PEE-WEE’S COWBOY : Busy Larry Fishburne Keeps On Running

Larry Fishburne is one of the busiest black actors today in films and theater.

“I just keep going,” he says. “I’ve been real lucky.”

Fishburne was seen in two recent features, “Cadence” and “Class Action,” and appears this summer in the coming-of-age drama “Boyz N the Hood,” which marks the feature debut of 22-year-old black filmmaker John Singleton. Fishburne also is appearing at San Diego’s Old Globe Playhouse in the West Coast premiere of August Wilson’s new play, “Two Trains Running.”

Fishburne has been involved with “Two Trains Running” since its world premiere last year at the Yale Repertory Theater. After the run concludes this month in San Diego, he plans to stay with the production, which is headed, eventually, for Broadway.

“Doing theater makes you feel like a real actor,” he says. “I have tried to do one play a year since 1982. You do films for a while and because they take so long to get made, it’s a year or two after the fact that the film comes out. By then you have forgotten about the work. It’s nice to get the feedback from a theater audience. It’s a gas.”

Fishburne began his acting career at age 10 and made his film debut two years later in 1975’s “Cornbread, Earl and Me.” He jokes that he got his education at the University of Hard Knocks located in the jungles of the Philippines, where he worked on Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic, “Apocalypse Now.”

“I was 14 when I started the film and 17 when the film was completed,” Fishburne says. “I had been told I was going to be there for three months and I ended up being there for 18 months. When I came back I thought I was a Vietnam veteran and so did a lot of other people.”

These days, filmmakers tailor roles specifically for Fishburne. “Apocalypse” star Martin Sheen, who directed “Cadence,” fashioned the role of the street-wise military prisoner Stokes for him.

Even Pee-wee Herman came knocking at Fishburne’s door with an offer to play the recurring role of Cowboy Curtis on CBS’ award-winning children’s series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

“I met Pee-wee in Los Angeles,” Fishburne recalls, “and he called me after we had known each other for four years and said he was looking for a black cowboy. So I put on my cowboy gear and I got to be John Wayne.”

Fishburne is picky about his roles. After working with Spike Lee in “School Daze,” Lee wrote the pivotal role of Radio Rayheem in “Do the Right Thing” for Fishburne, but the actor turned it down. “I didn’t like the script,” he says, tersely.

He also turned down the opportunity to play an orderly in “Awakenings” with his idol Robert De Niro, opting instead for a role he considered more substantial, that of Gene Hackman’s law partner in “Class Action.”

Fishburne says he’s thrilled that black filmmakers are finally getting the opportunity to make features. “I always hoped it would happen,” he says. “But it remains to be seen if it is just a passing kind of fad or something that’s going to have a bigger and better life.”

Movie audiences can expect to see at least 10 more feature films from black filmmakers this year, including Spike Lee’s latest, “Jungle Fever,” starring Wesley Snipes of “New Jack City”; “True Identity,” directed by Charles Lane of the acclaimed “Sidewalk Stories”; Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood”; “House Party 2,” the sequel to last year’s hit film starring the rap group Kid ‘n Play; “Talkin’ Dirty After Dark,” directed by TV producer Topper Carew; “A Rage in Harlem” starring Gregory Hines and Forest Whitaker and directed by actor Bill Duke, and 19-year-old Matty Rich’s “Straight Out of Brooklyn.”