Spelling It Like It Is

Some movie stars are unwilling to bend their pretty faces to put out for a role. Fishburne, who isn't pretty but exudes a sexiness born of cool and command, doesn't do movie star. He goes where he must to be true to the scene. Even if it twists his face ugly; even if it shows up as unmasked anguish, as it does on the face of Dr. Larabee.

"I carry a lot of feminine energy as well as masculine energy, and that's the hit that people are getting," Fishburne explains. "That vulnerable thing is not what we assume with black males. You get it and then they cease to become scary. They become human. You cease to have a bogeyman."

For years, writer-director Doug Atchison shopped his script around Hollywood. He had been captivated watching a national spelling bee on ESPN in the mid-1990s, and in 2000 his script was one of five winners of a competition sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- but for years, he couldn't get it made into a movie.

"People are allergic to doing what they've never seen," says Atchison. They hadn't seen a black girl who wasn't an athlete carry a film. Studios wanted to make the Dr. Larabee character white, but Atchison resisted. "That story had been told too many times and it was important to reconnect Akeelah with her community. She had a negative impression of where she came from, and Dr. Larabee came from her own world and had gotten his PhD. This gave her the belief she could do it."

Fishburne signed on to produce and act in the project in 2004 to help get it made. Atchison, who'd directed short films and independent straight-to-video films but not a studio release, echoes his sentiments about the Hollywood shuffle.

"When's the last time you've gotten a movie with a black family that's a drama and you can take your whole family?" Atchison asks. "When was the last time you saw a movie about a black youth that's not singing or dancing or playing sports? When was the last time you got a movie where the black mentor character was a PhD?"

For years -- a little like Akeelah -- Atchison didn't know if he, a white man, was entitled to step into a different world. "Terrible lies have been told about the abilities of black folks, about what they could and couldn't do, and it was white folks who told those lies. Why is it not appropriate for a white person to tell the truth ?" he finally asked himself.

In the original version of the script, the Larabee character was 72. But when Atchison decided to make him younger, he fantasized about Fishburne. Fishburne's persona gave him moral authority, he says, and since he had a reputation for "playing imposing, harsh figures, I thought it would be wonderful to have him play with a child and have that relationship expose a softer, more vulnerable side."

(Fishburne knows about kids: He has two from his first marriage to Hajna Moss. Since 2002 he has been wed to actress Gina Torres.)

That thing about sides and angles and depths and facets is something others in Hollywood have seen in Fishburne for a very long time.

Angela Bassett last starred with him when she was playing Tina Turner to his Ike. She says she's heard from people looking forward to their onscreen chemistry in "Akeelah" and delighted that he's not beating her down this time.

She knows some might be surprised by Fishburne's vulnerability in this film. "You're used to Morpheus and Othello," says. "But it's still him. It's like he's standing on the turntable, and it just revolves but it's still Laurence."

Francis Ford Coppola says when he was working on "Apocalypse Now," he wanted to convey the extreme youth of many of the soldiers in Vietnam. A 17-year-old might look 19 or 20, "so I thought I'd cast a 15-year-old to be sure we'd have that sense it's just a kid out there." Fishburne was 14, but lied.

"We went to New York," Coppola recalls, "met people, and Fish -- that's what we called him then -- had come out of various neighborhood theaters. I just liked him, the quality he had. He was uniquely himself, definitely sweet but a little bit of a neighborhood kid, kind of being a cool guy. I just had the impression that would be a personality that would serve that character."

On that famously difficult shoot, which spanned 1976 and half of 1977, Coppola became a sort of father figure to Fishburne. "I had two boys not much younger than him at the time," he says. Coppola had always loved children, had been camp counselor as a teen and at 21 couldn't wait to get married so he could start a family. For a time after "Apocalypse Now," he says, "every movie I made, I always made sure there was a role for him. There was a period where he wasn't getting a lot of parts automatically. He spent time with me and my family, and it was very much like he was part of the family."

They don't see each other often these days, but Coppola has followed Fishburne's career. "He was a skinny kid when I knew him. Now he's a big handsome guy," he says. Coppola, who is as incensed as Fishburne at the state of Hollywood, praises the actor for the way he has chosen his projects: "He's always alternated personal projects with also working as an important actor and on projects with commercial success."

All these years later, Fishburne reminds the auteur of a term in winemaking. " Terroir in wine, we call it," Coppola says. "When you drink a glass of wine, you know the earth it comes from. It's very specific, it has its own unique thing about it. There's soul and personality in it. He brings terroir to his work," says Coppola. "A thing that is uniquely him."

At the Ritz-Carlton, Fishburne seems not to notice people noticing him. Seems not to care if they are looking at him to try to see Morpheus.

He's not going to worry about that [stuff]; not going to let Hollywood or anyone hem him in. "I'll say I want to try an accent, or I want to try a different voice. They say, well, we like the Morpheus voice." But, not a problem, he adds: "I'm good at going the other way."

He knows he'll be remembered for Morpheus. "But that's not all I'll be remembered for," says Fishburne. "I'm a really good actor, and I will inhabit another role with the same kind of intensity and commitment I inhabited that role.

"Some people's first introduction to me will be as Dr. Larabee," he says. "That's what they're going to remember in 20 years."

His Dr. Larabee is a thoughtful character who quotes Douglass and Du Bois and John F. Kennedy in his all-black neighborhood, and taps out spelling rhythms on the back of a chair.

And Fishburne is an actor who modulates his performances, who can command a space the way a professor would, not the way a superstar would.

A dude who's got this volcano thing, but can make stillness swing.