Plan for ‘Dinner’: invert it

As a very young actor, Kevin Rodney Sullivan played a school-age extra in Sidney Poitier’s 1970 crime drama “They Call Me Mister Tibbs!”

It was Sullivan’s first paying role as a film actor, and a fleeting part at that, yet it marked the beginning of Poitier’s long influence over Sullivan’s career. Sullivan counts Poitier’s groundbreaking “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” as one of his inspirations for pursuing a Hollywood career. And without Poitier’s trailblazing, Sullivan says, doors would not have opened as quickly for black performers and directors like himself.

So it is fitting that if anyone was going to try to update “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” it would fall to Sullivan, who nevertheless concedes that he’s at risk adapting a film that is both culturally and personally resonant.

“I was definitely nervous about it, and I had a lot of trepidation about walking on hallowed ground,” the 46-year-old director of “Barbershop 2” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” said. “But I felt it was extremely relevant to do a funny movie about interracial romance.”

And so “Guess Who,” a very loose interpretation of the original comedy directed by Stanley Kramer that won two Oscars, arrives in theaters Friday. Instead of a white family meeting a black potential son-in-law, the new film has at its center a seemingly progressive black family (Bernie Mac plays the father) whose daughter Theresa (Zoe Saldana) is engaged to the white Simon (Ashton Kutcher).

A lot has changed in the world since “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” debuted in 1967 with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as the liberal parents wrestling with their own prejudices when their only child (Katharine Houghton) brings home her black fiance.

One thing, however, remains pretty much the same: When it comes to interracial romance, Hollywood remains as uncomfortable about black-and-white love today as Tracy’s character was nearly 40 years ago.

“It’s still a tricky thing to deal with and something Hollywood has generally avoided,” Sullivan says as he finishes the final sound mix for the film, making sure a joke Kutcher delivers while wearing his girlfriend’s lingerie can be clearly heard.

To see just how tentatively the industry approaches it, you don’t have to look much further than “The Pelican Brief.” Denzel Washington may have starred opposite Julia Roberts in the film, but anyone looking for sexual sparks between the two came away disappointed. Tom Cruise played alongside Thandie Newton in “Mission: Impossible 2,” yet they hardly fogged up any windows.

For the most part, passionate interracial romance remains limited to movies made outside the studio system, where it often remains the crux of the story, rather than random casting. Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton’s “Monster’s Ball,” filmmaker Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” and the recent release of “In My Country,” pairing Samuel L. Jackson with Juliette Binoche, all used interracial romance as a flash point.

All of which suggests that Sullivan’s film may be only slightly less topical than its predecessor. Sullivan says that mixed-race couples, especially outside of large metropolitan cities, “still get looks, and more attention than they should. I do think the challenges for interracial couples aren’t that different than they were 40 years ago.”

All the same, the director says, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” needed more than a little updating: The plot twist that could carry an entire movie four decades ago might provide a hook for today’s audiences but could hardly sustain the total narrative.

“I mean, how many times can you play the same joke?” says Sullivan, who as the executive producer of “Knightwatch” was one of the first black show runners in television.

Sullivan says Kramer’s original movie was a “message piece. But the studio said to me they didn’t want to make [just] a remake. And I felt there was a huge opportunity.”

That opportunity translated into a comedy about race and love and parenting. The challenges of succeeding in a mixed-race romance, in Sullivan’s retelling, trail the challenges in succeeding in a romance of any kind.

“Nothing is harder than falling in love. So race can only be second to that,” the filmmaker said. Around those themes, Sullivan peppered his movie with racist jokes (including a memorable gag about Tiger Woods) and a number of tongue-in-cheek song cues, including “Ebony & Ivory” and “Walk on the Wild Side.”

Bernie Mac’s Percy is a bank loan officer so concerned about his daughter’s boyfriends that he checks their credit histories. Kutcher’s fast-rising stockbroker, Simon, is so determined not to disappoint either his girlfriend or his prospective in-laws that he fails to tell either he has quit his job.

What starts as a movie about interracial dating quickly develops a parallel buddy movie story line as Percy and Simon try to find some fragment of common ground. As the men work toward a demilitarized zone, Percy and his wife, Marilyn (Judith Scott), begin to see in their daughter’s relationship with Simon the kind of commitment their 25-year-old marriage once had and now needs.

Sony is confident enough in the film’s broad appeal that it has marketed the movie to white as well as black audiences. In test screenings with predominantly white moviegoers, Sullivan says, “the audience didn’t even think about it being a black movie.”