by Robert A. Jones
photos by Tony Esparza/CBS

Angela Bassett as Rosa Parks. Click picture for larger view.

On a mid-winter day in Los Angeles, Dash discussed her career transition and the making of Rosa Parks. True to her indie roots, Dash says she was determined to avoid the standard biopic treatment of civil rights-era figures that so often converts them to noble but distant icons of history.

"It makes you feel as if you should sit up straight while watching, and take notes," she says. "And that's why you don't really connect with it. You don't laugh in those movies; there are very few smiles on your face. But when you add tiny specifics to a person's life or person's lives, then you have those moments of whimsy, pathos and certainly sexuality. You don't often see African Americans on television very intimate, caring or loving. It's always something violent or rough. Or the opposite: the 'I love you, Babe' kind of thing.

"So, for The Rosa Parks Story I wanted to see some kind of intimacy there. And from my reading, they [Rosa and her husband Raymond Parks] were obviously very, very close because they withstood so much and went through this fire together and the relationship maintained."

In pre-production, Dash made a number of script suggestions to achieve those touches of humanity, even going so far as to suggest that the film include a bedroom scene between Rosa and Raymond. The scene was written and then Dash held her breath while the script was reviewed by Rosa Parks herself, who now lives outside Detroit.

Parks did not miss the scene. "She asked Elaine Steele, who's one of her closest friends and also one of the producers on this film: 'Who wrote that scene in there with sex on the bed?'" Dash recalls. "And the answer came back, 'Julie did that.' And [Parks] just broke out into a big grin."

So the scene stayed. But the challenge of building a script around a still-living historic figure — and one who had virtual script-approval authority — proved daunting. At one point, Dash says, she needed to bend history a bit for dramatic purposes and ran into resistance from Parks.

"It was about the buses," she says. "Initially, there were not enough scenes in the script with buses. I said to myself, this film is about desegregating buses, and I wanted to show how black people had to board the front of the bus, pay their fare, and then walk around to the back, and get on again."

The problem was that Rosa Parks and her mother personally never walked around to the back of the bus. "They were always fighters and they always got on the front. And they always got away with it. Rosa Parks and her mother were so light-skinned, so fair-skinned, people didn't notice."

	From left: James, Bassett and Cicely Tyson. Click picture for larger view.

In addition, Angela Bassett and Cicely Tyson, who play Rosa and her mother in the movie, are not light-skinned, and having them defy the rules would present dramatic problems of another order. The tug-of-war went back and forth until it was finally decided to shoot the scenes both ways.

"So we had both versions in the can," Dash laughs, "And then, don't you know, the scenes were cut altogether for time reasons."

For Dash, the journey from the streets of New York to the director's chair has been a long one. Dash's father, a skycap, had settled the family in Harlem during Dash's last years in high school. One day, a friend suggested the two of them join a film workshop at the Studio Museum of Harlem. "[The workshop] was set up after the riots of '66. All this money came into the community for after-school programs, alternative programs for youth. And this was one of them.

"A friend said, 'Hey, come on down, we're going to learn how to use cameras to take still pictures,'" Dash says and then laughs at the memory. "We were going to be photo journalists.

"We were in the workshop two weeks before we realized it was motion pictures. We had these little Bolex cameras. We were loading them and we were like, 'This is going to take a lot of still pictures.' And then they brought the footage back and we're sitting there, thinking, 'This is moving...?'"

Dash laughs again. "We were like straight out of the ghetto. [In the class] we talked about the dynamics of editing and they started showing us Russian films. Like Eisenstein. And we watched The Battleship Potemkin and we would go, 'What is this? Aren't they going to start speaking in English?'"

Nonetheless, Dash caught the bug. She came to realize that with film "you could tell stories, the stories within. There's a reality outside the frame and there's a reality inside the frame, and you can control the reality in the frame. This was a highly political time, it was '68 and '69, all these things were happening. And I was thinking, wow, I can make films about the people I know and they could be real."

Later, at CCNY, she made film her major and eventually decided to try independent productions rather than try the Hollywood route. "You know the New York independent film scene, it's still big," she says. "You could make films from now on and never have one shown on television. Still, it could take you around the world with film festivals and different screenings. So Hollywood, per se, was not on my agenda at all."

Dash rolls her eyes. "We were watching Truffaut, and I was saying to myself, I'm going to be like him. Oh, yeah."

Did she realize the challenge she was going to face as a black woman director? Dash shakes her head. "When you're in college you live a fantasy life. The image I had in my mind was, like, Sidney Poitier or something. It wasn't real. None of us at CCNY had any idea how hard it was going to be."

She found out soon enough. After college Dash won a fellowship to AFI and then landed in the film program at UCLA. She became intrigued with the idea of directing a film that would tell the story of a Gullah family living on the Sea Islands off South Carolina at the turn of the century. Dash's father had come from the Gullah culture and Dash had often visited the Sea Islands as a child. It was a world she knew, and a story she wanted to tell.

She finally did, but it took ten years. While completing other projects, Dash continued to plug away at the $800,000 in financing that would allow her to make the film that became Daughters of the Dust. Finished in 1992, Daughters won acclaim as a dreamy, nonlinear film of a Gullah family undergoing a painful decision to uproot itself from its ancestral home. Set on the Sea Island of St. Helena, Daughters contained a striking look, won several major awards, and became one of the the first feature films directed by a black woman to go into national theatrical release. It put Dash on the cinematic map.

"Daughters of the Dust was definitely outside of the studio system," says Dash. "A film exec once told me I made a lot of people eat crow with Daughters of the Dust because many [Hollywood people] saw it at Sundance and they predicted it would not do well. And it did do well in its own little niche market. It did extremely well, to the point where it was given an award in 1999 as the best African-American film of the century. That means a helluva lot to me."

Asked if the success of Daughters quickly led to offers of work by studios, Dash looks out the window at the hazy Hollywood hills. "Not in this town," she says.

Part of the problem, Dash says, was the nature of Daughters of the Dust. Its roundabout narrative and dialect-heavy dialog made Dash suspect as a director of standard Hollywood fare. Studio executives were not sure she could handle, or would want to handle, a standard story line. But eventually, by the mid-'90s, a corner was turned.

"I had gotten work to direct," she says. "Television. MOWs. I remember the first one I did. Randy Levinson [at Universal Studios] was discussing a possible job directing Funny Valentines with me, which eventually I got. He was saying, 'Oh, yeah, we loved Daughters of the Dust. Don't do that..."

Funny Valentines was followed in 1999 by Incognito on Black Entertainment Television and, in 2000, by Love Song on MTV. And then, last year, Angela Bassett requested Dash for the director's chair on The Rosa Parks Story.

Somewhat surprisingly, Dash says she has enjoyed most of her experiences directing for television. "The main thing you have to remember about a television movie is that it's a producer's medium. And it's a huge collaboration. With Daughters of the Dust there was a collaboration but it was more a collaboration between myself, the director of photography, the production designer and the actors."

In a television movie, the director also ends up collaborating with the array of producers. "Often it's stimulating and interesting," she says. "It all depends on the producers; some are very creative. Some are more oriented toward commerce. [In the case of Rosa Parks] some producers had a mix of political affiliations and others had a long history of being involved with the civil rights movement. Their input was invaluable because they were actually involved there."

When she arrived on the project, a draft screenplay had been completed by writer Paris Qualles. Dash says she admired Qualles' script but felt the figure of Rosa Parks should be made more human. "The basic elements of the story were there, but I think I kind of pushed some elements a bit more. I wanted to make Rosa more memorable, more approachable, more distinctive. I had been heavily influenced by watching the HBO film Boycott, directed by Clark Johnson, because for the first time I saw Dr. King as a man and not as a martyr. It touched all kinds of emotions. And that's what I wanted for Rosa's story."

		Director Julie Dash (right) and Peter Francis James. Click picture for larger view.

The danger comes when the white owner of the barbershop arrives as Raymond is discussing the infamous Scottsboro case with other black patrons of the shop. All the other black men go silent in the presence of the owner, but Raymond begins reciting, under his breath, a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar that goes, in part: "We wear the mask that grins and lies,/It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,/We sing, but oh the clay is vile/Beneath our feet, and long of the mile;/But let the world dream other-wise,/We wear the mask!"

"The metaphor of the mask is wonderful," Dash says. "In the scene, Raymond is showing off for Rosa, as well as trying to politicize the man in his chair. It shows all the different ways that you can wear a mask and how you can promote yourself. I just thought that Peter Francis James, who plays Raymond, did a wonderful job."

Dash says she also felt an obligation to set the record straight about some elements of the Rosa Parks story, an objective that was supported heartily by Parks herself. "One of her [Parks'] real concerns has always been that she was not the first person to be arrested for not giving up her seat. In fact, just three months before her arrest a student was arrested for the same thing. And earlier that same year, it was another black woman. So we were able to put that [in the film] so you see that history."

Dash also tried to give the film as authentic a look as possible. Shot in Montgomery and Wetumpka, Alabama, the film often used the exact locations where events actually took place. Dash says, "We shot the bus scene, the big scene where she's arrested [by the police and they] take her off. That was the exact spot. And we recreated everything. We recreated the theater across a street, and even put up the same movie on the marquee. It was called A Man Alone. A Western.

"And the church where Dr. Martin Luther King speaks? That's the same church, the same pulpit, where that speech was made."

Asked if there were political or social difficulties encountered during the shoot, which, after all, conjures up Montgomery's most infamous past, Dash says there were not. Only occasionally, she says, did she sense a prickly response to the movie company's presence. "There was one location where a man [the owner] told us we couldn't use that location even if we paid him $2 million. He was like 90 [years old]. So I shot through it. I used his airspace, but we didn't step on it. That's the NAACP scene when they're coming outside and cars are parked, and the camera is kind of away. We're shooting across that little space. He [the owner] said, if anyone stepped on his property..."

If most Montgomerites took the shoot in stride, some scenes cut so close to the bone that the actors occasionally felt uneasy about their film personas. Patsy Denson, for example, played the voter registrar who forced Parks to take a series of civics tests — tests that were never given to white people — before she would allow Parks to register to vote. The scenes reek of cruelty. Between each scene," Dash says, "Patsy was saying, 'People are going to hate me.' And really she was a sweetheart."

So what's next for Dash? "For the kinds of films I want to do, the doors aren't open to me [in Hollywood]," she says. "This year I am going to be looking for financing outside of the country and working outside of the country. I'd love to work inside the country here. I would. But those doors just aren't open. So I'm talking about Europe right now."

Could Hollywood do more for black women directors? "I think they [studio executives] should recognize that we have a large following," she answers. "There's a whole posse of us: Darnell Martin, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood and others. We have a following and if this is truly about money, about green power, then I'd love to see more work done with African-American filmmakers. [But we are seeing] one film a year, one every two years. It's been very difficult.

Robert A. Jones is a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and is a freelance journalist who lives in Los Angeles.

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