WHO GETS TO TELL A BLACK STORY? (Part 3)

A White Journalist Wrote It. A Black Director Fought to Own It.

A Painful Scene

The scene on the schedule for Columbus Day was especially
difficult.

Mr. Simon had watched firsthand the event it was based on, back in
1993. Two addicts he had been following had emerged from a courtroom,
accompanied by their mothers. Suddenly, one of the mothers had
exploded at the other, raving and hurling obscenities in the crowded
corridor.

Mr. Simon had considered leaving the scene out of the script; it had
been painful to witness and painful for the mother on the receiving
end. But it had seemed essential, showing the way the corner world
kept intruding on people's attempts to lead ordinary lives. Mr. Simon
and Mr. Mills had ended up including it, but toned down the language.

The performance could not be cartoonish, the producers had agreed; it
could not be an eye-popping, head-rolling, sitcom stereotype. But the
actors who had auditioned for the part had leaned in that direction.
So the producers had gone to the expense of importing a New York actor
to play the part of the angry mother.

Privately, Mr. Dutton found the scene embarrassing. "There was
something about it that was so ghetto, so stereotypical ghetto," he
said later. Not that he doubted that it had happened. But there would
be black viewers who would ask, Why did you have to show that? And
there would be white people who would think, Oh, yeah, that is just
how they are.

When HBO had first approached him, he had had reservations about
exposing the world of the corner. Not just those aspects that were
embarrassing but those that felt intimate and precious, he said later.
Now, he said, he sometimes felt he was giving Mr. Simon more than he
could have imagined. He felt he was giving away secrets.

He remembered a performance of "The Piano Lesson" on Broadway. Dionne
Warwick had been in the audience and had walked out during the second
act. Months later, she told him why. "She said she couldn't take it
anymore," Mr. Dutton remembered. "Because we were letting white folks
in on all of our sacred little things. It was almost like that's all
we had, or have."

On Columbus Day Mr. Simon was on set, a courthouse in East Baltimore.
He was standing off the corridor where Mr. Dutton, intense and
absorbed, was having the actors repeatedly rehearse the scene. The
corridor was crowded with extras hired for the day to mill around in
the background.

Mr. Simon was watching the extras. They kept failing to react to the
commotion between the mothers. A couple of women looked so oblivious
and white-bread, it was funny. A man playing one of the bailiffs kept
going to great lengths to make sure he would be in the shot. Mr.
Simon, who knew him, would remember later that he had shared a laugh
with the man about that.

Meanwhile, the actor playing the raving mother was dead on. It was the
moment Mr. Simon had witnessed in another courthouse corridor six
years earlier, reinvented by a television production crew, transformed
by artifice. He was elated. He laughed again.

Out of the corner of his eye, at one point, Mr. Dutton caught sight of
Mr. Simon laughing. It made him furious.

He shot Mr. Simon an angry look. Mr. Simon seemed to turn
away.

Maybe he had misinterpreted that laugh, Mr. Dutton said later. But he
didn't think so. One of the actors had noticed it, too. "Why has he
got to be laughing at this scene?" Mr. Dutton would remember the actor
asking.

Mr. Dutton never mentioned the moment to Mr. Simon. But he said
privately that a black writer would never have laughed. Not even a
snicker. "Because they would have even felt a little bit of shame in
it. It boils down to nobody wants to look in the mirror and see
ugliness. Nobody wants to look in the mirror and see ignorance."

Months later, Mr. Simon would remember an angry look. He said he had
assumed Mr. Dutton thought he was meddling, because he had asked one
of the assistant directors to get the extras in the background to react.

Maybe he should have been more sensitive, he said. But how could he
have been? The moment between the mothers had been painful to witness,
but its power was attenuated six years later. If it had not been that
moment, it could have been 10 others. He had laughed at 10 other
things that were not funny in reality but were funny in the process of
representing them.

"I know what I wasn't laughing at," Mr. Simon said earlier this
spring. "I wasn't laughing at somebody who was black and poor and
uncouth making a spectacle of themself in a hallway. That's the one
thing that wouldn't have been funny to me, and wasn't when it happened."

One Connection

If there was one thing Mr. Simon and Mr. Dutton could talk about, it
was Baltimore street lore. Mr. Simon loved the crime history of
Baltimore the way other writers loved stories about the mob.
Baltimore's organized crime was its black drug trade. The most
enjoyable conversations Mr. Simon and Mr. Dutton had were about that
world.

For years, Mr. Simon had believed there was a great story to be told
about the early 1960's period in Baltimore when men who had made their
money as hustlers and gamblers moved into drugs. It was a moment of
reckoning, he thought. That story, perhaps wed to the War of the
Roses, as represented in Shakespeare's history plays, had the makings
of a classic black gangster film.

At its center might be the character of Melvin Williams, who was said
to have risen from the pool halls of Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore
to lay the groundwork for the heroin industry that then engulfed the
city. Mr. Simon had written a five-part series about Mr. Williams's
drug empire for The Sun in 1987. Mr. Dutton, it turned out, had known
Mr. Williams since childhood.

Looking back, Mr. Dutton would marvel that Mr. Simon had first
mentioned the idea to him not long after they met. And it had come up
again and again in the following months. Just in passing, Mr. Simon
said. But Mr. Dutton believed he knew what Mr. Simon was getting at.
In late October, he mentioned to Mr. Simon that he liked the idea of
the project, too.

So, four days before the end of the "Corner" shoot, Mr. Simon made his
way over to Mr. Dutton during a break. He gave him a copy of the
newspaper series and laid out his idea in detail. On the sidewalk
outside the fast-food restaurant where they were shooting, they fell
deep into conversation, then continued inside, squashed side by side
in undersized plastic chairs.

Mr. Simon believed he would have a hard time selling the idea to a
studio without Mr. Dutton, he said later, and an easier time
persuading Mr. Williams to cooperate if Mr. Dutton's name were
attached. Mr. Dutton knew that world, had the draw to get the project
made and would even be great in the role of a police lieutenant
colonel who was key to the story.

Similarly, Mr. Dutton believed that Mr. Simon would have the
screenwriting reputation needed to win over a studio, he said later.
Mr. Simon had the passion needed to get the project off the ground. He
would have access to older police officials. And, Mr. Dutton said, he
might be the only person Mr. Williams and others would open up to.

"I'm going to be the first one to admit, the idea is very, very, very
clever," he said later, referring to Mr. Simon's choice of the War of
the Roses as a frame for the story. "If more writers would think of
those kinds of clever devices, a lot of those so-called black films in
that genre would be a lot more interesting."

By early November, the editors had pieced together the first episodes
of "The Corner." Seeing those rough assemblages, Mr. Dutton thought he
and Mr. Simon and Mr. Mills were on the same page about many things
after all. He was struck by how distinct and memorable each character
was. Watching a scene in which an addict was stabbed to death, he had
found himself weeping.

Maybe he had not given Mr. Simon enough credit, he had begun to think.
"All the credit from the literary point of it, but from the humanity
point of it, I was a little guarded," he said. On the other hand, it
was a two-way street, he insisted; he remained convinced that Mr.
Simon had had doubts about him, too.

In the final days of shooting, Mr. Dutton said, he took a step back
and watched Mr. Simon with some of the "real people" from the book.
Mr. Dutton was impressed by the emotional bond between them, and by
Mr. Simon's commitment to remain involved. "If he has the patience for
it," Mr. Dutton said, "I envy him."

Mr. Simon was truly fascinated by the world of the corner, Mr. Dutton
believed. "There are times when he's been around the real people in
this, I would look at him from afar and he'd be totally enraptured,"
he observed one day. And Mr. Dutton would be sure that the person Mr.
Simon was listening to was full of it. Without hearing a word, he
said, he could tell.

"So, in that regard, I have a soft spot for David," he said, adding:
"Sometimes I shake my head and I say, 'Poor boy, if he's going for
that.' But then other times I'm wary. Because, wait a minute, is this
guy as nonchalant as he seems?"