Spike Lee aimed a video camera at four actors resting against a brick wall in Brooklyn.

"What's important," the film director said, "is that you not be cliches."It was 1988, and Lee was talking with the actors (including a young Martin Lawrence) he had cast to play typical neighborhood kids in his movie "Do The Right Thing." Lee liked taping these meetings.

"None of this grabbing yourselves," he continued. "None of this `Yo Yo Yo.' If a white director were doing this film, you'd be doing that because they don't know any better."

One actress cracks up at Lee's candor. "Yet still, kids on the streets of Brooklyn are still doing that?" actor Steve White asked. "Yes? No?"

"Yeah, but they're real people," Lee shot back. "It's an assumption that all black kids are doing this," Lawrence said to White. Everyone nodded.

It was a telling scene - as the Lee-led black filmmaking revolution shifted into high gear, the tension between showing accurate images and positive images, between quantity and quality of images, became evident.

Eight years later, African-Americans have a solid place in television and the movies, but questions remain: Do the images of African-Americans on screen reflect the breadth of black life in this country? Are these images accurate? Or are African-American actors struggling against more subtle, less obvious stereotypes?

I posed those questions to a number of African-American actors, directors, and critics. Most called TV's depictions of black life a joke. Most wanted to see black middle-class dramas. A couple of them thought the problems lie in the lack of ethnic diversity among entertainment decision-makers. "Homicide's" Andre Braugher said madness lies ahead for black actors willing to be all things to all people - one's positive image is another's negative.

During Hollywood's Golden Age, blacks would be given roles as either servants (1939's "Gone With the Wind"), comic relief (Buckwheat of "The Little Rascals"), or troublemakers (1915's "Birth of a Nation"). By the mid-1950s, TV had come into its own and the problems followed - led by "Amos 'n' Andy," a notorious sitcom that portrayed blacks as shiftless and scheming.

Then in 1965, Bill Cosby became TV's first black male lead with "I Spy." In 1968 Diahann Carroll became TV's first black female lead with "Julia." But for most of the 1960s, minorities on TV were expelled.

In the movies, after actor Sidney Poitier's success in the 1960s, the '70s saw the rise of so-called "blaxploitation" movies like "Shaft" and "Superfly" - mainly action films with blacks as pimps or prostitutes. In the last 10 years, blacks became mainstays on TV - "The Cosby Show," "A Different World" - while Townsend and other black filmmakers started the "Black New Wave" - "Boyz N the Hood," "Malcolm X," etc.

As much as things change, they also stay the same. Lee himself said he believes many of today's all-black sitcoms are "minstrel shows." Here's what others had to say about the image of black people in movies and TV:

ROBERT TOWNSEND directed and starred in "The Hollywood Shuffle" (1986), a wicked satire of the town's treatment of blacks. Currently, he's acting in the Warner Bros. Network's "The Parent Hood":

"A lot of my friends who are serious actors don't have a lot of work unless one of the shows has an episode that's all about African-Americans or Hispanics, (like) `Murder, She Wrote Goes To the Ghetto'! - `I'm here to talk with Raheem!' As a minority, I feel the same for Hispanic actors and Asian actors. You either get that stereotype of the best friend who's like, `Joe, she really cares about you!' or the gruff lieutenant: `I want your badges. You're a loose cannon!'

"But we've come a long way from Buckwheat or Amos 'n' Andy. Today, you can really consider an African-American as a lawyer or a judge or the chief of a police precinct."

TIM REID recently directed "Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored," and has the lead in The WB's "Sister, Sister," but is best known as Venus Flytrap from "WKRP in Cincinnati," and for creating the excellent, short-lived sitcom, "Frank's Place."

"Every time something original or real tries to slip through - `Under One Roof' or `Frank's Place' - it is immediately put under a microscope and made to be an example of what doesn't work rather than what should work, and use that as a base to set off on a creative expedition.

"One of the major problems with the industry I find is the incredible low intelligence - in terms of history and culture, in terms of the simple worldliness - of the people who write TV. You got people writing shows who have no knowledge about cultures except what they overhear at an L.A. Lakers game. Most of the shows are worse than `Amos 'n' Andy' because they're so inane and inept and devoid of human experience or substance that they don't even provoke anger! The people who write these show don't care to understand (other cultures). They're wealthy. They're arrogant, and they're in power.

"I don't see myself in TV, even in some of the shows I'm involved in. When you do try to bring culture in, you hear, `Ah, we don't want to offend our major audience.' In other words, a white audience."'

CHARLES BURNETT is one of the most a respected independent filmmakers in the country. In 1990, with Danny Glover, he made the critically lauded "To Sleep with Anger."

"In terms of numbers, there are a lot more shows with blacks, mainly sitcoms. I don't know if (when I'm putting together a film) I'm consciously trying to represent certain images. I think I consciously try to do stories about the black experience. The sounds and looks and feels. There are a lot of stories that remain to be told. What you're not seeing is 99.9 percent of the black experience.

"I don't know what that is (you see) on TV. It's ridiculous. I think people get this sense that all we do is laugh and joke and there's no universal dramas or we don't have the same shared experiences. That is wrong."

ANDRE BRAUGHER stars as Detective Frank Pembleton on NBC's "Homicide."

"I would love to see complex images of real African-American domestic life. I would like to see the `middle' of all the images: We're either shown as the best at what we do or the worst at what we do. I'd like to see everything in the middle. I'd like to see breadth and depth of characteristics. A drama would be fantastic. I'd like to be in that drama."

CARL FRANKLIN was a regular actor on NBC's "The A-Team," then directed some of the best movies of the last few years - "One False Move," and "Devil in a Blue Dress" with Denzel Washington.

"As far as making black statements for a political purpose, I kind of think that everything has to become secondary to the art and expression. I don't set out to put positive or negative images on camera. I'm just interested in accurate images, and that means a combination.

"I think it's hard for filmmakers to make a movie that doesn't fit a stereotype of the American experience. Period. A lot of people talk about what they feel are the limitations that black people have to conform to in order to get a film done. But `Devil' was different than any black film done up until now. `Dead Presidents' was a little different. And I think Spike's movies have been more esoteric and much more personal than conforming to any stereotype of what African-American cinema should be."

WARRINGTON HUDLIN produced "House Party" and "Boomerang", and founded the Black Filmmaker's Foundation in 1978.

"Twenty years ago, there was a period of blaxploitation films. In terms of pure numbers, I'm not sure if there are more blacks in movies and TV now than there was then. That era ran from 1971 to 1976. It was very narrow programming: `Let's go after the black audience. Exclusively.' Then someone said by pairing a black star with a white star we could maybe double the audience. The pivotal moment was 1976's `Silver Streak,' with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. The black/white buddy movie killed the genre of the preceding four years, and the all-black cast. TV and movies don't represent the breadth of the American experience, but blacks have become doubly plagued."

DOUG McHENRY and GEORGE JACKSON ("New Jack City") are arguably the two most successful black producers in Hollywood.

McHENRY: "People have to understand that African-Americans have been part of the film industry in the U.S. since the very beginning. After `The Birth of a Nation,' in response to that vilification of African-Americans, about 50 or 60 African-American-owned film companies sprang up overnight. They had really positive roles and presented a different view of African-Americans. They were widely seen by black audiences and had many themes.

"A typical one might be `A man loves a woman.' The man's a doctor. The woman is fairly well off, and so on. There was a broader range of subject matter then than there is now. The critical factor was that African-Americans were able to make their own films within their own system without going through the studios deciding if it's commercial or not."

JACKSON: "Those films were very similar in theme to white pictures, but they starred black actors. We're doing it today. `New Jack City' was the roaring '20s, a gangster picture, but because of institutional racism fostered by the media, it gets ghettoized into something else. That's the point I make with black films. Take the word `black' out! Is `Broken Arrow' a white action film? Is Arnold Schwarzenegger a white action star? So why does Wesley Snipes have to be a black action star?"

JULIE DASH is the first black female to direct a major motion picture, 1991's "Daughters of the Dust".

"The TV networks and Hollywood producers who have production deals only want to see the portion (of the black experience) that we've already seen before. If you submit something that doesn't fall within that same profile, they discard it or say, `The audience will have trouble...'

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"Now, everyone is jumping on the `Waiting to Exhale' bandwagon, and saying that there is a niche out there to be tapped. And I've been saying that for many years. You have this little culture (of Hollywood cliques). It's very limited, but they don't want to believe that. So you have several people making decisions for the whole country. Their children go to the same schools. They eat at the same restaurants. They just keep reinforcing what they already know."

ERIQ LASALLE plays Dr. Peter Benton on the hit TV drama "ER."

"I see it as a necessity for minorities to start taking control of their own images. It's important for them to make films from a minority point of view or a female point of view, anything but (the viewpoint of) white males, who basically run the entertainment industry and society. I see it as survival. If we don't become writers and directors, then we allow someone else who might feel it is fashionable or chic to write our stories. Who better, who more familiar, to tell our stories than us? Other people don't have as much invested."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)

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