Dayton Daily News from Dayton, Ohio • 34

4 2 Dayton Daily News May 20 1990 it 1i Veteran mit 2J ames-Earl Jones thrives on busy schedule t- Pan Am. On April 25, 1975, Topping orchestrated the last civilian evacuation from Saigon. The movie dramatizes the evacuation. "I avoided meeting Al Topping partly because I was afraid I'd meet him and say 'I want to do the Al Topping Jones says. "When you agree to do the script, that's the Bible, whether you agree or disagree with it.

In this case, I didn't want to make him the main character." Though Jones has been jumping from one film project to the next, he points out that most of his roles are small. "I can go into a cameo role and be done in a week or two and go on and do something else," he says. "Alec Baldwin was involved for many months in Hunt for Red October, and Kevin Costner, he's involved in a project for many months." Jones himself was involved for more than a year in August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning drama Fences. He won a Tony (he also received one for Hope) as Troy Maxson, an embittered, illiterate man who cheats on his wife and drives his son away. The actor discovered much to his chagrin that audiences would frequently laugh at the intense dramatic moments.

"Do you know what laughter is?" Jones asks. "For American audiences, laughter is rejection. The same for a German audience. If you sat a person in a seat by themselves without a group, they would deal with a play. But in a group, their instinct is to reject it with derisive laughter." Such laughter was devastating for Jones.

"It means you lost them," he says. "You might as well go home. There is a sound that happens at athletic events women indulge in it more than men it's the sound That is someone saying, 'I want to let everyone know who is sitting around me and those on stage that I like Jones' green eyes begin to blaze. "Bull," he booms. "Give me a genuine response and I can absorb that.

I can incorporate that in my performance. I want to say to them, 'OK, I'll take a break, and you can make your sounds, and when you're finished, I'll resume the If Jones has his druthers, audiences will be whooping it up for him on the small screen. The actor, who previously starred in the short-lived CBS detective series Paris in 1979, is developing a TV series with Lorimar. "There was a sitcom that was wonderful," he says of his choices, "and there was this hour drama that was wonderful. For the sake of employment and agility, I would have chosen the sitcom, but Lorimar chose the one-hour.

I'm grateful because it would have been a hard decision. I have to be a realist." He also is a realist when it comes to his future on the Broadway stage. "I waited 20 years after The Great White Hope to get Fences, Jones says "I can't wait another 20 years. I don't have the same energy. I have got to measure myself much more carefully in the future about stage and do special things for very limited engagements.

"I will always be a stage actor," Jones says, "but I have got to invest more time in the film medium for the sake of making a living and sustaining my family (wife, actress Cecilia Hart, and 6-year-old son, Flynn). The theater is not lucrative for anyone." By Susan King LOS ANGELES TIMES SANTA MONICA, Calif. James Earl Jones is as one would expect a formidable presence in person. Sitting in the den of his rented house here, he is larger than life a big and burly man with a firm, expansive handshake. His jade eyes are piercing.

And there's that Darth Vader voice. Jones, 60, is going just a bit crazy this afternoon; he is hot under the collar. The actor is trying to do interviews for Last Flight Out his new NBC movie before taking a flight to Africa to shoot another movie, this time for TNT. The phones are ringing off the hook, his secretary keeps interrupting him and outside, the gardener is mowing the lawn. "Someone should be here from the network," he says forcefully to his secretary.

"Someone should be here to coordinate everything." Jones shuts the den door. "Sorry about the noise," he says, closing the window. "The woman who owns the house is fixing it up." Regaining his composure, he settles down to talk about his movie career, which has been very busy of late, even busier than after receiving a best actor Oscar nomination for 1970's The Great White Hope. In films, he portrayed the reclusive writer in last year's Field of Dreams, and he is currently on view as a government official in The Hunt for Red October. Throughout this month, TV viewers can catch Jones in the HBO action-thriller By Dawn's Early Light, and Tuesday on NBC (Channel 22), he stars with Richard Crenna in Last Flight Out.

Jones plays Al Topping, who, from 1972-75, was director in charge of operations in South Vietnam for v7 hi If James Earl Jones 7 II 4 Political CONTINUED FROM1C Hollywood's veteran muckraker, Stanley Kramer (On the Beach, The Defiant Ones didn't even get to the starting block. His docu-drama on the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl was dropped like a radioactive potato when, thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, the Iron Curtain turned into gossamer. "In one fell swoop, with peres-troika and glasnost, everything was out the window," Kramer, 75, laments. "It was a whole new ballgame." Norman Jewison has been involved with political movies that have been on the money The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! and off by a country mile (Dogs of War, In Country). His advice: "Be careful.

You have to be ahead of your time. Political themes can and will backfire on you because it takes so long to reach the screen." In other words, it's a craps shoot? "You're damn straight," the still-crusty Kramer says, laughing. Last CONTINUED FROM1C fall of Saigon were sent to Communist re-education camps. As the Vietnamese tighten security, permitting only casualties of war to get to the airport, Hood and his pal devise a scam: The hospital employees fake injuries by wrapping themselves in bandages and plaster casts. And, on a plane configured for 375 passengers, 463 flew to freedom.

Hood: "I've never seen more people on an airplane in my life." Topping, now with Pan Am in Miami, has worked for years to rescue his Vietnamese assistant, who stayed in Saigon and spent seven months in a re-education camp. Word came recently that he has obtained papers to come to America. Ngor, the Cambodian refugee who won an Oscar for The Killing Fields and plays Topping's aide, hopes the film will awaken Americans to the refugee plight. "The people over there have too much suffering, too much," he said. "You never see that kind of What make you different, Channel CONTINUED FROM1C Under the present setup, Channel 14 serves the Oxford-Hamil-ton-Middletown area.

Although its signal is strong enough to be picked up in some south Dayton suburbs, it does not reach into the center, of Dayton, StanislawsM said. "Our vision is to present educational TV 'big E' educational TV on Channel 14," he explained. "The emphasis would be on tele-course-type material, programming that would enable viewers to receive college credits without ever leaving the comfort of their living rooms," he explained. Some programs currently being aired by Channels 16-14, like The Mind, Eyes on the Prize and The Constitution: A Delicate Balance, would fit that kind of format, according to StanislawsM. Once Channel 14 was operating as a separate station, it might have some of the same shows as Channel 16.

"But they wouldn't be on the air at the same time," he said. "If Channel 14 is ever expanded, I can guarantee you it won't be a carbon copy of Channel 16." "Yes, it is a throw of the dice," agrees Frankenheimer, whose most expensive project, Black Sunday with Bruce Dern as a wacko who commandeers the Goodyear blimp, arrived when the public was shellshocked from real-life terrorist raids. For many, Fran-kenheimer's beautifully tooled 1977 epic smacked of callous exploitation. After the events of November and December, those old McCarthy-era icons the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin checkpoints, May Day parades in Red Square no longer strike fear into the hearts of the average American filmgoer. Ivan and Svetlana are no longer his sworn enemies bent on world domination.

They now have faces. And their dreams for their children aren't all that different from our dreams. Which is why Hollywood is scrambling to reflect a more tolerant mind-set. Sean Connery's Soviet submarine skipper in The Hunt for Red October is the philosophical, even grandfatherly, hero of the piece. James Bond's old adversaries, Smersh and the KGB, have retired.

Now 007's archenemies are the same as George Bush's: international drug cartels operating out of Central America. And the status of Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger and John Le Carre's The Russia House? The first has been optioned by Paramount; the second already has been shot in Moscow with Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer in the leads. They've survived when Hollywood is pulling away from matters political because they're post-glasnost projects. The Clancy best seller pits CIA hero Jack Ryan against Colombian drug lords. The $20 million Le Carre adaptation, due at Christmas, tells of a CIA plot to discredit glasnost as a cowardly commie snowjob.

But, overall, Hollywood is taking a hiatus from "timely" political thrillers. The only ones that pay big dividends, they now realize, are either depoliticized (Red October) or apolitical (Top Gun, with its never-identified enemy planes). Dan Hood between you and them? You are human being. They are human being. You never see, by your own eyes, killing, torture, execution." What Hood regrets is not being able to save more of them.

"(I saw) fear, genuine fear, in the eyes of these people," he said. "As we taxied out, all I could think of is all those little kids we left behind, who didn't have a chance half-American, half-Vietnamese, who are shunned by their own society. I wish I could have done more." 5.00 A CARLOAD 1 PARP.IIZZAKO'S TRIO CON BSIOI mumi mum HIT llltlU 0 If khUMd OHIO'S OLDEST OUTDOOR ART FAIR hhainbi Roberts Steven Seagal El mi 1A He's Mason hug your etorm. heart. Ik- BSD 1:30,3:30, 1 1:50.4:30.7:15,9 30 i 3 f.

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