, Al confronts him early in the film, complaining: “You went into Africa. Took our music. Took our people. Now you’re gonna take rap? Leave our music alone!”

White and Jewish, like Zach, Drazan knew he was hardly an expert on teen-age Muslims. Still, he brooded over whether his inexperienced actor, Abdul Hassan Sharif, was going over the top with what Drazan dubbed his “white-devil” act.

“I gave all the actors freedom to improvise,” Drazan recalls. “I told the kids that essentially they were responsible for how their character came off in the film.”

But with Sharif, Drazan wavered. Was his actor really going too far? Or was the problem with him--the white director who couldn’t handle the rhetorical heat?

“I had an urge to pull him back, but then I would think, ‘Is it just my prejudice or preconceptions?’ ” he acknowledges. “Ultimately, I let him go. I’m still not sure if I was right. He’s one of the most controversial characters in the film. But with many audiences, he’s often the most popular one.”

Just as Drazan concludes this tale, a waiter shows up with a heaping plate of sandwiches. He cheerily apologizes to his white visitors for the strident rhetoric. “I hope you weren’t insulted by all the stuff on the sound system,” he says. “We don’t necessarily endorse everything you hear.”

As the afternoon wears on, the white-devil speeches are replaced by mellow Philly soul tunes. Having learned that Drazan is a film director, the restaurant owner proudly informs us that “Boyz N the Hood” director John Singleton is a regular customer.

He beams. “Maybe someday Steven Spielberg will come by too.”

Drazan grins broadly too. After “Zebrahead” made a splash at the Sundance Festival earlier this year, guess who invited him over for a chat and gave him a development deal?

Steven Spielberg, of course.

Drazan’s mother died when he was young. He and his younger brothers went to live with his father, who worked in the family business with Drazan’s grandfather. While these events are all recaptured in the film, Drazan hates to see the material typed as autobiographical. “It moves out of real life and into something else very quickly,” he says.

Still, real life often intrudes. Much of the inspiration for Dee, Zach’s best friend in the film, comes from Drazan’s childhood buddy Doug, who was also black. In Drazan’s youth, the south shore of Long Island was a melting pot, with Italians, Jews and African-Americans all living in close proximity.

“That’s where the movie’s really set,” he says. “It’s in that world where the affluent suburbs are next door to the inner city, so all the kids are thrown together.”

The film bug didn’t hit Drazan until he went off to college at the University of North Carolina. He spent a year doing theater workshops with inmates at a nearby prison, helping them act out dramatic experiences from their lives.

After graduating, Drazan got a job at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. He wasn’t writing plays; he was selling T-shirts.

“I was totally irresponsible,” he recalls. “All I did was watch films. Finally, my boss fired me. She said she was doing me a favor because I should be doing something more creative.”

Drazan took the hint and went to New York University’s Graduate Film School, where one of his classmates was Spike Lee. “Spike was on a different trajectory,” he says with customary modesty. “He was a laser, heat-seeking missile. I was a pre-nuclear war device.”

Later, when Lee made “Jungle Fever,” his interracial-romance tract, Drazan made a wise decision--he refused to see it.

“Spike and I’d gone to ballgames together, we’d shared an editing bench. I knew myself well enough to know that if I saw it. . . .”

Drazan wags his head. “It would’ve wreaked havoc on my thought processes. Who knows what would’ve happened?”

Drazan had written a first draft of “Zebrahead” in 1987, setting it in the ‘70s, his high school years. After rethinking the script in a writer’s lab at Sundance Institute, he made the story more contemporary.

To tap into today’s hip-hop consciousness, Drazan hung out at several New York-area high schools, armed with a video camera. He sat in on classes, asked kids about their friendships and their families, gathering a wealth of new material.

One day, an aspiring rapper named DeShonn Castle took him aside to show off his rhymes. Impressed, Drazan took his number. Nearly two years later, ready to shoot the picture, Drazan hired him to play Dee.

Except for the adult roles, which include Ray Sharkey as Zach’s dad and Candy Ann Brown as Nikki’s mom, most of the featured parts are handled by newcomers. Ron Johnson, who plays Nut, is an aspiring L.A. rapper who heard about auditions on a local radio station. N’Bushe Wright, who plays Nikki, was a dancer from New York’s High School for the Performing Arts.

Even the film’s star, Michael Rappaport, who plays Zach, was barely scraping by as a stand-up comic. “Michael claims to have been an actor, but I don’t think he’d really done much,” Drazan says. “He’s a big, awkward kid and the producers had their doubts--they wanted someone more classically handsome.

“But I held out for him, and I think his street-smart naivete was just right for the part.”

“Zebrahead’s” biggest challenge will be at the box office. In recent years, independent films have had trouble competing with major studio releases for the young urban audience, especially when studio films come armed with stars like Steven Seagal or Wesley Snipes.

To grab attention, Triumph’s trailer leads with the movie’s biggest drawing card--executive producer Oliver Stone--while playing up the soundtrack’s hip-hop beat. The provocative tag line: “It’s about change. It’s about time.”

Triumph Releasing chief David Saunders says the company has earmarked $2.8 million to promote the film--more than the $2.5 million it cost to make. Much of the marketing money has gone into a major sneak-screening campaign geared to build word of mouth in high school and college circles.

“We spent a lot more money than we’d normally spend,” Saunders says. “But I think the film really taps into kids’ consciousness. And when you do that, word spreads incredibly fast. Kids know when a movie’s for real.”

Unfortunately, the soundtrack album, which should be out at least a month ahead of the film to build awareness, still hasn’t hit the record stores. Saunders says it’s due any day, but its delay is making Drazan nervous.

Noting that both Triumph and RuffHouse Records are Sony-owned subsidiaries, Drazan laments: “I guess this is one time when the fabled Sony synergy hasn’t happened.”

Drazan and a reporter are lingering over lunch, sipping coffee, when a tall black man in a dashiki enters the restaurant. He comes over to check out these two white guys--curious, very formal, perhaps a little chilly.

He holds out his hand. “What’s your name?” We shake hands and introduce ourselves. He nods, smiles and walks away. He never gives his name.

Drazan leans forward. “I get that reaction all the time after I show my movie. A black guy will come up and shake my hand. . . . I get the feeling there’s an underlying attitude, maybe condescension, maybe pride, maybe both.”

Perhaps the attitude is a wary, self-protective sense of turf. Going back at least as far as Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” white artists have shown a fascination with African-American culture. For years, white musicians--from Stephen Foster and Benny Goodman to Eric Clapton and the Beastie Boys--have borrowed heavily from black idioms.

Even Bill Clinton has gotten into the act, donning shades and blowing his sax on “Arsenio,” his outfit recalling the Blues Brothers, two comic hipsters who paid homage to their favorite ‘60s black soul performers.

In days past, this was viewed as an appreciation of black culture. Today many African-Americans see it as appropriation. If there’s a story with a black theme or setting, why shouldn’t black artists be the ones to chronicle it?

Even though a white filmmaker had the rights to make a film about Malcolm X, Spike Lee insisted it should only be done by a black director--not just any black, as it turned out, but Lee himself. When Quincy Jones recently launched a glossy new hip-hop magazine, Vibe, he was roundly criticized by many rap insiders for hiring a white man as editor in chief.

So did Drazan have a certain amount of trepidation making a film that deals so frankly with the tangled state of race relations in young America?

“Only when I thought about it,” he says with a laugh. “When you’re writing, there’s really very little fear involved. I couldn’t have written this script if I was constantly considering how the race implications were going to be received.”

But Drazan was uneasy about including a pivotal scene involving black-on-black violence. He ended up writing four different script drafts, some in which no one died at all.

“I’m not saying I wasn’t apprehensive,” he acknowledges. “I did all sorts of crazy things. I must’ve asked everyone on the set what they thought of certain scenes.”

But Drazan rejects the argument that only black filmmakers should deal with black-oriented topics. “If you deal with a subject in a responsible fashion, then why should you be prevented from exploring it? By that logic, should a white Jewish guy only be able to write about white Jewish guys? Or Italians only about Italians?”

OK, so where would Drazan draw the line?

“Look,” he says. “When you’d go see a Bruce Springsteen concert and he’d say to Clarence Clemons, ‘Hey, Mr. Soul Man, give us some of that saxophone, give us some of your soul.’ To me, that’s appropriation. Not a movie that tries to remind people that we need to share human bonds to survive.”

But when the bonds involve interracial romance, many people get nervous, even Drazan. Asked about his personal feelings on the subject, he warily deflects the issue with a jokey one-liner: “I’m pro-choice.”

As it turns out, the theme touches a raw family nerve. Drazan’s youngest brother is involved in an interracial relationship. The romance has created a rift between the brother and Drazan’s father.

“They really can’t even talk about it,” Drazan says, clearly dismayed. “My father very much disapproves. He always wants a forecast, wondering if they’re still together.”

Drazan falls silent, instantly aware of the irony. “So here’s my father, upset over this relationship,” he finally says. “And yet he’s totally proud of me--my son the filmmaker--because I’ve made a movie about the issue!”

He shakes his head, amazed by how long we have remained divided by our tangled notions of race. “I mean, if that doesn’t capture the contradictions in our society, what does?”