Spike Lee Revisits Birmingham Tragedy

It has been 34 years since a bomb ripped through the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls as they attended Sunday school. The blast that murdered Addie Mae Collins, 14; Carol Denise McNair, 11; Cynthia Wesley, 14; and Carole Rosamond Robertson, 14, not only devastated four families but etched a defining moment in the American civil rights movement. Tonight, a documentary called “4 Little Girls”--the first feature-length documentary by director Spike Lee--will have its Los Angeles premiere at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. Scheduled to attend will be Christopher and Maxine McNair, parents of one girl, and Alpha Robertson and Diane Braddock, the mother and sister of another victim. Sam Pollard, the co-producer and editor, said that Lee had been interested in doing a film on the bombing since film school, but that Christopher McNair didn’t know who Lee was at the time and passed on the opportunity. It was only in recent years that Lee and McNair became reacquainted and the film was born, Pollard said. Using family photographs and archival news footage, the documentary features interviews--shot on location in Alabama and New York--with family and friends of the girls as well as former state and local officials from Alabama, members of the civil rights struggle and others. The film had its Birmingham premiere Sept. 13 at the Alabama Theater and 2,200 people showed up. “The theater was filled,” Pollard recalled. “Most of these people knew these young ladies or knew their parents. I said to Spike, ‘Of all the films I’ve worked on in this business, I have never had a reception that is so strong and powerful.’ ” He added: “As an African American, I come away with the strength and resilience that these parents had to deal with something as devastating as losing a loved one. . . . This terrible moment in their lives will never leave them.” The 102-minute documentary, which has also been shown at selected festivals, will open a limited run on Friday at the Magic Johnson Theaters in Baldwin Hills and at Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills. Home Box Office, which produced the film, has allowed Lee to release the film theatrically prior to its airing on television next February.

Guess What: Arts Are Underfunded

It’s not on the official agendas--but the National Endowment for the Arts’ dismal new “American Canvas” report on arts funding (news flash: there are more arts organizations than there is private money to go around) and the state of the arts is bound to be the buzz at a meeting of the California Arts Council in Los Angeles Thursday, as well as the talk-between-testimony at an interim hearing of the California Legislature’s Joint Committee on the Arts at Burbank City Hall Oct. 28, chaired by state Sen. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank). Among those scheduled to provide expert testimony in Burbank are actor Timothy Busfield; L.A. Arts Commission executive director Laura Zucker; Academy of Television Arts & Sciences executive director James L. Loper; Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, executive director of Glendale’s A Noise Within theater company, and California Arts Council chief Barbara Pieper. Pieper says that the council meeting agenda is already chock full, but calls the NEA report “very important” and says it is likely to be on the council’s canvas for its November meeting.

‘Top’ Finally Spins

After a bumpy road marked by a delay and revamping, the last new comedy of the fall season, ABC’s “Over the Top,” finally arrives Tuesday at 8:30 p.m. The series, which stars Tim Curry as a flaky, down-on-his-luck actor who winds up running a Manhattan hotel with his ex-wife (Annie Potts), had been plagued by problems even before it was bumped from the Sept. 23 premiere that ABC originally announced: The pilot episode had undergone changes in the cast and the setting--from upstate New York to Manhattan. But executive producer Robert Morton said that the delay and the retooling actually improved the series, and that the comedy is now on the right track. “We’re extremely proud of the show,” said Morton, who is best known for his former job as executive producer of David Letterman’s NBC and CBS late-night shows. But “Over the Top” is not out of the woods yet. It is launching just two weeks before the important November ratings sweeps, so it is under pressure to perform well right off the bat instead of being given a chance to build an audience. In addition, the show is premiering against Game 3 of the World Series on NBC. Is Morton concerned? “Concerned about Florida vs. Cleveland?” he quipped. “Uh, not in particular.”

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--Compiled by Times Staff Writers and Contributors