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103 Violence Sells: So They’re Telling Charles Burnett Wolf Schneider/1995 Published in LA Weekly, June 2, 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author. Is it the public that’s not interested in African American movies unless they are violent and action-laden, or is it the film industry that’s stuck on pressing black filmmakers into the urban-ghetto-guerrilla mold of Do the Right Thing, Menace II Society, and Boyz n the Hood? To see the trailer for Charles Burnett’s current film, The Glass Shield, is to be bombarded with a fast-moving hip-hop cacophony of arrest and interrogation. But the movie itself uses a jazz score and complex drama to examine corruption’s insidious spread and the pitfalls of racial and gender stereotyping. Burnett’s last film, 1990’s To Sleep with Anger, was distributed by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. Marketed to the art-house crowd, it drew fine reviews but a disappointing $1.2 million in box-office grosses. This is probably another reason why Miramax Films is emphasizing the action for The Glass Shield so heavily. “All of the action is in the trailer—basically, it’s all the action out of the movie,” says the film’s producer Carolyn Schroeder. “The trailer makes it look boom-boom-boom, but it’s not.” Says Burnett, “They try to get the high points and appeal to the visceral.” Such commercially skewed targeting to the black male audience aged fourteen to twenty-four may be limiting, but it’s better than being ignored, which is what happened to Burnett with To Sleep with Anger. Since its theatrical distribution rights went one way (Goldwyn) and video another (Sony SVS), the film received a paltry theatrical release of roughly thirty prints. “Anything is a step up from Goldwyn,” Burnett says. Then worries, “They’re probably going to kill me.” 104 charles burnett: inter views Despite being one of the most highly lauded filmmakers in artistic circles—he’s the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and his first feature, Killer of Sheep, has been singled out by the Library of Congress for preservation (although good luck trying to find it on video)—Burnett is still on shaky ground in the filmmaking business. Seated at the dining-room table of a tony Cheviot Hills residence replete with sweeping staircase and five bedrooms, Burnett is self-contained and soft-spoken. He never removes his black leather jacket. The house is not his; it’s headquarters for Carolyn Schroeder and Gwen Field’s Picture Perfect development company. It was Schroeder who raised the funds for The Glass Shield from CiBy 2000, which financed the under-$5 million picture and then sold domestic theatrical and video distribution rights to Miramax. This mansion is worlds from the streets of the 77th precinct in South Central L.A., where The Glass Shield is set. The movie is based on the experiences of John Eddie Johnson, a cop who found he had to sell out his own integrity in order to buy into the system. Miramax will release The Glass Shield on 330 prints in 24 cities, and is promoting it with 4,000 trailers and two 30-second and three 15-second TV ads. At Burnett’s request, KJM3 Entertainment Group, an “African diaspora” marketing organization that worked on Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, has been enlisted for six weeks and a budget of about $150,000. The company will spread the word to churches, black cop groups like the Guardians, black employee unions, and the National Association of Black Social Workers. Test marketing for The Glass Shield was as highly targeted as the ad campaign: the film was screened in the South Bronx, where a low-income , fifteen-to-twenty-five-year-old audience screamed in protest at the hero’s emotionalism in the original downbeat ending. “The group that was there were more or less rap-oriented kinds of kids who lived with people getting beat up and wanting the good guys to get justice,” reasons Burnett. Given the option of a reshoot funded by Miramax, he reluctantly availed himself, opting for a more commercial ending. No dialogue was altered, but now the acting suggests a more positive, redemptive resolution. “It’s more obviously upbeat, rather than sort of ambiguous. More of a closure.” According to Burnett, more major compromises had actually occurred earlier, with CiBy 2000 scrutinizing casting and chopping scenes. “In post-production it was...

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