Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 10, 1993 TAG: 9307100343
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACKIE HYMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
It also helps if you're a father.
"Being a father is part of it," said Carl Franklin, who directed the two-part HBO production of "Laurel Avenue," the story of an extended working class family in Minneapolis-St. Paul. "Directing is a very paternal-maternal process."
Having two teen-age children affected the way he visualized the younger characters, Franklin said, and also made him a better director.
"There was a time when I would have insisted everything conform to what was in my mind at the beginning," he said of his evolution as a director, following a long acting career. "Directing, like fatherhood, is taking the best of things and allowing them to run and grow."
"Laurel Avenue," a slice-of-life story that takes place during one weekend, premieres tonight at 10. It stars Mary Alice, Juanita Jennings, Rhonda Stubbins, Vonte Sweet and Mel Winkler.
Franklin cast his son, Marcus, 17, and daughter, Caira, 15, in small roles after auditioning them. Marcus plays a young man named Lamar, and Caira is a cheerleader at a basketball game.
The work originally was planned as a series of six half-hours, but was rewritten into two longer episodes after receiving input from Franklin.
"I decided that the premise of the film is that family love leads to survival," he said. "Then, you can set up your opposition - drugs, sibling rivalry, adolescent rebelliousness, sexuality, responsibility vs. desire, expecting love vs. wanting respect."
"Little things that go on in our own personal lives that are not necessarily headline news are still big to us, and that, I think, is the vein that we're trying to tap into," Franklin said.
"It deals with such a broad spectrum of conditions within one family. Most of the time, in depicting a black family, we generally see them either depicted in a very stark urban environment where conditions are abjectly horrible . . . or it's the Cosby show, everything's very pristine. We're hoping to tap into something that has not been mined yet, and that is the universal values of black life."
Franklin hopes "Laurel Avenue" will appeal to a wide range of viewers.
"There's an implicit intention to reach the black audience, but I believe the American public, the general public, is interested in human values," he said. "Overall, I want to reach the audience in general, but I think the only way to do that with ethnic material is to deal with the ethnicity. If you homogenize it, if you dilute it, you're offering them nothing."
He also believes the wider community shares the concern that materialism has distracted many people from deeper values.
"The advertising industry has created such a discontent with what you have," Franklin said. "They tell you you smell bad, you need another deodorant; that piece of furniture is getting old, you should get new furniture; that car is getting old, you'd better get another car.
"You're always in a situation of being unhappy with what you have," he said. "I think 98 percent of us are neurotic because of it."
A native of the San Francisco Bay area, Franklin studied history and dramatic arts at the University of California, Berkeley. He began his career on the East Coast, acting with the New York Shakespeare Festival, then moved to Los Angeles.
He appeared as a regular on three television series: "Caribe," "Fantastic Journey" and "McClain's Law." He also made recurring appearances on "The A-Team."
In 1986, he entered the American Film Institute and earned a masters degree in directing.
"I don't know what my motives for being an actor were, and it got to the point where I wasn't doing a lot that was satisfying," Franklin said. "I get off on watching actors do what I never could. I'm amazed by them. I enjoy communicating with them and taking them to the next level."
He found work shooting low-budget action pictures on location for Roger Corman's Concorde Films. It turned out to be a trial by fire as he landed in the middle of near-revolutions in the Philippines and Peru.
"It literally was guerrilla filmmaking," Franklin said.
He went on to direct the acclaimed feature film "One False Move," the story of a small-town police chief pitted against three urban killers.
As part of a two-picture deal with Tristar, Franklin is currently developing a film about a black detective in the 1940s.
He said his experience as an actor has shaped his approach to directing.
"That is the area through which I see the story," he said. "That even dictates where I put the camera. I'm not interested in the pretty shot. I want good composition, but I want to photograph the emotion, what's going on underneath."
by CNB