SUMMER MOVIE SPECIAL : ‘Yeah, It’s Sweet . . . ‘ : Star of Spike Lee’s ‘Jungle Fever’ and one of Hollywood’s hot properties, Wesley Snipes savors the moment and explains the past

NEW YORK —  He is on the phone to the coast in electric-blue Armani and with a career in full-throttle. “Nooooo, no, no, no, no, no--the Chateau is out! No A.C. I am not down with the Chateau.”

Wesley Snipes is nailing down his housing arrangements for a summer shoot in L.A. He’s been home in New York barely a week--seeing friends, hitting the Apollo for old time’s sake, doing the rounds with the press. He’s headlining two of the most talked-about films this year--Mario van Peebles’ “New Jack City” and Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever”--and another two to come next year: Neil Jimenez’s “Waterdance” and Ron Shelton’s “White Men Can’t Jump.” Now the actor is being courted by Lee for the upcoming “Malcolm X,” in which Denzel Washington stars as the Black Muslim leader. Meanwhile, he is due at People magazine in an hour for a photo shoot for this year’s “Beautiful People” issue, then he’s off to Cannes, where “Jungle Fever” is in competition.

“Yeah, it’s sweet,” says Snipes, “If I was a young white guy doing the films I’ve done, I’d be making a million easy.”

By all accounts, Snipes is a charismatic and versatile actor, one who is likened to Oscar-winner Washington for his ability to play drug lords and yuppies with chilling verisimilitude. Like Washington, Snipes is one of the key players in the current industry mania for all things African-American. His performance as Nino Brown, the mesmerizing drug lord in “New Jack City,” won him nearly unanimous praise--the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael hailed Snipes as one of the most impressive members of a new generation of American actors--and a comparison or two to Brando’s performance in “The Godfather.”

Now comes “Jungle Fever” (which will be released nationwide June 7), Lee’s much-anticipated take on interracial relationships, which stars Snipes, Lee, Annabella Sciorra and Anthony Quinn. In this contemporary star-crossed lovers tale, a married black architect from Harlem has an affair with his Italian-American secretary from Bensonhurst. Snipes trades in Nino Brown’s gold chains and firearms for the tortoiseshell glasses and drafting table of Flipper Purify. The change is astonishing, and more comparisons to Washington are probably inevitable.

“Oh, man, ‘You’re the new Denzel!’ ‘Denzel can’t do any better than that!’ I hear that all the time,” says Snipes with a partly rueful grin. “That’s not the case at all. If there can be Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Sean Penn, Kiefer Sutherland all working at the same time, then why can’t it be that way for African-American actors? Hollywood’s been in this slow change for a long time, but they still have this attitude that there can be only one (black American) who can be the new Spike Lee or the new Denzel.”

For Snipes, the recent spate of critical attention is decidedly double-edged--nationwide praise for his artistry that still smacks of racial pigeonholing.

“I don’t avoid talking about race. I celebrate it,” says the actor. “I don’t say talk to me as an actor--that’s a given. I’m also a black actor. That’s a given. So we can talk about it all together. It also says to all the black Americans out there that I am conscious of who I am and where I come from--one of them, the hip-hop bloods, who got out but who is still conscious of where I came from.”

Sitting here in his press agent’s office, dressed in that electric blue suit, black velvet cloque, with a lone gold hoop glinting against his cheek, Snipes is a commanding and articulate spokesman both for his own ambitions and for an entire generation of black Americans now working in the Hollywood mainstream. During the 50-minute conversation, Snipes spoke frankly about “Jungle Fever,” Spike Lee, Malcolm X and the relationships between black and white America. He spoke forcefully but not without humor, often with such energy that words sometimes gave way to strings of sounds.

“OK, then, let’s be candid,” he says, removing his jacket, leaning back in his chair, signaling his press rep to bring him a bottle of wine--red, please. “We got 50 minutes, let’s kick it!”

In the final scenes of “Jungle Fever,” the affair between Purify and Angie Tucci (Sciorra) is coming to an end due to economic and cultural differences between the lovers, their respective families and the issue of children. The scene ends with Purify refusing to consider having children with his white girlfriend. “No babies,” says Purify. “No mixed-race babies. They come out a bunch of mixed nuts.” The scene seems to advocate cultural separatism. Lee says that his film is “not saying all interracial relationships can’t work, just this one. . . . The film is about sexual myths and boundaries and what happens when you cross them.”

For Snipes, the film raises the larger question of racial inter-relatedness. “Black folks understand white folks very well. You have been the ones to initiate legislation, to decide what looks good, what doesn’t, what is good conduct and what is bad conduct, what is acceptable slap-on-the-hand crime and what is an incredible, moral and spiritual offense,” says the actor. “So it is not about us understanding you, its about you understanding us.”

Lee says the idea for “Jungle Fever”--exploring inter-cultural relatedness within the bounds of interracial relationships--came to him when Yusuf Hawkins, a black Brooklyn resident, was shot and killed by white youths who mistakenly thought he was visiting a girlfriend in Brooklyn’s Italian neighborhood of Bensonhurst. “I don’t see how anyone can live in New York City and not look at this film and think of Yousef,” says the director. “They killed him when they thought he was coming to see his Gina Feliciano, when they thought he was her boyfriend. That was a lynching.”

Although Lee edited the film to eliminate an implausible Hawkins-like foray by Snipes’ character into Bensonhurst, the film retains a decidedly separatist view of black and white America--the two lovers abandon each other to return to their families, their tribes, and Purify leaves his prestigious Manhattan architectural firm to set up his own black-owned business. “I don’t know if the film is an argument for racial purity,” says Snipes. “I think it’s about how color-conscious this society really is.”

It is a contemporary cultural distinction that Snipes says has historical origins. “Remember the African-American people were the ones that were not invited here but were brought here. We didn’t come here looking for freedom,” he says. “Our cultural identity, our religion, our social order was stripped from us and we were forced to adopt the ways of our slave masters. And to this day it still reverberates.”

Those cultural differences, Snipes says, are explored in his character of Purify, one of the richest, most complex protagonists the actor has played, “a man who knows the truth and chooses not to speak on it,” as Snipes describes it. It is is a role Lee wrote specifically for the actor. “I tend to cast actors who I feel are very natural,” says Lee. “And Wesley has that as well as a power that we needed for this film.”

“Flip comes from the ‘hood, grew up there and had to experience many of the same things that Nino Brown had to,” says Snipes. “But he made the decision to go corporate and define himself as a yuppie. He says, ‘There is no racism. This does not happen to me, it happens to other people. I am educated, I am an architect, I’m a professional, let me be judged by my merit and my merit alone.’ ”

That color-blind premise, Snipes says, is challenged when Purify begins the affair and begins to encounter “the subtle (discriminations) that maybe neither one understood at the beginning.” Although the relationship eventually unravels, “Jungle Fever” probes one of the least-discussed subjects in contemporary race relations: As Snipes puts it, “how people’s behavior is motivated by (sexual) myths--good or bad.

“We are dealing in a society where white men are always trying to keep the brothers down,” says Snipes. “And Flipper is now being put into this position of being professionally blocked by his two white bosses. How does he get around this? One part of him says, ‘Maybe if I have this white woman by my side you will treat me differently.’ . . . And it does look that way in society when you see the number of football players, athletes and some artists who have (white) women by their sides--they do seem to be considered less confrontational, more acceptable to white society.

“But there is another part of Flipper--and this perspective is a little more accurate with my experience of African-American men dealing with white women. (It) is when you finally have acquired enough economic stature that they have to deal with you, you remember: ‘The one thing you never wanted me to have, the one thing you never wanted to get into the hands of me, the bushman, the monkey--all those messed-up stereotypes equated with African-American men--your white women. Well, that’s what I’m going to get and when I get it, bam, how do you like that now?’ ”

It is a decidedly sexist and exploitative perspective on interracial relationships that he says is “wrong, categorically wrong, because when you put yourself in a position of doing something like that, then you have divorced yourself from the opportunity to experience natural attraction for another human being.”

“It’s also a trap,” adds the actor. “Because you think you are going to win the game because you finally get the prize, but you’re still not even on the team.” (It is also a perspective not shared by all the film’s principals. Sciorra, who has refused all interviews connected with the film, purportedly disagreed with the film’s premise.)

“There are a lot of complex issues when you are involved with a white woman,” says the Brooklyn-based Snipes, who is the father of a 2-year-old son who lives with his mother in Connecticut. “For one thing, living in the black community, you could forget it, the sisters would kill me. But also, living in an oppressive racist society, it is a slap in the face to see your heroes walking around with someone of the oppressor’s race. I have heard people of the Jewish faith talk about being opposed to their children having a relationship with a child of Nazi parents and that’s considered logical. But when we talk about it, it’s called reverse racism.”

Snipes’ candid assessment of such thorny social issues is similar to the cinematic ethos of Lee, the de factor leader in the new wave of African-American directors working in film. What Snipes says he admires in Lee, is that the director “is not just making comedies to anesthetize the pain. No, Spike is exposing to 50-60 million people the closet things of our society. I love Robert (Townsend) and I love Keenen (Ivory Wayans), they are making beautiful films, but at the same time you have to balance humorous films with ones that raise the consciousness of the people to evaluate where you are in a particular place, time and neighborhood.”

Snipes says it was a social conscience that also attracted him to play Nino Brown in “New Jack City,” Van Peebles’ low-budget sleeper. Snipes has said he was saddened by the reports of rioting and looting in some cities when the film first opened, but objects to what he has called a double standard being used against the film’s young black audience.

“They oversold the showings by 1,500 tickets and the theater owners didn’t give their money back,” he says. “The same thing would happen with a Menudo concert, or the Rolling Stones. What is the greater issue is that people came away from the film with realizing the problem--that this was the rise and fall of a little genius who under different circumstances could have been a Mike Milken.”

He was born in Florida in 1963, one of seven children belonging to his now-divorced parents. He never lived with his father, who soon moved to South Carolina with four of the children; Snipes, a sister and another half sister were moved to the South Bronx by his mother. “She was on my case a lot,” says Snipes, who remains close with his mother today. “She was hard, she made it difficult.”

As with many a child with an inner-city upbringing, sidestepping involvement with neighborhood gangs was part of Snipes’ elementary school years. “It was tricky,” he says. “That’s what it was, the world, the cats, the gangs.” But Snipes early on showed talent as a performer, first as a dancer and a singer, later as an actor. He attended New York’s High School for the Performing Arts for two years before his mother moved the family to Orlando, Fla.-- where she worked as a window-washer at Walt Disney World and Snipes “fell into doing street theater at school and it became obvious that this was going to be my groove.”

Later Snipes moved back to New York and studied acting at the State University of New York at Purchase, N.Y.--one of four black students in his class. David Garfield, an acting teacher, recalls Snipes as “being so obviously gifted. He was extremely funny, he could do straight drama, he could sing and he would stop shows with the dance numbers that he had choreographed. He also exhibited a strong black political consciousness even then.”

It was during those years that Snipes began to pursue two additional interests--martial arts and Malcolm X, the black nationalist leader. “It was 1980 and they were showing a documentary on Malcolm on campus and I was mesmerized,” recalls Snipes. “It changed everything. . . . His own life so paralleled a lot of young men’s who were trapped and wanting to lash out, wanting to scream and not knowing who to scream at, until like a powder keg you burst and pow, you’re in jail and ‘Man, I never meant that.’ Malcolm transformed many a young man and my priorities come from the effect that Malcolm had upon us.”

That ardent political sensibility, combined with the physical discipline required by his practice of martial artistry, as well as his talents as a performer, quickly vaulted Snipes to a fast track in New York theater circles. After graduation he swiftly obtained lead roles in John Pielmeier’s Off Broadway production of “Boys of Winter,” which also starred Matt Dillon and Andrew McCarthy, the Lincoln Center production of Noble laureate Wole Soyinka’s “Death and the King’s Horsemen” and Emily Mann’s Broadway production of “Execution of Justice,” in which Snipes played a drag queen, Sister Boom-Boom. “His energy was amazing,” recalls Mann. “I remember when he auditioned. I had never seen a man put on high heels and walk that way and all of us said, ‘That guy is going to be a star.’ ”

Indeed, it was that flamboyant role that landed Snipes his first feature film role, as a boxer in the 1986 film “Streets of Gold.” From there, Snipes played opposite Michael Jackson in Martin Scorsese’s video for the song “Bad.” More film roles soon followed--playing Willie Mays Hays in “Major League” and a football player in “Wildcats,” a role for which he turned down a bit part in Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.” This summer he begins working with Shelton in a comedy about pickup basketball players, “White Men Can’t Jump.” This fall, Snipes will play a featured role in Lee’s “Malcolm X.”

“Spike and I feel the same way about Malcolm, which is why it is fitting that we do this film,” says Snipes. “We have been afforded the opportunity to pay homage to a man that, unlike Martin Luther King, has gotten very little respect and he deserves it.”

Snipes says his characters--whether a ball player, a disciple of Malcolm X, a drug lord or a yuppie architect--are forged from both psychological and physical bases. “I look for what’s underneath the script,” he says. “I am always wondering what would motivate him, what’s behind the lines. Then I go for a physical extension of that. Like for Nino, I covered my living room with photographs of panthers. For Flipper, I got the drafting table and started looking at the book and drawing architectural lines on a daily basis so it becomes part of my subconscious. By the time we roll camera, it’s there.”

More than an hour has passed and Snipes has worked through a glass or two of wine when the press agent opens the door and reminds him that he is due at People magazine for the “beautiful people” shoot. “Do I qualify?” the actor asks with a laugh. “What’s the criteria?” Snipes stands, slips back into his suit coat, realigns his black velvet hat and heads into the hallway where he is immediately surrounded by several of the press agency’s staff members asking for a quick autograph or a photo.

“It’s not just about money,” says Snipes, reaching for a pen and obligingly signing his name. “Some of the brothers are making more money that I do. It’s about what I symbolize--a young African-American man who is conscious of his cultural heritage in a society that doesn’t immediately accept that. I’m doing it, I’m getting away with that and getting paid for it!”

The actor’s voice trails off as he enters an elevator surrounded by admirers. Everyone rides down together in silence and then Snipes steps out into the late New York afternoon--a brilliant flash of blue on the sidewalk--and into a waiting limo, which snakes downtown bearing one of the year’s most beautiful people.