Dishing up Cosmic Slop - HBO television program

American Visions, Dec-Jan, 1994 by Sharon Fitzgerald

Only a few adventurous beachcombers have stumbled onto the drama unfolding on Leo Carillo State Beach just north of Los 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." Yet 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 cross section of black America. Dreadlocked. Permed. Bald. Braided. Afroed. Working folk and buppies. Church ladies in straw hats. B-boys in floppy denims. Afrocentrists in traditional robes or in different configurations of red, black and green. Each person clutches his or her earthly treasures - moneybags, family albums, stuffed bunnies, golf clubs, camcorders - and one carry-on suitcase.

White actors dressed in combat fatigues and carrying make-believe rifles hold the procession in check. No words are exchanged. Every face is somber. One by one, the travelers advance to their immediate destination: a round, black platform situated at surfside, the launching pad. Their next stop? Somewhere in outer space.

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

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

But beaming up is hard to do. While the camera is rolling, a stuntwoman dressed as a senior citizen hobbles to the platform, seemingly with the help of a walker, a leather handbag hanging from her arm. Filming stops as the crew members adjust lights, confer about angles, hook the actress onto a strong wire attached to the condor lift. At last she is drawn skyward in one swift motion. The stunt then requires that she dangle lifelessly, head drooped, feigning heart attack. Strange fruit.

Scrutinizing the scene's progress is director Reginald Hudlin, a young man in white sneakers, khaki shorts and a black hooded sweatshirt sporting the words "Can't Stop the Hip Hop." It is Hudlin's job to tell the story, set the pace. "Will it look too funky if we slow it down?" he now asks a special effects expert. Assured by the effects man that slowing the lift would have the desired effect - to capture the ascent on consecutive frames - Hudlin asks that they try it again.

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

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

Perhaps the first person 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 students, to score points in classroom debates. "When I pointed out how, throughout history, blacks had been sacrificed whenever it served the nation's interests, my students would say, 'Sure, that happened in the past, but it would never happen today,"' Bell explains. "I was trying to come 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 complete leeway," Bell continues, "I'm surprised that they got the go-ahead to do a story that, in its written form, never fails to bring a degree of welcomed enlightenment to blacks, but often upsets whites who see it as threatening and perhaps too revealing."

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