Waiting for 'Action!'

So why, with such promising stories, such larger-than-life characters and such historic sweep and importance, hasn't the civil rights era been captured in a feature film? Not surprisingly for the movie industry, the answer is portrayed as purely economic; and equally unsurprisingly, economics in Hollywood are inextricably interwoven with the still unresolved issue of race.

Andrew Manis, author of the Shuttlesworth biography "A Fire You Can't Put Out," offers the following hyperbolic hypothetical: " 'Martin Luther King was a nobody and he was plucked from obscurity by people who decided he'd be the best leader of the Montgomery bus boycott, then he exploded on the scene and became a prophet to the nation, and America is such a good and moral country that we listened to him and fixed what was wrong and we all lived happily ever after.' If you have films like that, they get made."

It's not as if Hollywood hasn't tried, albeit with mixed success. There was "Mississippi Burning" in 1989, followed several years later by "Ghosts of Mississippi." Both dealt with real-life civil rights workers -- Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and, in the latter film, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers -- who were murdered by white supremacists. And both engaged in a certain degree of revisionism, valorizing the white investigators of the crimes rather than emphasizing the heroic stories of their nominal subjects. Even more egregiously, there was "Forrest Gump," which inserted its dim Candide of a protagonist into a trivialized pastiche of American social history, reducing the 1963 March on Washington to a "Zelig"-like stunt.

So far, the closest thing audiences have to a definitive civil rights movie is "Malcolm X," Spike Lee's brilliant biographical film starring Denzel Washington as the black-nationalist leader. But notwithstanding that film's compelling portrait of one man's extraordinary personal and political transformation, "Malcolm X" takes place largely outside the context of the mainstream civil rights movement, which at its height involved hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Ironically, a case of white guilt scuttled what might have been Hollywood's best chance of getting the most iconic civil rights story right. In the early 1990s, after Taylor Branch published the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Parting the Waters," the first installment of his three-part history of the civil rights movement, Jonathan Demme optioned the book with an eye to directing a feature adaptation. Having had a huge box office and critical success with "The Silence of the Lambs," he had the pull in Hollywood to shepherd any project he wanted through the studio system.

As the script for the movie came together, Demme directed a music video for the Neville Brothers' song "Sister Rosa," in which actors reenacted Rosa Parks's act of civil disobedience in 1955. "And it was really hard for me," Demme recalled recently. "I didn't like directing the black actors to sit in the back of the bus." As time went by, he said, "I questioned more and more my ability to effectively go out there and stage the kind of brutality that white Americans were visiting on black Americans. Truthfully, I just found that I didn't feel I had the stomach to direct black actors and black extras to take the kind of beating and humiliation that were visited on them in those days." Demme recalled telling Branch and co-producer Harry Belafonte: "Guys, we've got to find a young African American to direct this. I want to produce it, and I'll do anything I can to get it on-screen, but I can't be the guy who directs it."

It could also be that Demme -- who had come in for criticism from some gay rights activists for what they regarded as an anodyne depiction of gay life in "Philadelphia" -- didn't want to be the guy who got the Martin Luther King story wrong. Without him at the helm, the "Parting the Waters" movie stalled, in part because at that time the movie industry was undergoing a profound structural change, with overseas box office becoming as important as or even more important than domestic receipts to a movie's total revenue.

"Even though America has a huge export business in entertainment, movies about our own history often don't travel too well," says Edward Saxon, an independent producer who worked with Demme on "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia." "Then you add race in. It's the received wisdom of Hollywood that movies with black themes and lead actors, especially dramas, don't travel overseas. And the exception [to that rule] doesn't get a chance to get proven much."

Bob Berney, the president of Picturehouse Films, wonders if that calculation "is still true or used as an excuse, or out of laziness. I run into that a lot: 'You'll never get international with a black cast.' But if you look at music, all the hip-hop artists appear to be huge in Europe and Asia and everywhere else. It's an issue that the more old-guard gatekeepers have, rather than the audience. Something is going to have to break through, and then once it does, everyone will say, 'See, it's not a problem.' "

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And there's the rub: Who goes first? Over the years, various directors have talked about King-related projects -- at one point Oliver Stone was going to direct a movie called "Memphis"-- but nothing has made it past the development stage. The producer Caldecot Chubb ("To Sleep With Anger," "Eve's Bayou") was interested in a book about King and Lyndon B. Johnson "with Hoover hovering" but, he says, "I didn't end up buying it." Noting that period movies with casts of thousands can be exponentially more expensive than most films, Chubb adds: "The trick always is getting the audience to leave the house and go and pay money to see your movie. And that can be hard with historical drama, unless there's a great love story -- and preferably a great tragic love story -- at the heart of it."

The movie business, explains Saxon, is based on the notion of "comparables," whereby past performance of a similar property is taken into account before a project is greenlighted: "So you say, 'Okay, if this superhero movie does even half of what that superhero movie did, it'll be successful.' If you try to call up the comparables on a movie like 'Parting the Waters,' they don't exist. So on the basis of the business evidence, making an epic civil rights story can seem like a big risk. But on the other hand, it's never a big risk to make a great story. And the civil rights story is certainly the great story of my generation."