Action Heroes for a Changing America

When Entertainment Weekly reviewed “The Scorpion King” last month, the mainstream magazine’s film critic described its star, the Rock, as a typical All-American hero, calling him “a cross between Rob Schneider and Tony Robbins ... at once exotic and square-jawed suburban.” But when Rolling Out, an African America weekly, put the “Scorpion King” star on its cover last month, it embraced the World Wrestling Federation behemoth as one of its own, calling him “a brother” and touting the story with the tagline: “The Rock on Being Black and Becoming a Movie Star....”

Vin Diesel, who became an overnight star playing a scowling street racer in last summer’s “The Fast and the Furious,” has been getting similar dual treatment. Though he has played Italian Americans in several films, including “Saving Private Ryan,” he has been embraced in the black community as African American. When Diesel was a struggling actor, he made a short film called “Multi-Facial,” which showed him assuming different identities for his auditions, playing an Italian street tough, hip-hop gangsta and buttoned-down preppie.

The Rock is of black and Samoan heritage, while Diesel is reportedly of black and Italian descent (he won’t elaborate--”just say I’m multicultural,” he told US Weekly--and his production company is called One Race). Now earning $10 million or more for each film role, Diesel and the Rock are the new muscular box office kings everyone can identify with: the multiethnic action hero.

“They are the New Americans,” says director Rob Cohen, who made “The Fast and the Furious” and “XXX,” a Diesel-starring extreme-sports action film coming in August. “When you see these two guys, you see how the epicenter of American culture has moved to the urban centers of America, where different ethnic groups are rubbing antennas with each other. You almost feel like Tom Cruise is too straight today. To young moviegoers, Vin and the Rock are the epitome of cool. Kids look at them and say, ‘That’s who I want to be.’”

That’s meant new marketing strategies for studios. “What we’re seeing is the browning of America,” says Santiago Pozo, who has served as marketing consultant for Universal films such as “The Mummy Returns” and “Scorpion King.” “So young moviegoers want black and brown heroes. When they see the Rock or Vin Diesel, they recognize themselves.”

To market “The Fast and the Furious” at clubs and concerts, Pozo held casting sessions to make sure his street team marketers looked just like the street racers in the movie. “I wanted to send a message right from the beginning that they were in sync with what the film was about.”

The emergence of Diesel and the Rock marks something of a seismic shift in Hollywood which, despite its focus on youthful audiences, has traditionally been the medium slowest to react to sociological change.

When it comes to global reach, the action movie is Hollywood’s most potent cultural export. Films such as “A Beautiful Mind” win Academy Awards, but movies like “Jurassic Park” and “Terminator 2” reach the biggest worldwide audience, their explosions and special effects translating an adrenaline-driven story line into any language or culture.

Over the years, the action hero has served as perhaps the most accurate barometer of America’s cultural preoccupations. John Wayne was a symbol of American heroism and sense of purpose. Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, the action heroes of the ‘60s, captured the decade’s free-spirited distrust of authority. In the 1970s, Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry symbolized the era’s focus on crime and a loss of ideals. In the mid-1980s, Sly Stallone’s “Rambo” and Cruise’s “Top Gun” captured the jingoism of the stand-tall Reagan era, while action series like “48 Hrs.” and “Lethal Weapon” used the conflicts sparked by their black and white co-stars to comment on the country’s own continuing racial divisions.

It is hardly a secret that today’s youthful moviegoers are far more colorblind than any previous generation. For older America, the voices of cultural authority largely remain white, whether it’s news anchors Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, comics Jay Leno and David Letterman or morning personalities like Katie Couric and Regis Philbin. Young America has its own heroes. Thanks to the influence of hip-hop, MTV, comedy and professional sports, they have a wide multicultural array of icons, running the gamut from Jay-Z to Jennifer Lopez, Kobe Bryant to Marc Anthony, Allen Iverson to Jackie Chan, Shakira to Ja Rule, Eve to Chris Rock.

Until now, Hollywood has been slow to catch the multicultural wave. When Cohen worked at Motown Films in the late 1970s, he says, he couldn’t book films like “Mahogany” and “The Wiz” in a theater north of Wilshire Boulevard.

“[Theater owner] Ted Mann thought if a black audience came to one of his theaters, the white clientele would never come back,” Cohen recalls. Progress has been slowed by business disincentives. Movies with Latino or African American stars have trouble selling overseas, which now represents the biggest chunk of the movie marketplace. Last summer, “Rush Hour 2” out-grossed “Jurassic Park III” in the U.S. by $45 million, but overseas “Jurassic” made nearly $100 million more at the box office than the Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan-starring action comedy.

These dismal overseas numbers could be changing, in part thanks to more aggressive marketing strategies. Universal Pictures helped organize a WWF tour of Asia with the Rock earlier this year to build awareness for “Scorpion King’s” international release, working references to the movie into the plot lines of the wrestling matches.

The strategy paid off. “Scorpion King” had the studio’s biggest opening of the year across Asia.

But Hollywood also has an out-of-sight, out-of-mind problem. Its executive suites remain alarmingly lily-white--most studios can’t even point to one black or Latino production vice president. Before “The Fast and the Furious” was released, the heat--among white industry-ites--was on co-star Paul Walker, not Diesel, who turned out to be the movie’s real drawing card. Too often, movie executives don’t notice the upheaval in today’s pop culture until they walk into their kids’ bedrooms.

“All my 9-year-old boy does is imitate black culture. To him, that’s what is cool,” says Universal Pictures vice chairman Marc Shmuger, whose studio has been a leader in multiethnic casting, having made “Fast and the Furious” and “Scorpion King,” among others. “He wants to walk like Kobe Bryant and dress like Lil’ Bow Wow. We’d be crazy if we didn’t try to reflect that in our movies.”

Universal, for example, recently teamed with Pozo’s Arenas Entertainment to launch the industry’s first major Latino film distribution company. The move was inspired, in part, by the studio’s realization that Latinos make up roughly one-third of the population in America’s top 15 movie markets and go to twice as many movies as other Americans. Latinos made up more than 35% of the audience for “Scorpion King,” thanks to the Rock, who was already a huge drawing card in the Hispanic community from his WWF exploits.

Young moviegoers’ identification with multiethnic pop and sports stars has dramatically changed the way movie studios cast their new films. “Scorpion King” features the Rock, Michael Clarke Duncan, who is black, and Kelly Hu, who is Asian. Studio executives say the movie would not have had such a racially mixed cast as recently as five years ago.

“It used to be a fight to get a black character into a movie,” says MTV Films senior exec David Gale. “Now the studios are all saying, ‘How can we find more black actors?’”

Hollywood still has a long way to go, especially in terms of embracing ethnicity in the executive ranks. But if the action hero is the ultimate embodiment of our pop fantasies, the ascendancy of the Rock and Diesel signals a potent cultural breakthrough. “They’re the new man, where all the racial contradictions are rolled up into one,” says producer Stephanie Allain, who’s making a film about black and Latino biker clubs called “Biker Boyz.”

“What’s cool in our culture has changed. My kid isn’t the only [mixed-race] kid around. Lots of his friends are. And when they see Vin or the Rock, they just think the movies are reflecting real life.”

*

The Big Picture runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to [email protected].