The Delicate Dance of an Interracial Love Story

Try pitching this story to a major Hollywood studio:

Suburban white girl moves to the inner city and enrolls in a nearly all-black school. White girl and black boy fall in love. Her friends don’t like it, neither do his. But in the end, love is blind, and they live happily ever after.

Most likely, you will get a polite “Thanks. We’ll call you.”

But before you are pushed out of the executive’s office, you add the clincher:

It’s a dance movie.

Suddenly, you are invited to sit back down.

From “West Side Story” to “Saturday Night Fever” to “Flashdance” to “Dirty Dancing,” Hollywood, it seems, is most comfortable broaching the subject of interracial romance or class conflict through the cushion of dance. The latest example of this is Paramount’s “Save the Last Dance,” starring Julia Stiles (“10 Things I Hate About You”) and Sean Patrick Thomas (“Cruel Intentions”) as the pair of high school students who fall for each other, defying everyone around them. The film opens today.

Because of the potential for controversy, race and class are dicey propositions for studios. But if there is a little dancing involved, a green light is easier to come by. To be fair, Hollywood is only reflecting the general discomfort most Americans feel when discussing these topics.

“I think America is generally apprehensive when it comes to dealing with the issue of race,” said Todd Boyd, professor at the USC School of Cinema and Television. “Music and dance in American culture are linked to African Americans and so this is a convenient way for Hollywood--in a surrogate way--to address the issue through popular culture.”

In a world where “drama has become an endangered species,” dance makes it possible for some of these issues to be addressed, said producer Robert Cort, who noted that it took five years for “Save the Last Dance” to come to fruition.

“Because race is a heavy issue, you want to be able to do it in a form that is entertaining,” said Cort, who also produced “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” another drama interlaced with music. “If it’s a dance movie, then you deliver your message through that. Ultimately, this is a commercial medium, and you have to make it look entertaining.”

Indeed, films that attempt to tackle race or slavery directly, such as “Jungle Fever,” “Amistad,” and “Beloved” have been disappointments at the box office.

In “Save the Last Dance,” the characters interact through hip-hop dance. Stiles, an aspiring ballet dancer, tries to learn hip-hop as a way of fitting in with her new schoolmates; Thomas is her teacher and in a sense her guide to her new world. The hip-hop club in the film is seen as a place where the races can safely interact.

Duane Adler, who wrote the original story and co-wrote the screenplay (with Cheryl Edwards) for “Save the Last Dance,” doubts the film would have been made without the dance scenes.

“If you take away the dance element, would they have made this? I don’t think so,” said Adler. “The dance element is what made it a high-concept movie.”

Thomas Carter, director of “Save the Last Dance,” said Hollywood still hesitates to cast inter-racially if the film involves romantic scenes. “When it comes to romance, people are still cautious,” said Carter. “But interracial and cultural romance happens every day in this country. If two people have a chemistry and appeal, then it would be nice to see them cast without Hollywood being afraid. They are still afraid.”

Paramount chief Sherry Lansing, who, according to the director, championed the movie at the studio, said she had a visceral reaction to the story--regardless of the dance element. Lansing said she was attracted to the colorblind attitude among the nation’s youth.

“The world has evolved so much since I was growing up,” Lansing said. “I think kids are colorblind, and that is the world that you want.”

But does Hollywood shy away from that interracial romance unless it’s packaged as a positive dance film?

“I can’t say I thought I was doing a ‘dance’ movie,” said Lansing. “I was thrilled when I saw those [musical] numbers in it. . . . I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to explore some substantive issues as well as have some dance in it.”

Females Under 25 Are Target Audience

Certainly, having that commercial musical element will make it an easier sell to teenage audiences. Paramount, with MTV as its partner (both are owned by parent company Viacom), has honed in on the under-25 female audience as the primary target for the film. Even though young teenage boys are the preferred customer for studios today, the young female sector is what made “Saturday Night Fever,” “Flashdance,” and “Dirty Dancing” such huge hits, said Cort.

“Hollywood can feast on the younger males. But they know that younger females also go to movies,” said Cort. “I’ve had very good fortune throughout the years going to that market. If this movie works, it will remind everyone at how powerful that audience is and how wide it is.”

The film is timed to pick up the student crowd over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. The soundtrack, featuring Pink, Lucy Pearl and K-Ci & JoJo, has been marketed heavily on contemporary and urban radio stations nationwide--Paramount is partnering with Power 106 (KPWR-FM) in Los Angeles for promotions and marketing--as well as MTV. The hip-hop choreography is by Fatima, a woman who taught the Backstreet Boys and other teen pop acts their dance moves.

But could interracial romance be an outdated issue among the hip-hop generation? After all, hip-hop is about the melding of races, cultures and genders. The filmmakers knew they could end up looking antiquated or wrong if they didn’t do research. So Carter, Adler and Edwards visited high schools in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago to get a sense of what teens think about race and class.

Adler, who is white, said he based it loosely on his own experiences as a teenager going from a white suburban setting in South Carolina to an urban high school in Washington, D.C. He admits that times have changed a great deal from his high school days in the mid-1980s.

“I would listen to hip-hop in high school and I would get laughed at,” said Adler. “This was the mid-’80s, and we’re talking the Vanilla Ice era. Now you have Eminem getting embraced by the hip-hop generation. [But] would he be as embraced if Dr. Dre hadn’t endorsed him? I think there is still reluctance [to accept people of all races], and you have to prove yourself.”

Carter (“Swing Kids”), who is black, was involved in the project from the start. In their research, he said, the filmmakers found that teens today are much less obsessed with race than a decade ago.

“I was so impressed by most of the kids--it certainly was not an issue who you went out with,” Carter said. “They didn’t seem to necessarily group together based on racial lines. They tended to group together based on similar interests.”

The script evolved as time went on. Originally, there was a near “hysteria” at the school when Stiles’ character showed up, said Edwards.

“The original script, I felt, was too over the top and not that contemporary. It didn’t reflect what I felt was the true voice of how kids were dealing with the race issue,” said Edwards. “I’m not saying that there are not racial entanglements but they are less and less. It was more about if you were hip with the hip-hop culture you were fine. Race was not a huge deal.”

But Edwards and Carter did want to add some scenes that showed the complexity of race relations. In particular, Edwards included scenes that addressed how some black women view white women dating black men. It is an issue that is pertinent to African American women who resent white women dating African American men.

“Maybe it’s a little bit less important generationally, but it’s still a valid point,” said Edwards. “Any white woman who is walking down the street with a black man and gets a roll of the eyes from a black woman needs to understand where this sentiment is coming from.”

In the end, both Carter and Edwards were attracted to the story because of those issues. Being pragmatists, they understood that those few dance scenes could serve the purpose of getting the film made and sending a message without it being preachy. This is a Hollywood movie after all, not a documentary.

“The dance, to me, was just a catalyst to bring these two worlds together,” said Edwards. “I didn’t want to hit the audience over the head with an anvil with this as a political, racial movie.”