IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT

By Jack E. White

Say what you will about Spike Lee's uneven talents as a film director, there is no gainsaying his entrepreneurial zeal or commitment to enhancing the black presence in Hollywood. Case in point: Get On the Bus, Lee's celebration of the Million Man March, which opens on Oct. 16, the first anniversary of the event. Apart from its subject matter, the movie is nothing special. But in its unprecedented method of financing, Bus represents an important breakthrough for racial equity. Its entire budget came from black male investors inspired by the march's message of self-reliance. Says Lee: "If we really wanted this film to come out correct, we had to do it ourselves."

Ironically, the idea for Bus did not originate with blacks but with Jewish producer Barry Rosenbush, who sensed the movie potential in a television-news story about the bonding that occurred among a group of black men from Los Angeles who met on a bus trip to the march. But, as Lee puts it, Rosenbush and his partner, Bill Borden, quickly realized that "being Jewish, it would have been very hard for them to pull it off without some brothers up in there." Rosenbush and Borden recruited Reuben Cannon, an African American and one of Hollywood's top casting directors, as a co-producer. He in turn brought Lee aboard.

All along, the notion was to make the film quickly enough to get it into theaters this week, when Louis Farrakhan is scheduled to stage a World's Day of Atonement that is sure to inspire nostalgia among those who attended last year's convocation. Lee and his partners were also determined to make the movie on a shoestring budget of $2.4 million. The director waived his usual $5 million fee and worked for scale, as did the entire cast, including such well-known actors as Ossie Davis, Charles Dutton and Andre Braugher. The combination of low cost, big names and a built-in audience made Bus an attractive project, and Columbia Pictures offered to finance it. But Lee saw it as an opportunity to break into the white-dominated world of film financing. "I said to Reuben, 'If you and me can't raise a puny, minuscule, pooh-butt $2.4 million, then we both need to be shot.'"

Cannon and Lee drew up a list of wealthy black men and asked them to bankroll the film. Among those who responded: actors Danny Glover, Wesley Snipes and Robert Guillaume; San Antonio Spurs basketball player Charles D. Smith; record producer Jheryl Busby; businessman Olden Lee; Black Entertainment Television chief Bob Johnson; and O.J. Simpson lawyer Johnnie Cochran. Each chipped in a minimum of $100,000. Because the film has been sold to Columbia Pictures for $3.6 million, their investment has already been repaid--with interest.

The script was hastily pulled together by Reggie Rock Bythewood, a producer on TV's New York Undercover. Perhaps because of its low budget and speedy production, the resulting movie has the feel of a made-for-cable special rather than a big-screen epic. It draws heavily on the cliched formula of war pictures like The Dirty Dozen, in which strangers from different ethnic backgrounds are thrown together by fate and united by shared adversity. In Bus, of course, all the main characters are African-American men, so the diversity arises from their differing socioeconomic backgrounds and sexual orientations: a disaffected gay couple, a biracial L.A. cop whose father was murdered by a black hoodlum, a reformed gang banger, a fatherly bus driver (Dutton), an egocentric actor (played to the hilt by Braugher) and an elderly victim of corporate downsizing (Davis) who has lost everything but his African drum. Since in post-civil-rights America this motley crew would have faced no greater danger than the boredom of a three-day bus ride, Lee concocts an anachronistic confrontation with two red-neck state troopers as the bus passes through the South.

Floating above it all is the presence of Farrakhan, who is never seen in the film but is incessantly talked about in reverential terms. One character praises him for "being in the forefront of cleaning up the black man for more than 40 years"; another proclaims that the Nation of Islam leader is "the only free black man in America." Less discussed is Farrakhan's notorious anti-Semitism, which was why many black men who subscribed to the Million Man March's message of spiritual rebirth and atonement nevertheless felt a deep ambivalence about taking part in it.

But in the end, Bus' failings and omissions are far less important than the fact that it was made at all. Says Lee: "The success of this film will make it easier for us to raise, say, $10 million the next time around." That is still a lot less than the $30 million a typical Hollywood production requires. But it is a definite stride toward the goal of enabling blacks to get control of a bigger piece of Hollywood's image-making machinery--the only means of guaranteeing that their own story is told in their own way.