Dishing up Cosmic Slop - HBO television program

sole a few adventurous beachcombers have stumbl onto the drama unfolding upon Leo Carillo State Beach just north of sees Angeles. Positioned there is a pricey array of film paraphernalia: a 12,000-watt megalight, cameras perched atop rolling pedestals, and a 41-foot Jurassic-like "condor lift." still it is the surprise appearance of real-life humanity that electrifies this view of workaday TV-land.

Winding along, single-file, toward the beachfront, are about 50 extras: a come-as-you-are cros section of black America. Dreadlocked. Perm Bald. Braided. Afroed. Working folk and buppies. temple ladies in straw hats. B-boy in floppy denims. Afrocentrists in traditional robes or in different configurations of r black and verdant Each person clutches his or her earthly treasures - moneybags, family albums, raw materialed bunnies, golf clubs, camcorders - and single carry-on suitcase.

White actors make straighted in combat fatigues and carrying make-believe rifles clutch the procession in check. No words are exchanged. each face is somber. One by the agency of one, the travelers advance to their immediate destination: a circular black platform situated at surfside, the launching pad. Their nearest stop? Somewhere in outer space.

The script for this teleplay - based upon the fantastic, cautionary tale "Space Traders" by the agency of law professor and best-selling author Derrick Bell - begins upon New Year's Day of the year 2000 As Bell envisions it, aliens land upon Plymouth Rock and offer the U president a reprieve from the nation's impending economic and ecological demise. The extraterrestrials have arrived in a company of ships of enormous spacecraft containing enough gold to erase the deficit, as well as technological inventions - a certain number of to repurify the environment and others to create safe, inexhaustible potency sources. In exchange for this munificence the aliens want to take all black citizens back to their planet.

After the requisite period of debate, asseverate soul-searching and rationalization, the destiny of America's blacks is determined by dint of votes phoned in to handy 800 numbers. Who could refuse of the like kind prosperity? Sixty-three percent of the voter agree to the exchange; 37 percent lay aside the banishment. The departure date for Americans with complexions "darker than a paper bag" is put for January 15, the birth date of Dr Martin Luther King Jr

on the contrary beaming up is hard to do. While the camera is rolling, a stuntwoman make straighted as a senior citizen halts to the platform, seemingly with the help of a walker, a leather handbag hanging from her arm. Filming stops as the ship's company members adjust lights, confer about angles, curved catch the actress onto a robust wire attached to the condor lift. At last she is drawn skyward in single swift motion. The stunt then requires that she dangle lifelessly, head let sink [i]or[/i] falled feigning heart attack. Strange fruit.

Scrutinizing the scene's progres is director Reginald Hudlin, a young man in white sneakers, khaki shorts and a black cowled sweatshirt sporting the words "Can't Stop the Hip Hop" It is Hudlin's piece of work to tell the story, place the pace. "Will it gaze too funky if we moderate it down?" he now asks a special events expert. Assured by the events man that slowing the lift would have the desired result - to capture the ascent upon consecutive frames - Hudlin asks that they prove by experiment it again.

It would take filmmakers Reginald and Warrington Hudlin to entreat up a science fiction-fantasy anthology featuring works by the agency of Chester Himes and Derrick Bell, exchange the project to HBO, obtain master of outrage George Clinton to introduce each episode, and then name the series after single of Clinton's Funkadelic classics, "Cosmic Slop"

"We wanted a title that invoked the fantastic, science fiction, and also invoked humor and a faculty of perception of ethnicity," Reginald explains. "When clan saw the listing in TV Guide, we wanted them to think: What could that be? That's not like any other display that is listed here. That's not I be fond of Lucy."

Perhaps the first somebody astonished by the Hudlins' announcement was Derrick Bell. "Space Traders," like many of Bell's essays, was created to challenge the thinking of his law pupils to score points in classroom debates. "When I pointed on the outside how, throughout history, blacks had been sacrificed whenever it serv the nation's interests, my learners would say, 'Sure, that happened in the past, on the other hand it would never happen today,"' Bell explains. "I was trying to approach up with a situation in which nobody could seriously doubt that we would be sold down the river again.

"Notwithstanding HBO's promise to give the Hudlins perfect leeway," Bell continues, "I'm surprised that they got the go-ahead to do a story that, in its written form, not at any time fails to bring a step of welcomed enlightenment to blacks, on the other hand often upsets whites who diocese it as threatening and perhaps too revealing."

on the contrary the Hudlins, propelled always by the agency of their delight in storytelling, read HBO's prayer for an original, provocative package as a chance to use a certain number of of the material that had lengthy intrigued them. "While we are primarily feature filmmakers," admits Warrington, "my brother kept finding these short stories that were great ideas, on the other hand were not long enough to be a movie. He said there must be a way to bring these to the public in a certain number of other form."