Denzel Washington: Nowhere to Hide

In fact, Washington takes oh-so-seriously what he sees as America's obsession with gossip in tabloid magazines, on TV and in politics. Voice ringing, he asserts. "This [rumor] stuff has always been done with movie stars, but I worry that we're all just going down and down and down. We've succumbed to the lowest com¬mon denominator. There's a nastiness going around that I think has to do, basically, with the fact that we ain't what we used to be as a country. This country peaked, economically and otherwise. 20 years ago. We ain't the best on the block no more, There's all kinds of challenges from the right and left, but everybody's looking over [their shoulder] going, 'Well, at least I'm better than them' instead of saying, 'Let me take a look at me. Let's see how I can be a better me.'"

Washington sounds so impassioned, so utterly sincere, it occurs to me that if he ever decided to run for office, he might easily be formidable. But, I say, just as a sop to those poor souls still obsessed with details of other people's muck and mire, are rumors of his being unfaithful just rumors? He says, "I wouldn't qualify what they talk about or what anyone's talked about in a newspaper or magazine. What goes on between me and my wife goes on between me and my wife. It's our business and not anyone else's. So, I wouldn't even begin to talk about what I did. didn't do, with whom, without whom. Because that's just giving power to people who run and talk about more stuff, regardless of what I say and do. We [as a family] just sort of circle the wagons a little bit, which is all you can do. And you realize that this [rumor] business, really, it's good because it puts you in check. You've got to reassess and go, *Wow, you just can't go out and think you can just do... whatever,' because people are gonna talk about you and say, 'He's doing this or that,' or 'Let me tell you who I saw him with.' It's sad, but that's part of [fame], too."

His fame may well soar even higher right about now. After all, he won the lead role opposite Gene Hackman in Crimson Tide, which director Tony Scott calls, "The Caine Mutiny on a nuclear sub," over contenders like Brad Pitt, Andy Garcia and Val Kilmer. He can't exactly rave about a movie he claims he has not seen yet, but he will say, "Crimson Tide was a real, real thrill because I got to work with Gene Hack-man, who can flat-out act. I feel I can act, too. But I hadn't really worked with a quote-unquote master before, and he is a master. Gene is in there with Marlon Brando, Pacino: I don't consider anybody better than him. It's going to be a good summer kind of movie, with just the right combination of things, the drama, the actors--and Tony Scott can really turn on the action. With Jerry and Don [producers Bruckheimer and Simpson, respectively] behind him, we've got all the right elements."

All the right elements, perhaps, for a flow of future Tides? "That sequel stuff scares the heck out of me and, besides, I just don't plan that far in advance." he demurs. Even though director Scott, too, calls the movie "too classy for that." much about the project seems to shout "tentpole." How sequel-wary could Washington be, anyway, considering he made the mayhem-by-numbers Ricochet for producer Joel Silver, of the famously successful franchises Die Hard and Lethal Weapon? And what, if not an attempt at another poten¬tial franchise, is the long-delayed Devil in a Blue Dress. Carl Franklin's movie version of one of Walter Mosley's terrific books, in which Washington plays cool, brainy "Easy'" Rawlins, the detective who runs with danger and racism in post-World War II L.A.? He insists, "I didn't take [Crimson Tide or Ricochet] with that in mind." conceding that Devil was indeed intended as a run-it-up-the-tentpole-and-see-if-it-flies project. "It's just about variety. I met Joel Silver at Spago the night of the Academy Awards with the Oscar sitting on the table. And he was like. 'I've got eight scripts I want you to do. Pick any one you want,' I shouldn't say Ricochet was a mistake, but it's not one of my favorite films. But I talk, to people and some go, "Man, that was one of the best movies you ever made,' so who am I to say? You think it's lousy, this other one thinks it's great. When the movie's done, when I've done all I can do with it and/or for it. I move on. You pay your $7.50 you've got the right to feel what you feel. 'Cause you couldn't tell me there was a greater film made than Superfly when I was 18."

So, is his Devil in any way a throwback. a gentle nod to such cinematic African- American icons as Superfly's Ron O'Neal and Shift's Richard Roundtree? "Those were the movies that my friends and I were interested in growing up during the 'black exploitation' times," he recalls. "Across 110th Street, Three the Hard Way, all of them."

What, exactly, has happened with Devil in a Blue Dress, made a year ago with Jennifer Beals? "We just shot a scene with me and Jennifer over again that hadn't clicked before, but I think we nailed it this time." he says, assuring me that we will be able to judge for ourselves come fall when TriStar will finally release the film Washington's production company, Mundy Lane Entertainment, produced. "They want to enter the movie at Cannes and I think it's gonna be a good movie. Carl had done one film, One False Move, before, basically, and I said, 'I think that my clout, if you will, can get this film done and get Carl a budget he deserves." My having done some films, not at all for business reasons, but some of them having turned out to be really good business, it was the right moment to do Devil."

Given his clout, his star power and his sex appeal, isn't it time to do the provocatively intimate scenes from Mosley's novel that spark between his character and the one Beals plays? One hears those scenes will not be in the film. "It's Carl's vision, it's his film," he asserts. "Those [sex] scenes you talked about were never in the script." Faced with his look. which seems to ask, "So, what arc you driving at?" I say, "Given the fact that you are perceived as a fine actor, are you at all uncomfortable with also being perceived as. well, fine?" As Spike Lee put it, inimitably, "Women love them some Denzel."

Washington declares, shirking it off, 'There was nobody knocking when I was a senior in high school, a freshman in college. Where were they then? Power is attractive. That stuff just sort of feeds onitself. It doesn't really have anything to do with me. It just becomes 'something' all on its own. I know that, for African-American women in particular, there's not many black men for them to look at on-screen. So, you know, I just sort of, I guess, accept it. It doesn't really blow my mind. That's a part of the business."

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