| DGA’s AASC Honors Sidney Poitier
by Jerry Roberts
photos by Terry Lilly
DGA Member Sidney Poitier
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The African American Steering Committee (AASC) of the Directors Guild of America extended Sidney Poitier’s 74th birthday by an extra 24 hours when it honored his directing career on February 21, 2001.
A packed house in the Guild’s Theater 1 was treated to an evening of reminiscences, thanks, goodwill and talk about the craft of directing, particularly comedy.
Poitier made his directorial debut with the western, Buck and the Preacher, in 1972, followed by helming the tragic romance A Warm December. Then the big man’s grin turned to a troika of popular capers co-starring Bill Cosby: Uptown Saturday Night, Let’s Do It Again and A Piece of the Action. For his other four films, including Stir Crazy, he was solely behind the camera.
After opening remarks for “A Tribute to Sidney Poitier: The Director” by the AASC’s Co-chairs, Reginald Brown and [DGA Third Vice President] Paris Barclay, as well as welcoming words from DGA President Jack Shea and Guild mainstay Norman Jewison (who directed Poitier in In the Heat of the Night), actresses Lee Chamberlin, Paula Kelly and Denise Nicholas each warmly greeted the pioneering performer from the podium.
Director John Singleton told the assembly about going to see Poitier on the Columbia lot to get the honoree’s signature on his application for Guild membership.
“I sat there as you told me stories about Paul Robeson and Bumpy Jones and the rules you lived by, one of which was ‘Never make a film that your father would not admire,’” Singleton said to Poitier. “I sat there for an hour and a half and almost forgot to get my application signed. A lot of us wouldn’t be in this business if it weren’t for you.
“Thank you very much,” Singleton added, echoing most of the previous speakers and articulating the tone for the evening. The guest’s notoriety as the Jackie Robinson of the arts was too big to keep the evening strictly about directing.
“We so appreciate having you to look to, standard bearer that you are,” Nicholas said. “Thank you for your whole life in this business. Thank you for making it possible for the rest of us.”
Nelson Mandela, the activist whose negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize of 1993, and whom Poitier played in the Joseph Sargent film, Mandela and de Klerk, delivered a speech via a short film extolling the honoree as an icon of integrity and a role model.
“I wish I could be with you to honor this remarkable man,” Mandela said. “I first met him nearly 50 years ago when he came to my country to make Cry, the Beloved Country.
“At that time, he was a very young man, but even then his great talent, tremendous dignity and passion for justice were already evident. To millions around the world, he is an inspiration and an eye-opener. Again and again, he has broken new ground,” Mandela said.
DGA director member Lee Grant, who co-starred with Poitier in the movie In the Heat of the Night and also directed a documentary about the actor, Sidney Poitier: One Bright Light, which aired on PBS’ American Masters said, “It was so symptomatic of Sidney that he did not go into social statement, that he made home movies for the folks. The movies he directed belied a good time, and when Sidney has a good time, everybody has a good time. He loves to laugh and people laugh with him.”
Sidney Poitier cuts his birthday cake
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Guild member Donna Brown Guillaume conducted an informal interview with Poitier onstage and zeroed in on the man’s directing career. She asked if he used a hands-off method when it came to comic greats Cosby, Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder — each of whom he directed more than once.
“Well, we wouldn’t have had a movie if I let them go,” Poitier said. “It was my job not just to direct them, but to keep the herd together. Mr. Cosby is a wonderful comedic actor. He’s really gifted at comedy. But he’s addicted to the sound of my laughter. The man, at the most inopportune times, would lean over, whisper in my ear and I would fall on the floor.”
Poitier said that he uses the same set of values in directing as he does in acting, as with anything. “Who we are and what we are made up of a complex set of values,” he said. “If we come to a corner and turning left would go against our grain, don’t turn left. I bring my life to whatever I’m doing and I only have one emotional scoreboard. It tells me, according to my values, what is right, decent, fair and human. I use this scoreboard to decide all my artistic choices. I have lived at a time when a sense of self was important to me, and I was the architect of that self.”
He talked of directing being a “grueling profession” and “a young man’s game,” and emphasized the never-ending series of tasks and decisions that directing a movie requires. But... “If a piece of material seduces me at age 74, I would have a crack at it,” he said. He also hinted that a one-man stage show might be in his future.
Brown Guillaume prodded Poitier to talk about his introductions to movies and to directing. He was the son of a tomato grower on remote Cat Island in the Bahamas when a U.S. embargo on the importation of that crop forced his family to move to the capital of Nassau. His culture shock included a word he had never heard of, a “matinee,” which cost two cents. Poitier’s storytelling skills animated his childhood remembrance of entering a big room with seats, screen, then darkness, writing on the screen and then: “I saw a cow — the first cow I ever saw.
“There was a man on a horse,” he continued. “I thought, ‘He’s riding in the countryside but he’s still in the building.’ [Outside later] I went to the back of the theater and stood at that door for an hour, and no cows came out.... I paid two cents, went back in, and exactly the same thing happened! Now I’m nuts.... Finally, they told me, ‘It’s a small strip of film.’”
Members of the AASC present Poitier (seated center) with a director’s chair and a picture that will hang in DGA Headquarters in LA.
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As to making his directorial debut, he and Harry Belafonte had been hired in 1971 to co-star in Buck and the Preacher. “I was aware that there is a mercurial nature to being a movie actor,” Poitier said. “We don’t go into perpetuity. That’s why I watched Norman Jewison closely. I felt it was my responsibility to learn as much as I could about the business.... Harry Belafonte and I were in Mexico, and we had engaged a gifted director and a friend, who, rest assured, is still a friend. From our take, five to six days into shooting, Harry said to me that our points of view were clashing.
“I asked Columbia Pictures to allow us to select another director,” Poitier continued. “They said they would get back to us.... Harry said to me, ‘You know about this business, let’s keep rolling.’ I did. After five or six days, we hadn’t heard from Columbia, but they had seen what we had done in rushes. And [Columbia executive] John Veech, God rest his soul, said, ‘Leave him alone to finish the picture.’ And I finished the picture.”
AASC member Michael Schultz presented Poitier with a director’s chair bearing the honoree’s name at the evening’s close, and the guest joked that he might get started on a project just to use it.
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