Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 24, 1990 TAG: 9003242600
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES ENDRST THE HARTFORD COURANT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When he was finished, he had a Pulitzer Prize but little in the way of easy answers concerning his subject - the tumultuous events surrounding the desegregation of Boston's public school system in the 1970s.
If anything, Lukas says, writing "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families" left him more unsure of his own views than when he began.
Lukas hopes viewers of "Common Ground," CBS' four-hour adaptation of his 1985 book, will feel much the same way.
"The principal feeling that I wanted a reader to come away from this book with was confusion," said Lukas at a recent news conference in New York promoting the miniseries, which will be broadcast Sunday and Monday (at 9 p.m. on Channel 7 in the Roanoke viewing area).
"It seemed to me that people (have) these preconceptions of what they would do in a situation like this - busing is good, busing is bad, these are the moral imperatives in a situation like this. And I came into Boston with those preconceptions and what I learned . . . was that this was an incredibly complex situation in which there are no easy answers."
Jane Curtin, Richard Thomas and C.C.H. Pounder star as the respective heads of three very different households involved and affected by the events and issues of the time in very different ways.
Curtin - as far afield from her "Kate & Allie" persona as you can get - plays Alice McGoff, the feisty Irish-Catholic widowed mother of seven from the Charlestown section of Boston who was active in the anti-busing group called Powder Keg.
Thomas ("The Waltons") is Colin Diver, a Harvard-educated lawyer with an idealistic agenda who goes to work for Boston Mayor Kevin White (James Farentino), only to be disillusioned. Putting his liberal beliefs and his family to the test, Diver moves into Boston's racially mixed South End.
Pounder ("Bagdad Cafe") is cast as Rachel Twymon (who died a few months ago), a divorced mother raising her six children in predominantly black Roxbury, who is fighting - like the Divers and McGoffs - for the future of her children.
In a brief author's note in "Common Ground," Lukas wrote, "The three families at the center of my story were not selected as statistical averages or norms. On the contrary, I was drawn to them by a special intensity, an engagement with life, which made them stand out from their social context. At first I thought I read clear moral imperatives in the geometry of their intersecting lives, but the more time I spent with them, the harder it became to assign easy labels of guilt or virtue. The realities of urban America, when seen through the lives of actual city dwellers, proved far more complicated than I had imagined."
Curtin, who joined Lukas, Thomas, Pounder and members of the real-life families portrayed in the film at the press conference, grew up in Wellesley, Mass., and recalls, "Wellesley wasn't very different (from Boston). I mean, it was the same kind of incestuousness that you had in the inner cities. There were no black families in Wellesley. There were no Jewish families in Wellesley when I was growing up. Growing up in Boston, you're very aware of racial tension. It's there, and it's not just black and white. The neighborhoods are so - or were at that time - so clearly defined. You knew when you went from an Irish neighborhood to an Italian neighborhood or to a Polish neighborhood or a black neighborhood. It was all very clear."
Curtin said candidly she wasn't making the film for reasons of political or social morality.
"I've never really felt personally strong about anything in my life," she said, explaining instead that by coincidence she was reading Lukas' book when she was approached to do the project.
"I felt as though I knew a little bit of the background; I knew a little bit of the history, and so it was somebody handing me something wonderful on a platter."
At least one reporter from the Boston area, however, thought "Common Ground" might not be so wonderful for the city - coming, as it does, in an environment of renewed racial discord stirred up by the Charles and Carol Stuart shooting.
But "Common Ground" isn't just about Boston, just about education, or busing or racism.
"Bostonians have no reason to be ashamed - although these were painful times," Lukas said. "For Bostonians in this film, read Americans. These are issues that were heightened in Boston because Boston has a way of heightening everything. These are issues, these are dilemmas, this is pain that is shared by all Americans. And I would hope that people would see the film and think not about what went wrong in Boston, but what has gone wrong in America."
Memo: correction