Tim Reid Fights to Get Word Out About His Film on Segregated South : Menace to Marketing?

When television actor-turned-film director Tim Reid showed his new film, “Once Upon a Time . . . When We Were Colored,” to a sold-out audience in Chicago recently, he was met with a hearty response.

It received a standing ovation, Reid recalled, but also an unusually physical reaction.

“A black woman about 65 came up and hugged me as hard as when I was a kid and my Aunt Dora grabbed me,” he said. “She told me, ‘In the last 10, 15 years I’ve been watching the movies and this is the first time I’ve seen a black person die of natural causes.’ ”

Reid--who is best known for his roles in “WKRP in Cincinnati” and “Frank’s Place” and currently stars in the WB sitcom “Sister, Sister”--tells this story with a mixture of warmth and dismay. It illustrates just the sort of filmmaking he is working to counteract: the “dysfunctional black urban anger” that permeates so many Hollywood movies about the African American experience.

“Studios have got to give audiences a broader view,” Reid said. “Until they stop turning out this urban, dysfunctional stuff, I’ve no respect for them. Their stories leave me sad and sickened.”

“Once Upon a Time . . . When We Were Colored,” which opens Friday, is as different from the gangbanging, drug and violence-laden films Hollywood has lately churned out as a movie can be. Based on the best-selling novel by Clifton L. Taulbert, the movie is set in the segregated rural South from 1946 to 1962.

It is a gentle tale of a boy who grows up amid an extended loving family of cotton sharecroppers in Glen Allan, Miss. He is surrounded by a proud and self-sufficient black community, played by 83 actors including Al Freeman Jr., Phylicia Rashad, Leon, Richard Roundtree, Bernie Casey, Paula Kelly, Isaac Hayes, Taj Mahal and Daphne Maxwell-Reid. Reid shot the movie on a shoestring budget of $2.5 million on location in North Carolina and many of the actors lowered their usual fees because they believed so much in the film, he said.

But because it is not being released by a major studio, it won’t get the kind of broad exposure that boosted such black-themed films as “Menace II Society,” “Boyz in the Hood” or even the more recent “Don’t Be a Menace . . ., “ which satirizes that genre of movies. The film is being distributed in five cities by Republic Pictures.

“We’re having a very difficult time trying to get the movie to the marketplace, even though it has been doing very well at screenings and we’ve won awards like best picture of the year at festivals,” Reid said. “It’s almost as if the film is subversive. In some regards I think the film is subversive, in regard to the controlling of images of racially defined groups of people. . . . Along comes a movie about a time when character and courage, and all those wonderful values that many of us over 30 years old were brought up on, prevailed. It doesn’t fit. And when it doesn’t fit, distributors don’t know how to sell it.”

Reid peddled his film, which was financed by Black Entertainment Television Pictures, to every major and minor studio in town unsuccessfully. It was rejected as a television movie by every network, as well as “American Playhouse” and “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” The film also was denied a place at the Sundance Film Festival, which showcases independent features, but has played a few lesser-known film festivals around the world.

“They all turned it down because they said it doesn’t fit the style of movies that are being made about the black experience,” Reid said.

On his rounds to the studios he also was told that he shouldn’t pigeonhole himself by only telling black stories.

“I’d rather be pigeonholed,” Reid said. “There is so much to be told about the black experience in this country, let alone the world, that’s all I want to do. Is that wrong? No, that’s a niche. . . . I don’t think Scorsese has to apologize for his depiction of his culture. Why is that when blacks try to depict their culture they find themselves in a battle? I’ve spent a lot of time in this business in a warrior stance.”

Reid, whose television career has spanned about two decades, has been trying to break into the film business for several years. Tired of the battling, he has joined forces with Robert Johnson, founder and president of Black Entertainment Television, and, for the time being, has quit banging on Hollywood’s door.

“Why keep waiting for Hollywood to be interested? We have to do it ourselves,” Reid said. “Then they’ll get interested.”

Reid worries that too little attention is paid to the black audience--which comprises an estimated 25% of the ticket-buyers across the country--and too much to attracting white audiences to black films.

“There is a fear in this town and a total lack of respect for the black moviegoer,” Reid said. “Occasionally a ‘Waiting to Exhale’ will come along which fulfills the need for a black female audience. I want to make movies for the black audience. And if I’m fortunate enough to pull in some white audience, then that’s gravy.”

Reid, 51, knows the world that he has chronicled on film. He grew up in Norfolk, Va., with experiences not unlike those described in Taulbert’s book.

“The thing that struck me about the book when I first read it was ‘God, this is my life. I know these people.’ My family were former sharecroppers. My grandmother ran a boardinghouse and sold liquor illegally. I knew so much about these people, from inside out, that it hurts me today when I go and pitch stories about that era, or some of the values from that era, and people look at me like I’m talking about a distant planet. . . . One of the reviewers wrote that it was all idealistic. This wasn’t idealistic. This was the way I was brought up.”

In “Once Upon a Time,” Reid wanted to emphasize the self-sufficient nature of the segregated South.

“My entire environment as a youth was segregated because of the town’s laws, but what it fostered in me was a tremendous independence and resilience,” he said. “We had our own black businesses. There was nothing that we purchased that we didn’t buy from a black person: We had our black savings and loans, black cab companies, a black newspaper, black grocery stores.”

As a result, Reid is determined to make movies that stem the tide of one-dimensional or stereotypical portrayals of blacks.

“I can sit on my butt and wait for Hollywood to have some warm change of heart and I’d starve to death,” Reid said. “I’m not going to do that. I’m going to hustle and do what I always did as a black in the segregated South. We survived. We were entrepreneurs.”