Los Angeles
WHAT IS IT ABOUT OSCAR? That bald-pated, gold-plated bugger, named after a Hollywood secretary’s uncle, has gone from icon of excellence in motion pictures to patron saint of righteous indignation. Who among us doesn’t recoil in horror recalling Marlon Brando and Sacheen Little Feather, Richard Gere protesting for Tibet, Vanessa Redgrave against “Zionist hooligans,” Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon for the Haitian boat people — and now, the Protester di tutti Protesters, the Rev. Jesse Jackson on the “Hollywood Blackout”?
“Hollywood Blackout” is the new era in Tinseltown, so christened by People magazine, whose team of correspondents concluded after “a four- month investion” that “the film industry says all the right things, but its continued exclusion of African-Americans is a national disgrace.” Pretty stark for an entertainment glossy, so it must be true.
Which is what leads me to Holman Methodist Church in South Central Los Angeles the Saturday before the Oscars, where Jackson is presiding over a Mau- Mauists’ Summit — half pep rally, half planning committee. Attending are John Mack of the Urban League, Maulana Karenga, the father of Kwanzaa in knee- length dashiki, and Sonny Skyhawk of American Indians in Film, bemoaning stereotypical portrayals of Indians as he stands there in deer-skin vest, dangling earring, and a heavily beaded bolo.
Jackson is in the back of the one-third-full auditorium. Not drawing nearly as well as the funeral next door, he looks a little frayed around the edges, with his receding eye sockets and an extra long belt playing peekaboo from under his potbelly. Still, he stands tall, mumbling the same three or four parallelisms and couplets numerous times within the space of minutes to nodding humpbacked reporters, who are on their knees if not prostrate but all the while managing to hold out their mess skillets for a dollop of trite-isms (“the product comes out of the process”; “America is a rainbow”).
One rouge-bunny from Turner Broadcasting approaches Jackson, microphone off and eyes a-twinkle, to tell him, “I voted for you, I even wanted you to be my president. We’re really looking forward to hearing you speak about justice and opportunity.” He seems to take a liking to this line of questioning, as opposed to, say, mine: If black actors are underrepresented, as he claims, why does the Screen Actors Guild report that 11.9 percent of its membership is African-American (blacks are about 12 percent of the population)? “I can’t uh — ” he stumbles, while looking at a volunteer constructing rainbow lapel ribbons. “You should deal with other statisticians on that, okay?”
Jesse regains himself on stage, shifting from low-watt mumble to Sunday- morning-epiphany, scorch-the-nose-hairs-on-a-dead-man sermonizing that draws a host of “Ahhh yeah”s and “Walk through it”s, despite being littered with non sequiturs like why “blacks and browns” don’t own Lexus dealerships, how Nelson Mandela told him he loved the Cosby Show, how Pete Wilson is worse than George Wallace,and, in a curiously racist-sounding assertion — how blacks do better in sports than in Hollywood because “on the playing field, the rules are fixed.”
Mandela, Dr. King, Rosa Parks — Jackson hits all his historical marks, wrapping himself in the mantle of the early civil-rights movement, when real justice was to be won and outrage was completely justified. He recalls marching in Selma 30 years ago, where he first met Karenga, who, in his bubbling gurgle, outpoints Jesse in oratorical skills and applauds all his own best lines.
They work as a kind of injustice-seeking tag team, Jackson extending a hand to slap five with Karenga whenever he mentions Dr. King. They whip the crowd up while making assertions that seem less than grounded in reality. Jackson claims that during one of his many shakedown meetings with various Guild members and Hollywood elites (which produced the Hollywood Rainbow Covenant) a studio executive had the absence of mind to say minorities weren’t being hired because of a shaky work ethic. Who would be so foolish to make such a claim in front of Jesse Jackson? He refuses to elaborate: “We’ll have more on that at another time.”
Karenga is as hard to pin down. Because the People story and this protest were launched after only one black person was nominated for this year’s Academy Awards, I ask Karenga, Jackson, and eight random supporters who should have been nominated. They have no specific answers. “That’s not the issue,” Karenga says. “The issue is whether there is a process in which [minorities] can participate and show that we have a multicultural expression.”
In the world of Jackson and Karenga, process is everything. Processes can be participated in, and manipulated. Somebody’s always doing the rigging, and somebody’s getting rigged. For evidence of such, look no further than Jackson’s own numbers, gleaned from the People story and put out in a press release. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has 5,043 members, and, according to People and Jackson, only 3.9 percent are black. The Academy does not make public its membership list, and when I called them, a spokesperson was befuddled: “I have no idea where People got those numbers because we don’t even keep track of race. There is no race designation on the membership form.”
So how did they get the number? People editor Jack Kelley in the L. A. bureau, who oversaw the “investigation,” could barely swallow his indignation when I told him not even the Academy knew how many minority members it had. ” That is a measure of how oblivious to the problem they are,” he fumed. ” Anybody who’s paying attention these days ought to know that.
“The number was arrived at this way,” he continued. “Our correspondents talked to several black Academy members, and there is a very strong network among them. They gave their best estimate of their membership. We gave the Academy the benefit of the doubt and went with the highest possible membership that we heard and did the math. I think the number could well be lower.” Perhaps so, but they’d have no way of knowing. Since there are 13 different craft divisions, would a black producer, say, know every black gaffer? “Yeah, I think so.”
Jackson was unperplexed about the guesswork “that led to the oh-so-precise Jesse Jackson 3.9 percent. “You would assume a magazine as credible as People would have reliable information, so we should assume so. . . . The Academy gets a product that comes from a process.”
There is plenty that is laughable in the People story (and hence, Jackson’s press release). People implies racism was responsible for Whitney Houston’s being passed over for her critically undistinguished performance in Waiting to Exhale, and implies racism was responsible for Vanity Fair’s having featured only one black actor — Will Smith — on the cover of its Hollywood issue. (There were only 10 actors on the cover — the closest proportionate representation they could have to 12 percent short of finding a 2 percent black actor.)
And there is also this blindingly obvious truth about the Hollywood ” process”: It is a market-driven meritocracy, where an entertainer who scores big will be rewarded accordingly. Comb the Forbes Top 40 Wealthiest Entertainers for the last 10 years, and you’ll find proportional representation. In 1994, 5 out of the 40 entertainers were black, with a black woman, Oprah Winfrey, heading the list. In ’92, there were 8 blacks in the top 40 (20 percent), and three in the top 10, with Cosby and Oprah holding the one and two spots. Even in Forbes’s first list nearly a decade ago, 4 of the top 10 were black.
What nobody can ever measure, of course, is how many aspirants (actors, directors, writers) are trying to break in. This makes most arguments about numbers futile — and indeed, one suspects that the numbers are probably beside the point for Jackson. There’s no time for reflection when you live by the credo “Turn on the heat, and don’t ever turn it off.” He spoke those words to Al Sharpton nearly 30 years ago, and these days, Jackson’s about as shameless as Sharpton (though without the portly reverend’s good humor).
When I suggested to Jackson’s political director Frank Watkins that Jackson was a Cause Barnacle, an opportunist looking to glom on to any issue du jour, he replied with candor, “Guilty as charged. He takes advantage of every opportunity to advance the cause of social and racial justice. He exploits these occasions . . . His secret is to keep people agitating.”
Jackson’s protests are seldom a spontaneous burst of passion or conviction. It’s more of a science really. Watkins neatly distills it into a six-step program, which, in Jacksonian fashion, rhymes. First there’s Research (requires the least amount of time), then Education, Negotiation, Confrontation, Reconciliation, and Implementation.
Confrontation, it must be said, isn’t what it used to be. On Oscar night, as Hollywood glitterati greased their delicate gullets with tempura shrimp in wasabi cream and marinated artichokes in white truffle vinaigrette, Jackson and about 120 people (not counting media) marched on a street in East Hollywood, around a sleepy ABC affxliate (symbol of the Oscars, since ABC televised the ceremony). On the side, leaning up against an Audi 5000, Roland Poet X, an original Black Panther in full regalia, was talking about how there’d never be revolution in this country — not like the days when they packed Molotovs with soap powder to make the burning liquid stick to anything, and took out bike cops with fishing wire.
Two knuckle-draggers from the Jewish Defense League were screaming themselves foamy from behind the police tape (“Jesse, come back to Hymietown!” ), while nose-ringed revolutionaries in Crenshaw buba suits and full Cleopatra-Jones coifs were setting off Radio Shack bullhorn sirens in the antagonists’ ears.
Roland sold me a rainbow ribbon and his poetry book. His black beret caught a weary Jackson’s eye as he smiled at Roland, giving the thumbs up sign. Roland obliged back, but mourned, “We don’t have any true leaders, all these guys are opportunists.”
When I framed Jesse as such to former NFL great Jim Brown at a post-Oscar party, he shrugged his shoulders and gritted his teeth. “Jesse will be Jesse. That’s all I’m gonna say.” Perhaps writer Russ Myers said it best in the Los Angeles Times — that it’s easy to understand why Jackson is upset with the movie industry. “After all, he hasn’t had a meaningful role in years.”
