ON LOCATION : We’re Not in the ‘Hood Anymore : Mario Van Peebles attempts to break out of ‘New Jack City’ genre with a new spin on an old genre--a Western about black cowboys

SONOITA, Ariz. —  The cowpuncher’s cracked-leather face showed a look of profound surprise. He stood at the side of a narrow dirt road in southeastern Arizona’s Santa Rita Mountains and watched as the passenger vans rumbled past. One after another went by, each packed to the windows with black cowboys.

When the long parade was complete, the man ambled through a storm of dust to a visitor’s car, leaned into the open window and drawled: “What in the blue lightning is all that bidness?”

A movie company is filming a black Western, he was told. Those men are actors.

“You mean like a cowboys-and-Indians Western . . . with them black fellows in it?” he asked.

Yup.

“Well, I’ll be gosh-darned,” said the local ranch hand, who kept staring up the road.

The old cowpuncher’s surprise would surely have deepened if he’d continued another few miles to the peak of the hill. There, amid a woodland of juniper and oak, an impossibly pretty land 50 miles southeast of Tucson that gold miners gouged more than a century ago, he would have run into the main street of Freemanville, a nine-building town constructed for the filming of “Posse.”

The movie, scheduled for May release by Gramercy Pictures, stars Mario Van Peebles and Billy Zane and tells the story of a group of black soldiers in the U.S. Army during the 1898 Spanish-American War. Disillusioned with the racism and corruption of Col. Graham (Zane), the commanding officer who orders them into obviously fatal front-line battles with the sole purpose of filling his pockets with gold, they desert.

Under the leadership of Jessie Lee (Van Peebles), this renegade band heads back to the United States, and to Freemanville, a utopian settlement modeled after the all-black townships that sprang up in the American West in the late 1800s. To protect themselves against the pursuing Col. Graham and to defend Freemanville from the depredations of neighboring whites, Jessie Lee and his men turn outlaw.

“Posse” is an action movie, with Van Peebles directing and playing the starring role of a remote but heroic gunman reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s early performances in the Sergio Leone Westerns. But Van Peebles, who acted in Eastwood’s “Heartbreak Ridge,” and others associated with “Posse,” have ambitions that run deeper than simply blasting bad guys from rooftops.

“It’s immensely important that people understand this era of black history,” says Melvin Van Peebles, Mario’s father and a man considered a pioneer African-American filmmaker. In “Posse,” he plays an irascible crank named Papa Doc, the man who taught Jessie how to use a gun.

“Blacks had a huge role in settling the West, but you’d never know it from Western movies,” says the elder Van Peebles. “In a way, this is the story of the West rectified. At the same time, it’s a classic Western--only with black people in it.”

The scenes being shot this day demonstrate just how encompassing the film’s ambitions are. It is the climactic battle sequence in which Col. Graham arrives in Freemanville to eliminate his nemesis, Jessie Lee.

The action involves the rat-tat-tat of a Gatling gun and the destruction of a storefront with a thunderous dynamite blast that sends wood scraps flying into the orange dusk that has settled over the Santa Ritas.

In response to the threat, extras playing Freemanville citizens grab shovels, pitchforks and whatever else they can carry to defend their dream. What discerning viewers will see in that sequence, and others throughout the film, are several faces from the history of black films.

These include Melvin Van Peebles (“Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song”), Isaac Hayes (“Shaft,”) and Pam Grier (“Coffy”). The film’s prologue features 78-year-old Woody Strode, a black actor best known for roles in “The Professionals” and “Once Upon a Time in the West.”

“Posse” also has appearances by comedian Nipsey Russell and rappers Big Daddy Kane and Tone-Loc.

A younger generation of black actors is represented by Blair Underwood (“L.A. Law”), Charles Lane (“Sidewalk Stories”), Salli Richardson (“Mo’ Money”) and Tiny Lister (“Universal Soldier”).

“I wanted to convey that sense of history and lineage between the community of black filmmakers and the community of Freemanville,” says Mario Van Peebles. “In a sense they both have the same dreams and desires for empowerment. The film showed the people of Freemanville trying to make it on their own. It’s like an African-American version of the Protestant ethic--being responsible for your destiny.

Many of the movie’s black actors shared the same sense of mission. Van Peebles says that they agreed to participate in the small-budget production for less money than they might otherwise expect--because they witnessed earlier spurts of black filmmaking and the quick fade-outs that marked their end.

“These folks don’t want that to happen again,” says Mario Van Peebles. “It’s also a response to the way the media divide black filmmakers by asking me what I think of Spike (Lee), and asking Spike what he thinks of John Singleton. I’m trying to bring black talent together.”

Producers filled several key positions behind the camera with blacks as well, including stunt coordinator Bob Minor (“Glory”), the first black admitted to the stunt union, costume designer Paul Simmons (wardrobe coordinator for “Malcolm X”), assistant director Joe Ray and Steadicam operator Kirk Gardner.

But Mario Van Peebles is well aware that empowerment doesn’t sell tickets, and that making a conscious effort to choose actors representing the history of black films “won’t mean diddly unless the movie works.”

The first step toward that goal was scouting a location that would lend authenticity to the production, and they found it on this cattle-beaten turf, 50 miles southeast of Tucson.

The site is just east of the historic Empire Ranch, which sprawled across this territory in the 1800s and well into this century. The ranch house itself was the home of the Barkley family in “The Big Valley,” a popular television Western from the 1960s.

Production crews also work three miles to the south, in Gardner Canyon, filming portions of the “Young Riders” TV show.

The producers of “Posse” liked the feel of these hypnotic hills from their first look-see. “We started calling this ‘The Sound of Music’ location,” says producer Jim Steele. “It was like Julie Andrews breaking into song. We knew this was it.”

But more important, the story is an attempt to blend commercially appealing gunslinger action with an accurate retelling of the nearly forgotten role blacks played in settling the American West.

The screenplay was originally written by Sy Richardson, an African-American writer who based the story, in part, on the recollections of his grandfather, who roamed the West of the late 1800s as a cowboy and buckboard preacher.

At that time, 30 years after Emancipation, large numbers of blacks had fled the South’s oppressive Jim Crow laws and headed for the frontier, seeking some measure of economic opportunity.

Up to a million blacks settled from the Midwest to California, becoming cowboys, Indian fighters, rodeo riders, cattlemen, outlaws and lawmen.

In the course of this migration, a number of all-black towns were formed, primarily in Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas, some of which thrived with their own newspapers, schools and emerging political clout.

In many cases that land and the power that derived from it was stripped away by railroad companies, private cattle barons and fearful white politicians. Legislators in Oklahoma denied residents of the emerging black townships the right to vote through the grandfather clause, a law that said if one’s grandfather could not vote, neither could his grandson.

Director Van Peebles was drawn to “Posse” because it touches on themes that still resonate among blacks today.

“Whether you are getting out of the South in the 1890s, or Harlem or South-Central today, the parallels are there,” says Van Peebles, who found success as a director in his first feature, “New Jack City,” which grossed $50 million for Warner Bros. “In those days blacks couldn’t box or rap their way out of the ‘hood, so they became cowboys or outlaws.”

But Van Peebles and the film’s producers admit that, on several levels, “Posse” is a gamble.

One potential problem is exemplified by the surprised reaction of the white cowboy as he watched the vans filled with black cowboy-actors roll up the hill toward Freemanville.

Will white moviegoers react with the same cool distance, or will they view “Posse” as an attractive action ride?

Not surprisingly, Van Peebles believes that any well-made movie, regardless of its ethnic slant, will succeed: “If people on one side of the tracks do something that is true to their culture, then people on the other side will come to see it.”

The track record for black Westerns is slim, and offers few clues. The last such movie to gain widespread distribution was the marginally successful “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), starring Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, with Poitier directing.

“That movie made quite an impression on me, and it seemed the time was right for another black Western,” says Preston Holmes, who co-produced “Malcolm X” and Ernest Dickerson’s “Juice,” and is a producer on “Posse.”

“I think the mainstream audience is ready for this too. But if it’s viewed as just a black Western, the white audience will think there’s nothing there for them. And yet we can’t think too much about that or we’ll neglect the core black audience. It’s a real tightrope.”

Holmes and co-producer Steele are also well aware that “Posse” veers dramatically from the trend among black directors toward urban dramas--such as “Juice,” “Boys N the Hood,” “New Jack City” and others.

A similar cycle of black film-making occurred in the early ‘70s, triggered by Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweetback.” That 1971 movie, the highest-grossing independently produced black movie to that point, spawned a number of what were called “blaxploitation” films, such as “Shaft,” “Superfly” and “Shaft’s Big Score.”

Holmes and Steele believe that “Posse” has the potential to begin yet another cycle, thereby opening a new genre to black directors.

They are aware already of several other black Westerns that are being discussed or are in production. Eddie Murphy has announced that he’d like to make one, and New Line Cinema has a Western called “Peacemaker” in development.

“It’s time to get the hell out of the ‘hood,” says Steele. “Black filmmakers have been so pigeonholed into the social-urban context that the whole movement might suffocate. I really think our success with ‘Posse’ will be a test of whether black films can work outside the ‘hood. I know everybody here feels we need to prove that they can.”

Director Van Peebles, who declines to give his age but is probably in his early 30s, is uncomfortable with the labeling of black films in general and the term black Western specifically.

He says he never thought of Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” as a “white Western,” and he believes “Posse” can attract the same audience. But Van Peebles realizes that through the sheer force of numbers, the labeling will persist.

“Something like 16 of 400 films made last year were by black directors,” he says. “Right now, we’re new in the business, and you guys in the media have to label us. But hopefully we’ll get to a point where everyone is used to us and we are seen as less of a fad.”

But for now, Van Peebles knows that the consequences of what black directors do are magnified because of color:

“We should be looked at as representing nothing but ourselves and our own vision. Unfortunately, when you’re black, your film represents more than your individual vision. If a David Lynch picture bombs, it isn’t the death of white films. It’s not that way for us.

“But I’d rather go down in flames than to not try, to just kick around being afraid of doing different things. If this fails, I know Hollywood will look at it and say, you should’ve stuck to ‘New Jack,’ Part 7.

“Sure, this is a test. But with ‘Posse,’ I can have fun with a story I feel strongly about, and break new ground in terms of what black directors are doing. If I’m going down, I’m going down doing what I love.”