Family Man

By Anne Kelly-Saxenmeyer

One of the reasons Kevin Rodney Sullivan signed on to direct his third feature, Guess Who - a race-reversing take-off on 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner - was that Percy Jones, the "curmudgeonly" patriarch played by Bernie Mac, was "a good dad," says Sullivan. "It's rare to get to show a great father on the screen."

It may be rare, but the director also did it in Barbershop 2. Owing to a few simple moments between Ice Cube and a wide-eyed baby boy, you could just about understand it if Cube's character - a small business owner and community leader, whose every move is steeped in intergenerational responsibility - had abandoned his role in the movie's gentrification plot and taken a $200,000 payoff for the kid's piggy bank. (Being a long-view sort of dad, of course, he doesn't.)

But, while there's a pretty great parent in each of Sullivan's three theatrical releases, including his 1998 feature debut How Stella Got Her Groove Back, his interest in the parent-child dynamic isn't about promoting an ideal.

"I find it really compelling to portray those relationships because they're so vital to who we end up being," he says. "I'm just particularly interested in that. In Stella, she's raising her boy without a husband. For a woman to be raising a man-child and trying to reconcile all the other things that are happening in her life and her other desires with that responsibility makes her choices different. And the nuance and subtlety of those moments on film kind of makes them rich, I hope."

Sullivan wasn't born into show business, but he credits the work ethic he brings to filmmaking to his own parents: a "very strong Catholic woman," whose career took her from secretary to hospital executive, and a serviceman who fought in the Korean War and drove a municipal bus for 40 years.

They were supportive but "mostly surprised" when Sullivan, as a kid at the YMCA in their Western Addition neighborhood in San Francisco, gravitated toward a theatre company rehearsing upstairs and, by age 12, had become a working actor. After moving to Los Angeles at 20 and playing a regular role on Happy Days, he switched his focus to writing and went on to become one of the first African-American show-runners in television, with Knightwatch in 1988.

Steep Climb

Sullivan's parents met in California but are both from the South; his father, the son of a sharecropper, was one of 14 children born to work the land. In Sullivan's first film, Soul of the Game for HBO, he explored the steep trajectory of opportunity in the African-American experience that could produce, in three generations, a sharecropper, a bus driver and a feature film director.

The movie centers on legendary pitcher Satchel Paige in the summer before rookie teammate Jackie Robinson would be chosen - over Paige - to integrate the game.

"The movie, thematically, was really about the legacy of ambition for generations of black men," says Sullivan. "That feeling of pride that Satchel probably had for Jackie, and jealousy, was something that I could tap into because, generationally, from my grandfather to my father to me, there's been a shift. The opportunities my father had are not the opportunities that I have. He certainly paved the way... But then there's that feeling of, ‘Well, I'm just as smart. I could've done... I didn't get to do...' "

This dynamic of generational progress and debt becomes heated in Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner when Sidney Poitier's character, an internationally respected doctor, defies the will of his father, who carried the mailbag "75,000 miles" to afford his son's opportunities and who opposes his marriage to a white woman. Unlike Sullivan's recent update of the film, that particular conflict - and that piece as a whole - is inextricably bound up with issues of race.

"The movie that they made at that time, which I thought was a beautiful movie, was a message piece," says Sullivan. "Its reason for being in the marketplace was enough: that he was coming to meet the white folks and maybe marry the white girl. In 2005, that didn't seem to be enough to me. But, more importantly, as a human being I'm interested in more than that. I think the challenge of being in love, of committing to a relationship, is just as daunting as the challenge of race dynamics or the challenge of interracial relationships.

"I think the love dynamics and the family dynamics are more interesting - for me, personally. In my movie, the biggest thing for Simon [the prospective son-in-law, played by Ashton Kutcher] is that he doesn't know if he's capable of making the kind of commitment that Percy Jones made [to his wife] because Simon's father had left. Really, for him, the journey is about realizing that he gets to choose his own destiny."

Who's Responsible

It may be because its source material was a milestone in the American dialogue about race that critics tended to respond to Guess Who primarily on the depth of its racial interrogation. But, as Sullivan notes, it hasn't been uncommon for African-American filmmakers (or characters) to be assigned more social responsibility than a particular story can support.

"Race isn't ignored in my film, but it's not the whole story," he says. "In today's generation, I'd like to think that we've moved beyond having to be responsible in every film for all the issues of race and to make a defining statement for everybody. That's not interesting. It's a trap as a storyteller to think that you speak for everybody, to try to make the ultimate message movie.

"So I feel grateful for those who have gone before and had to make those moves. Even in my own career, I've found myself in situations where I'm being asked to make this defining story about the black experience. Okay, done that now. What else?"

If there's something personal about Sullivan that seems to overlay his sense of responsibility as a filmmaker, it's being the father of a 13-year-old daughter. His fascination with the lives of kids - and the new phenomenon of medicating them "for the shit we've done to them" - was part of what drew him to his upcoming project, Crazy School. Sullivan developed and will co-produce and direct the movie, set in the public school inside Bellevue. (He's also developing a story that he wrote during his last two projects; it's about "what happens when the honeymoon is over" - in the 15^th Century. He'll produce and direct.)

As a dad, and as a filmmaker who works from theme, Sullivan is disturbed by "how cavalier we've become about violence in films." If you want to get him fired up, ask him about a movie he saw recently that celebrated, "for a hundred minutes," all the "cool and gory ways" you can kill someone.

"See, I think when you get people in a dark room for two hours, that is a privilege," he says. "You have the privilege of their attention, of their sensibilities, their minds, their eyes, their souls. They're in your hands. They've paid money to come into a dark room and sit with you. Now, if you're going to do that, and you're going to celebrate violence, marginalize women, make racial statements, unanswered, you are abusing the privilege.