Fishburne says 'Akeelah' touches on risky themes

Throughout a screening of "Akeelah and the Bee," a low-budget film about a professor played by Laurence Fishburne who coaches a young African-American girl for a spelling contest, it seemed clear that the movie was only partly about all of the above.

Twelve-year old Keke Palmer stars as a South Central Los Angeles girl with a natural propensity for spelling words right. When her school pushes the reluctant girl to enter competitive spelling, classmates taunt her and ask why she'd want to hang with the smart kids from the affluent part of town. Friends, siblings and even her mom, tautly played by Angela Bassett, question why she'd want to set herself up for certain failure and rejection. The only characters who believe the girl has a chance to win are the square college professor and the hip local gang banger.

Fishburne had been in Philadelphia for a couple of days, where "Akeelah and the Bee" had opened the prestigious Philadelphia Film Festival. (The movie opened Friday in Pittsburgh.) Fishburne was nearing the end of a day of media phone interviews when it was suggested that the movie, outwardly about striving and succeeding, was even more about the reluctance of many black Americans to compete in mainstream society.

Fishburne paused.

"That's an astute kind of observation, and even that you would broach that kind of thing is great," he said, in a slow, deep voice. "When I read this movie, I loved it, but I was heartbroken because I realized that nobody would finance a movie about an 11-year-old black child who wants to go to the National Spelling Bee. [Writer-director] Doug [Atchison] wanted to be subtle about it, so I haven't brought it up, and everybody has been afraid to mention it. You're the only person who's asked."

It took the producers, including Fishburne and Pittsburgh's Mark Cuban, two years to come up with $6 million to make "Akeelah." Fishburne called it "a little movie that black audiences should see and mainstream audiences should see." But he was resigned to the fact that it's precisely the kind of movie that has trouble finding screens.

"It's that old social disease," he said. "Do mainstream crowds want to watch a movie about good things happening in black neighborhoods? Do black audiences want to see a little girl doing something in a white world? It's important for a lot of young black males to value swagger over intelligence. Swagger is important, but intelligence must come before the swagger. Swagger can get you killed. Not having it can get you killed. But intelligence can get you so much more."

In a separate phone interview the next day, Atchison, a white director, said about the same thing.

"Specifically, it's about this girl's insecurity about doing a thing that she hasn't seen people who look like her doing," he says. "But it's symbolic of a lot of things. I had done some work at a youth center [in Los Angeles] and seen how the kids there don't want to compete. They're put in this public school system that seems to crush their intellectual curiosity. I wanted to make a story for everybody, but particularly for kids of color to see a little black girl who does something powerful."

That's a powerful socially progressive statement from a guy who directed "The Pornographer." It wasn't a pornographic movie, but Atchison seemed as if he'd have been happier if I hadn't mentioned it in conjunction with "Akeelah."

"I did that for $150,000 in 1988 when I was struggling to get a film career going," he said, with a defensive little laugh. "It was a dysfunctional love story set in the world of adult video. I could say something about exploitation. It made all its money back for the investors, including my mom, who invested in that movie. It was picked up by HBO and gave me experience in making a low-budget movie."

He needed every bit of that experience to make the statement he intended in "Akeelah."

"If you see African-American kids striving to do something in the movies, it's sports or singing or dancing," he said. "Here, we're engaging kids on their intellect. That, you don't see. These lies about black inferiority have been seeping into cinema, and that seeps into our kids. As a filmmaker, you can dig into these issues, but you have to be subtle. You can't hit them over the head with it or they'll turn off. So I tried to be more subtle. You brought it up, so maybe it isn't subtle enough."