‘SOUL’ FOLKS

Why did the Negro wear a tux on his way to get a vasectomy?

I don’t know--why?

Because if he’s gonna be impotent, he might as well look impo’tant!

Nobody laughed on the Inglewood set of “Soul Man,” a comedy just wrapped for New World Pictures. Not white star C. Thomas Howell, sitting nearby in black makeup, brown contact lenses and an Afro wig. Not black co-star Rae Dawn Chong (who’s also part Irish, Chinese and Indian). Not executive producer Steve Tisch. Not director Steve Miner, who was putting the racist joke through its third or fourth take.

But some ticket buyers will undoubtedly guffaw at this and other racist japes that turn up in “Soul Man” when it’s released this fall.

“Some people will laugh at the (vasectomy) joke,” conceded Miner. “But by the end of the movie, they should feel bad about having laughed.”

It’s a chance Tisch--co-producer of the hit “Risky Business” with ex-partner Jon Avnet--is willing to take for a movie he hopes will be entertaining and carry a message about racism in the 1980s.

This time out, Tisch is into riskier business: The original screenplay for “Soul Man,” by Carol Black (who is white), is about a rich Caucasian kid who darkens his skin chemically to get into Harvard Law School on a minority scholarship, triggering plenty of misadventure. The idea is to comment on white attitudes about and behavior toward blacks, a “Black Like Me” of the youth genre. It also takes another risk that mainstream movies rarely do: an interracial love story.

Since a white actor performs the lead role in blackface, and because much of “Soul Man” is written and played broadly--well, if it misfires, it’s going to stir quite a ruckus and could be a personal embarrassment for all involved.

There’s the extra worry that “Soul Man” will end up looking like blatant exploitation--perhaps creating a new “whites-ploitation” genre.

Besides the broad comedy (including jokes about breast and penis size, both related to racial myths), you’ve got a director whose primary credits are in horror films (“Friday the 13th” II and III, “House”), a distributor not famous for tasteful marketing, and a $4.5-million budget for the non-union shoot that hardly allows for rich production values or leisurely development of character.

“In this movie particularly, it can be a problem,” Tisch admitted. “It could easily be a pure exploitation picture. Or it could be a very manipulative message picture. But I think with the story and with Tommy’s performance, it’s going to be first-rate.

“It’s not a racist picture at all. It pushes buttons in us to make us as whites look at how we relate to blacks. I’m hoping (black) groups rally behind and support the picture.”

Rae Dawn Chong, who plays a single mother and a law student, and Howell’s eventual love interest, considers the black-white issue both “the most important thing about this movie--and its danger zone.”

“It’s a tough line that we’re walking and I just pray that we’re doing it right,” she said. “If we are, you can’t not be enlightened by this movie.”

“Walking a fine line” seems the operative phrase on the production.

Take that vasectomy joke. Miner, the director, knew that actor Wally Ward, playing an obnoxious Harvard preppie, has to get his comeuppance--and audiences will need to share his discomfort. Otherwise, it will be just another racist joke that will generate yuks in theaters across America.

On the subsequent take, Ward emphasized his nervousness to Howell’s angry reaction. It worked. It was a print.

“The joke is not supposed to be funny,” Miner explained. “It’s one of the sensitive areas of the film. The point is that racist jokes are not funny. They make fun of a stereotype that is not true in day-to-day life.”

Yet the joke has to be well-told “or it won’t work at all.”

“And that’s the fine line that we’re treading. We hope, through a funny movie, to open the (viewers’) eyes and help them look beyond their own little insular world.

“There’s no way to do this film without offending somebody--on the white side or the black side. If we didn’t, then we’re not doing our job. But (we can’t tiptoe because) it’s got to have some reality, you know?”

Screenwriter Carol Black (who co-produces “Soul Man” with companion/partner Neal Marlens) started two years ago to write a comedy about a young white guy who can’t find a job, darkens his skin and takes advantage of minority-hiring quotas.

“But I didn’t like what that said about affirmative action.” So she came up with a new plot: a rich kid, Mark Watson, whose father cuts him off financially just as he’s about to enter Harvard Law School. He figures that racism is a thing of the past--”It’s the Cosby decade! America loves black people!”--until he is faced with prejudice at every level, including white liberal racism from a patronizing co-ed who is sexually attracted only to blacks.

The script is brisk, full of sight gags--and decidedly short on polemics: Mark in a black disco dance contest, up against a skilled black player at basketball, or in fantasy sequences as he’s seen by an upper-class white family (pimp, stud, Prince-like rock star).

The diminutive Swarthmore graduate was confident that she had a marketable screenplay (her first). But “there was a point when I worried so much that it wouldn’t get made right that I almost put it in a drawer.” Instead, she and Marlens (they were executive producers of “Growing Pains” for ABC last year) sat down with their agents and made a list of preferred producers they thought would handle “Soul Man” sensitively.

Tisch, she said, “was at the top of that list, because ‘Risky Business’ could have been so vulgar and it was very sophisticated.”

(Tisch has also co-produced a number of highly regarded TV movies dealing with sensitive subject matter, including “The Burning Bed,” about wife-battering, and “Silence of the Heart,” dealing with teen suicide.)

Tisch said he bid for “Soul Man” as soon as he read it.

“It was an original, not a copy,” he explained. “And it addresses issues that have not been addressed in a long time in a feature film, issues of racism and interracial relationships. When you take a hot issue, one that’s going to be troubling to people, I think the way to do it is with humor. You invite the audience to be on your side.”

Then the project started an uphill battle--every studio turned it down.

“It’s a lot easier to get a ‘Porky’s’ made than to get a ‘Soul Man’ made,” Tisch said. “As with ‘Risky Business,’ the studios identified the material as too controversial, too risky. And they’d rather say no than take a chance. What I responded to--the controversy--was what scared the studios. I liked the idea that audiences were going to have a problem with it. But a lot of studios were afraid it would come off real bad. They were afraid to put their name on it.

“I sometimes heard the specific comment (from studio executives), ‘Some of us feel the material is racist.’ I told them that it addresses the race issue and asks a white audience to look at its own racist tendencies.

“When I pressed them, some said, ‘Not everybody here sees it that way.’ I (also) think many studio executives read it superficially and just felt they’d rather be safe than sorry.”

By the end of 1985, he gave up on the studios. “Soul Man” landed briefly at Atlantic Releasing, but Tisch thought the money (“a little over $2 million”) and 25-day shooting schedule offered was insufficient “to make the movie the way I’d promised Carol Black we would.” The project eventually settled at New World, which agreed to a $4.5-million budget, a 40-day shoot (still short by studio standards) and a voice for Tisch in the marketing.

Miner came aboard as director--Tisch felt the humor and humanity of Miner’s horror flicks raised them above the rest--and casting began in early February.

Tisch offered the lead role to Anthony Michael Hall, Tim Robbins (who stars in the upcoming “Howard the Duck”), Anthony Edwards and Val Kilmer (both of “Top Gun”), and John Cusack (“The Sure Thing”). Cusack wanted to remain in college, Tisch said, and the others were committed to projects or vaguely “unavailable.”

Meanwhile, Howell, who got good notices for “The Outsiders” and had “The Hitcher” about to open, was campaigning vigorously for the part.

“It was a real good example,” said Tisch, “of an actor really wanting something and convincing the producers of that. I admire that--Tommy made it clear this wasn’t just another job to him. He seemed to sincerely want to do something special, to step into another level (career-wise). That he was generally ready as an actor to take the risk.”

Howell, 19 (he plays a 22-year-old in the film), said he “laughed hysterically when I heard the story over the phone” and coveted the part. But his agents and managers were less sure.

“We had to sit down and think about it,” Howell said. “We went over it and over it and over it. I was always the one who was positive and wanted to do it.” Why? “Nine out of 10 scripts I get are about getting laid and drinking beer. But ‘Soul Man’ is about something.”

He’s also aware that the picture rests more than usual on the credibility of his performance.

“We knew that going in. The whole black-white thing is going to stir a lot of controversy. A lot of people are going to be upset, or love it. If people can sit down with an open mind, though, I think it will turn a lot of heads around.”

Agents for Rae Dawn Chong and James Earl Jones (who plays a no-nonsense law professor) contacted Tisch, and the two were cast quickly.

Chong responded to the political and social issues in the script “because racism is as strong today as it ever was, it’s just more insidious and quiet.”

“(The script touches upon) all those hidden and subtle things that only happen to you if you’re black, but that you can’t explain to anyone,” she said. “Like the time I wanted to go into a Cartier shop in my hotel and the woman wouldn’t let me in. Or having people move their purses when you get into an elevator. You don’t have to be preachy about it (in a movie), but I think we have to enlighten society.”

Jones, the black Oscar nominee for “The Great White Hope,” which also dealt with racism and black-white love, liked the script for other reasons.

“I cannot measure (social) worth in a script, I can only measure laughs,” said the deep-voiced actor. “I sat and read the script in privacy and found myself laughing out loud. It was special. It took a comic approach to the problem of someone changing racial identity. Comedy can take us into areas that tragedy cannot.

“They asked me if I found it offensive, and I said it treads a line--but satire must tread a line. You cannot please everybody. The writer’s vision is not everyone’s, but that should not stop the writer from having that vision.”

Tisch and Miner, knowing Howell’s appearance in the film would be critical, even auditioned makeup artists.

Devorah Fischa was the fifth in a long day to try her skills on Howell. Tisch, Miner and Howell’s representatives stood judiciously by while she worked.

“Tommy was red and raw when I got to him,” said Fischa, a native of Trinidad who has worked primarily on music videos. “He was really depressed--you could see it in his face. (After previous makeup attempts), he had been looking orange or like an Indian.

“I wanted the job so badly, I put every bit of black makeup in my box on him.”

She even covered his hands. It still didn’t convince the nervous executives. Then she used her ace: She had brought along dark glasses and an Afro wig. Minutes after she put them on Howell, Tisch hired her.

During production, Fischa spent an hour each day applying two pancake and three oil bases to Howell. The result: He was a shade darker than Chong and, with the wig, looked black . . . sort of. (To cover the problem, Black has characters in the script observe from time to time: “There’s something funny about you.”)

Early on, the decision was made for Howell to speak naturally.

“The worst thing that could happen,” Chong said, “would be for Tommy to try to ‘act black’ and come off as a caricature.”

With filming finished in Inglewood and Boston (Harvard wouldn’t allow shooting on campus), Tisch will edit and then extensively test his picture--with possible sneaks in the South. A late summer opening would have been preferable to late fall, he admitted, but the production schedule wouldn’t allow it. Now he hopes for a good run through Thanksgiving. A “state-of-the-art black sound track” album is in the works at A&M; Records, featuring new tunes but including Sam and Dave’s classic “Soul Man” from 1967.

Tisch claims confidence that he can deliver a film that will rise above the exploitation pack. But he also knows tacky marketing can undercut the best intentions.

“I’m very concerned that it’s sold in a classy way,” he said. “So many pictures, particularly those sold to kids, start to look alike. My intent is to work with New World to come up with a campaign that lets the public know this picture is different. Every day, I think about the images I want to portray.”

One can project all kinds of reactions to this little movie that deals with big issues: black backlash, white backlash, careers marred, another mark against a film industry with a history of denigrating people of color.

Carol Black hopes that’s forgotten for a while.

“There’s a tendency with racial subject matter,” she said, “for people to prejudge you--that if you’re white, you’ll automatically do something racist. I just hope people will go with an open mind and enjoy it in the spirit with which it’s intended.

“I think its heart is in the right place. You end up rooting for a white person and a black person to be in love and raise children together. I hope that speaks for itself.”