In Command of ‘Mutiny’

Actor-director Morgan Freeman adds executive producer to his resume with Sunday night’s NBC movie “Mutiny,” a story of the aftermath and controversy surrounding the largest home-front disaster of World War II.

The two-hour historical drama traces the complicated series of events surrounding the July 17, 1944, naval mutiny at Port Chicago, some 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. The story is told through the experiences of Ben (Michael Jai White), Vernon (David Ramsey) and Teach (Duane Martin), composite characters representing three of the 258 young sailors--all African American--who initially refused to load munitions weeks after the catastrophic and still unexplained accident.

“Mutiny,” on which David Israel (“House of Frankenstein”) and Lori McCreary (“Bopha!”) also serve as executive producers, also represents the first production of Revelations Entertainment, a company co-founded by Freeman and McCreary.

It was exactly the sort of project Freeman wanted to launch his production company with--an American tragedy few had heard of, marked by issues of courage, patriotism and justice, and set against the backdrop of an entrenched, segregated military. The project had been at NBC for nearly a decade, after KRON, the network’s Bay Area affiliate, had won a local Emmy for a 1990 documentary (voiced by Danny Glover) on the event.

“The story takes place during wartime,” Freeman said, “where soldiers--mostly black stevedores--are loading bombs and ammunitions onto ships headed out for the Pacific and working at breakneck speed under terrible conditions. There was an accident, and no one was able to ever get to the bottom of

what really happened.”

The explosion killed 320 men (202 of them African American) and injured 390 others. It lifted two transport ships completely out of the water, destroying them, blew out windows 20 miles away and sent up a plume of flame visible for 35 miles.

McCreary hired veteran screenwriter James Henerson to invoke the period and tell the story.

“I’m in my early 60s,” says Henerson, whose writing credits include “Attica” and “The Love Letter.” “I had grown up in the Oakland area, so I knew the story of Port Chicago, but I didn’t know about the black sailors. When I got into it, I was really fascinated.”

Henerson interviewed 17 of the sailors who had survived the explosion, some of whom were active members of the mutiny that followed. Ultimately, he set the crux of his drama not on the explosion, but on the conflicts and issues that followed in its wake.

“I didn’t want to make a movie about victims. For me, this was the central problem. Dramatically, you have to tell the truth: These were victims, victims of a system,” Henerson said. “But they were also heroes. They were heroes by reason of standing up and getting in the faces of the people who victimized them.”

Of the 258 sailors who were involved in the initial protest, 50 were charged with mutiny, over which hung the military sanctions of death and dishonor. The men were eventually given honorable discharges, but they were convicted of mutiny--a conviction that was never lifted, so the taint of mutiny remains with them to this day.

In the process of researching the project, Henerson said he was struck by the fact that the men, now in their 70s, had for the most part maintained a sense of patriotism and pride--and an utter lack of bitterness.

“I expected everybody to have an edge,” he said. But he found only “some residual anger about the fact that the whole pardon issue had not gone through.”

At its core, the movie is about “injustice, set against the tapestry of war,” said executive producer Israel. “I think our greatest fealty was to tell responsibly the story of the men who experienced it, on both sides of the story.”

It was Israel who attracted his old buddy Kevin Hooks to direct the project. Hooks had been a director on Israel’s “Midnight Caller” series 11 years earlier. Unbeknownst to Hooks, his actor-producer father, Robert Hooks, had been involved in two previous efforts to bring the Port Chicago incident to the screen.

“When I told him that this was something that I was considering doing, he immediately said, ‘It’s an incredible story that is well worth the telling,’ ” Hooks said.

Actors as Composites Bring an Authenticity

The director credits his three stars, White (“Spawn”), Martin (“Scream 2”) and Ramsey (“Con Air”) with bringing pathos and vibrancy to the drama’s central themes and tragedy.

“It was critical for us to put ourselves in the shoes [of these young sailors]. And once you have established an emotional through-line and a foundation for those emotions to flow, that’s when you can really kind of build on subtext as opposed to hitting the nail on the head with mere melodrama,” Hooks said. “[We got] just incredible performances from David, Michael and Dwayne--three distinctly different characters with different, sometimes overlapping qualities.”

To bring authenticity to their roles, the actors went through an intensive “boot camp” in the San Fernando Valley. And like the men whose lives they portrayed, they were given no training whatsoever in the loading of munitions. Much of their on-camera clumsiness, said White, was natural.

To bring in what Israel called military “verisimilitude,” the actors were drilled by ex-Marine Pat Dye, one of the most respected military technical advisors now working in film, having trained the actors in “Platoon” and “Saving Private Ryan,” among others.

For White, “Mutiny” was a deeply rewarding learning experience. “One thing that I thought was so incredible when I met the actual survivors is that they never thought of themselves as victims, not for one minute,” White said. “These men were as proud today as they were back then. They stood for what they believed in.”

Los Angeles resident and Port Chicago survivor Robert Routh Jr., who was blinded in the incident, has hopes that “Mutiny,” after 55 years, will bring a pardon, as well as some measure of truth and justice to the sailors of Port Chicago.

“I believe when we apply the word ‘mutiny’ we generally look at people who are trying to take over something. These men merely stated that they didn’t want to go back to work under the old conditions, meaning: We’d need to have some training, and we’re willing to do anything else but that,” Routh said. “No bereavement leave was granted to the men [as it was for the white sailors involved]. I just feel that we were looked upon as the machinery that was used to hoist the bombs and projectiles, rather than as live, young sailors. That explosion was the biggest fireworks I had seen in my life. And it was curtains for me.”

Hooks, too, hopes that his work on “Mutiny” will make a difference in the lives of the men.

“There are still, I think, 18 men who have never been exonerated, and whose names are still besmirched and blemished by the legalities of this incident,” he said. “Ultimately the people, and hopefully the Congress will judge just how successful we’ve been in illuminating this.”

* “Mutiny” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on NBC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).

“There was an accident, and no one was able to ever get to the bottom of what really happened.”

MORGAN FREEMAN

executive producer

A Survivor’s Story: Robert Routh Jr., blinded at 19, tells of his life since the explosion. F25