‘Deep Cover’ poster art by Sam Green https://samgreenartist.com/
November 27, 2024
By Koraljka Suton
The year 1990 saw the publication of a non-fiction book entitled Deep Cover: The Inside Story of How DEA Infighting, Incompetence and Subterfuge Lost Us the Biggest Battle of the Drug War. Its author is Michael Levine, a former DEA veteran and “America’s top undercover cop for 25 years,” according to the television show 60 minutes. The subject matter Levine explored in his book sparked an interest in Henry Bean and Pierre David, who had collaborated on the 1990 crime thriller Internal Affairs, with the former writing the film’s screenplay and the latter executive producing it. Their objective was to adapt Levine’s book into a run of the mill thriller revolving around an undercover cop, but Gary Lucchesi, the former President of Production at Paramount Pictures, had other ideas. Seeing as how the movies of Spike Lee became great successes, the studio was mightily impressed, so Lucchesi proposed that the protagonist of Deep Cover be African-American.
Screenwriter Michael Tolkin was hired to write the first draft, Bean was in charge of the revisions made to the script, whereas the film’s director Bill Duke and several cast members helped refine several of its aspects. Surprisingly enough, the finished screenplay was turned down by Paramount, as well as every other major studio. It was even suggested by some executives that the protagonist be a white man after all. But after the success of the 1991 crime thriller New Jack City starring Wesley Snipes, Ice-T and Chris Rock, New Line Cinema, the studio that had previously said “no” to making Deep Cover, reassessed its initial decision. The plan was to give the movie a budget below $8 million, so that the risk would not outweigh the potential reward. As it turned out, Deep Cover went on to gross $16.6 million in North America.
The film’s director Bill Duke worked as an actor on films such as Commando and Predator, while making his directorial debut in 1984 with the made-for-television drama The Killing Floor. His second feature, the crime movie A Rage in Harlem, received a five-minute standing ovation at the 44th Cannes Film Festival in 1991. Around the time he got hired to direct his third feature Deep Cover, he said he was not interested in making ‘black’ movies: “I’m interested in making movies that reflect reality as I perceive it.”
When asked in a 2020 Vulture interview by Matt Zoller Seitz to describe said reality regarding drugs and politics in America in 1991, the director stated: “The crack epidemic was in full swing. The black community was seen as the ‘horror station of the universe,’ you know? The news and the government made it seem like these evil, sick, crazy black people were doing bad things, killing each other, killing cops and killing other people. In those days, the drug infection in our community was just overwhelming. But when you really research what was going on, you see that there was—when I say poverty, I mean extreme, extreme, extreme poverty. We’re talking about a welfare system that was dysfunctional, making it hard for men to be part of their own households and then blaming them for that. We’re also talking about the public-school educational system totally broken. We’re talking about the ratio of black men in prison compared to the numbers in the population being way out of whack. I could go on and on and on. I wanted to really explore what was at the core of it and what could be done, in the form of a thriller.”
Deep Cover follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne), a police officer who at ten years old witnessed the death of his cocaine-addicted father while the latter was in the process of robbing a store. The traumatic event not only led Russell into law enforcement, but also embedded him with a very strict moral code lacking any underlying values. This, along with his hot temper and his disdain for authority, can be found in his psychological profile, implying that he exhibits ‘criminal tendencies.’ That is why DEA chief Gerald Carver (Charles Martin Smith) deems him the perfect candidate for an undercover job that entails posing as a drug dealer for the purpose of bringing down a West Coast drug cartel, with South American diplomat Hector Gúzman at the top. Stevens, shaped by his traumatic experience and now going by the undercover name of John Hull, has never so much as had an alcoholic drink, let alone anything else. But his newest assignment threatens to put his entire self-concept to the test, as he slowly becomes seduced by the many temptations inherent in one such lifestyle. His partner-in-crime becomes David Jason (Jeff Goldblum), lawyer by day, drug trafficker by night and the two plan on upping their game by getting in the business of distributing synthetic cocaine.
Growing all the more dissatisfied with the tasks he is given by his superior and eventually realizing that chief Carver never painted him the whole picture pertaining to the operation at hand, Stevens becomes painfully disillusioned with both his purpose and his role in the grand scheme of things. As the lines start becoming all the more blurred, we the viewers are meant to swim in a sea of moral ambiguity alongside the protagonist, who begins questioning whether he is better suited for the role of a drug kingpin than he ever was for that of a cop. By the end of the film, we find ourselves unsure of whether we are rooting for him to take down the drug overlords as was the initial plan, thereby fulfilling his assignment as a man of the law, or if we would rather see him succeed in a business he seems to have a natural talent for.
But instead of telling us all of the above, the movie’s prerogative is to show us—the screenwriters abstain from using excessive wording so as to get their point across, allowing Duke to focus on action-based character development and the ‘how’ of his storytelling. And therein lies Deep Cover’s true brilliance. Montenegrin cinematographer Bojan Bazelli’s stylish cinematography reassuringly pulls us into the underworld Stevens quickly becomes a part of, making it feel surprisingly welcoming and oddly seductive despite the frequent outbursts of violence and the depiction of the inevitable descent into a kind of personal hell that accompanies drug addiction.
The story is, in its essence, fairly gritty, but it seldom looks like it. The colors are highly saturated, Bazelli’s camera often pulls the audience into the frame, making certain scenes look as if they were taken straight out of a 90s rap video, with a soundtrack that features the eponymous title track, performed by then-newcomer Snoop Dogg. The voice-over narration done by Laurence Fishburne reads and feels like spoken word poetry that is used to accentuate the film’s overall tone, rather than to serve as a means of filling in the plot-based blanks.
Another testament to the movie’s show, don’t tell policy is the notable presence of religious imagery, courtesy of screenwriter Tolkin who had previously demonstrated a fondness for themes of guilt and redemption in movies such as his 1991 drama The Rapture or the satirical black comedy The Player (1992). There is also the inclusion of Clarence Williams III in the role of Detective Taft, a deeply religious man who serves as a mirror of Stevens’ conscience and ultimately becomes the main catalyst for the protagonist’s choice regarding the path he is meant to take.
For the role of Stevens, both Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes were considered, before the part ultimately went to Laurence Fishburne (credited as Larry Fishburne), who Duke thought had the capacity to portray a character the viewers could both believe in and identify with. Fishburne and his co-star Goldblum researched their roles and bonded in the weeks prior to shooting by riding in an LAPD squad car that was called to a homicide scene. The two actors were altogether very different in their approach to acting—while Goldblum was a big fan of improvisation, often coming up with lines on the spot, Fishburne was more prone to drawing inside the lines by sticking to the script. And Duke is the type of director who welcomed improvisation: “Larry hated working with me in the beginning. He’s used to rehearsing a scene the way it’s going to be shot. I said, ‘Larry, that’s not how I work.’ It always made him nervous, but he started to trust me and we had a good collaboration.”
Deep Cover is a thoroughly exhilarating thriller that successfully avoids the rather clichéd black-and-white juxtaposition of “good” and “evil,” seeking to explore the shades of grey inherent in the human condition instead. It is also a bold piece of filmmaking that does not shy away from exposing corruption in American politics, pertaining to the hypocrisy behind the government’s self-serving motives that can be found at the very core of the war on drugs. And on top of that, the film’s director resorts to a visually interesting aesthetic that effortlessly enthralls the viewers and catapults them into America’s poverty-stricken underbelly of the early 90s.
Koraljka Suton is a member of the Croatian Society of Film Critics and has a master’s degree in German and English. For her thesis, she did a comparative analysis of Spielberg’s ‘Band of Brothers’ and ‘The Pacific’. Koraljka trained at a Zagreb-based acting studio for six years and fell in love with Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg’s acting techniques. She is also a contemporary dancer and a Reiki master who believes in the transformative quality of art. Read more »
Screenwriter must-read: Michael Tolkin & Henry Bean’s screenplay for Deep Cover [PDF]. (NOTE: For educational and research purposes only). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available from the Criterion Collection and other online retailers. Absolutely our highest recommendation.
Bill Duke on Deep Cover and Hollywood’s gatekeepers, by Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times, July 2021.
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What inspired you to make that initial transition into directing?
I started out as a writer and director of theater in New York and I wrote my own plays and directed some of them. I always was interested in film, but I was intimidated by the equipment, the size of the crews, the cameras, everything. So I just stuck to directing theater. I got a show called “Palmerstown, U.S.A.,” [created by] Norman Lear and Alex Haley. We were on for two seasons. And after that, I didn’t work for two years. So I said, you know something, you better get over your fears. So I applied to the American Film Institute under Tony Vellani and the rest is history. I mean, at that time, AFI was the bomb place to be in terms of understanding the craft of directing. So I was very fortunate.
Was that a difficult decision to make, to enroll at the AFI? I wonder if starting your directing career somehow felt like a failure in your acting career.
This is the business of rejection and they tell you to get over it, but you don’t. Because it has an emotional impact on you, a psychological impact on you. And so you have to continue to dig yourself out of holes. Fortunately, I have meditation in my life, certain spiritual things in my life and friends that help support me. So with that combination, I was able to get through those tough times, but no matter who you are, those tough times keep coming. As you age in the business, it gets worse. So it’s like, thank God I was able to continue.
How did you come to direct Deep Cover? It’s an adaptation of a book by a white drug enforcement agent adapted by two white screenwriters that becomes a film directed by Bill Duke and starring Laurence Fishburne.
New Line saw some of my work and invited me into a meeting. I pitched them my vision, et cetera. And they got it and it was a great collaboration. That’s before they got the big films; they were an independent film studio. And even though it was initially a white hero, at that particular time drugs were obliterating the Black community. And so it was more relevant to a great extent, but one of the things in the book and in the script that we dealt with, which I was really happy and proud of, is that before that, films dealt with drugs on the street, the people that actually sold the drugs on the street. But in the book, he says, “wait a minute, the people that are selling it on the street, they’re being punished, put in jail, murdered, but they’re not growing it, they’re not shipping it in, they’re not manufacturing it. Why don’t we go after those people?” He tried to go after them. And he was fired because the upper echelon people have protections. There’s an old saying that a lawyer friend told me years ago. He said, “Do you know the distinction between a good lawyer and a great lawyer?” I said, “No.” He said a good lawyer knows the law. A great lawyer knows the judge.
The movie captures Laurence Fishburne at a very powerful point in his career. How did you come to cast him?
What Laurence has, he understands silence. Watch his work; he’s a great listener. It’s like music. The only reason that music exists is because of the rests in between the notes and Laurence is not afraid to rest and respond to you. Not with lines, but respond to you based upon not only what you said, but how you said things, and for that, you have to listen. So watch his work. You’ll see he’s a great listener and it comes organically out of what he just heard.
He and Jeff Goldblum have such great chemistry. At times the movie becomes almost like this crazed buddy film. And you really leaned into that, letting them improvise. As a director, how do you recognize that chemistry and elevate it?
It’s very fortunate I’m an actor also. So I really feel the characters that I’m directing. And I feel for the actors and I know what they’re trying to do emotionally and craft-wise. And so there comes a point at which if you don’t trust your director, it’s over. And so I brought them to a point of trust and that they could rely on each other. And once that happened, they really trusted each other and trusted what I was doing with the story of the film. And so I was very fortunate because I coached them as a director who understood and trusted actors.
You mentioned the drug epidemic of the time you were making the movie. The first shot of the movie is a slow-motion image of two guys smoking crack. It’s really unnerving and also unusual in that those are not the lead characters. As a viewer you don’t really know who those guys are and what you’re looking at. What did it mean to you to be exploring that world at that time?
Well, they were the leads of the film to me in the sense that these are the people that are being impacted by what I’m going to show you. They were young. Then we went back to the crack house. We saw the deprivation, what those drugs do to the human psyche, physiology. I mean, I was into drugs at one time and drugs are no joke, And withdrawing from drugs is a full-time, 100% courageous act. If you were into alcohol and drugs, it takes a lot to kick that. So I wanted to really address the fact that drugs are no joke. And people will relate drugs to the street. I wanted to relate drugs to the corporate offices in this nation.
You did an interview with the L.A. Times in 1992 about the number of films with Black directors coming from Hollywood at that time. But you said “I’m not interested in making ‘Black’ movies. I’m interested in making movies that reflect my reality as I perceive it.” And you said, “I see these as American films.” Do you feel that at that time in Hollywood, the business, and also the media, were trying to shoehorn all Black filmmakers together? What was it like at that moment?
I will give you an example. I directed a film called The Cemetery Club. Diane Ladd and Olympia Dukakis. And I loved the play on Broadway and they brought it to me and we all worked on the script because it was about death and mourning people. When someone dies, how do you feel? What happens to you? These three women’s husbands died and they created this cemetery club and helped each other bury the husbands, helped them mourning after. We took the film around the world. And here’s the question I was consistently asked, “Mr. Duke, this is a film about three white females and you’re a Black director. Why are you directing three white females?” And I said, “Well, I’ve had people die in my family. I mourned. And I related to that because of what I’ve been through.” And they said, but you’re a black director. And I said, but Steven Spielberg just directed The Color Purple. And here’s what got me, man. This happened at least 10 times, different interviewers can look at me when I say, well, Steven Spielberg directed Color Purple. They look at my face and say, without any malice at all, “But that’s different.” How do you deal with that? “But that’s different.” And I’ll give you another example. I was the first Black director on Dallas. I drove up to the gate, rolled down my window. The security guard looks into the window and he says, “Who are you delivering for?” “What did you say?” “I said, who are you delivering for?” As I’ve said in several other interviews, I wanted to say, “I’m about to deliver a can of whoop-ass to you.” But I would have been the angry Black man in Hollywood. So instead I said, “I’m delivering my talent as the first Black director on ‘Dallas,’ would you please open the gate?” The most gratifying thing was the look on his face. He almost let out a little gasp. That was great for me.
But when you’re just trying to make your films and Hollywood is bringing its baggage to you, how do you deal with that? How do you continue to move forward to make the films that you want to be making?
Well, I don’t work a lot. They consider me a renegade or too old or whatever you want to call it. But I keep developing my own content, documentaries, et cetera. But you know, Hollywood is not an easy place to be. And so if you try to stand by your integrity, there are compromises you have to make, but you have to choose those compromises wisely because in media, when your name goes on a film, it’s on there forever. Your great-grandchildren will see that. So sometimes you’ve got to compromise to pay the bills. Other times you’ve got to stand up for your principles.
About a year ago there was a New York Times article on the lack of films by Black filmmakers released by the Criterion Collection. And now Deep Cover is coming out, along with Dee Rees’ Pariah, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love and Basketball and a box set of films by Melvin Van Peebles. What does it mean to have your film recognized this way?
I think it’s wonderful. We all like to be recognized for our work. Self-recognition is first, but when people say you’ve done good work and what you created communicated with them and they appreciated what you did and they want to reward you for it, that’s always positive. Because as you know, directing a film is hard work. People don’t understand. I wish they could have people behind the scenes, seeing what we really do and all the challenges we face. And then you get a final product and you’re hoping that people relate to it in the way that you intended them to. No guarantees, but you hope that they will. But it’s work. Hard work.
What do you think of this idea of the film canon and that there are gatekeepers, people making decisions about what films are considered worthwhile. Whether it’s work from Black filmmakers or a crime picture, what do you make of who decides what movies are worth consideration?
It’s a very difficult space to be in because who’s determining the worth of it? What is their experience? Do they know anything about character arc, story arc, what you’re trying to say with the film? As creative people, it’s hard to be put into a box and be creative at the same time. Because your creativity becomes about the box. And so you’re like, “I want to breathe. Could you open the top?” “No, not right now, maybe next year.”
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Legendary actor and director Bill Duke gives an in-depth interview where he touches on a number of topics ranging from racism, film school, and some of his most prominent roles. We highly recommend Duke’s autobiography: Bill Duke: My 40-Year Career on Screen and behind the Camera.
JOHN CARTER, ACE (1922-2018)
The first African-American to join the American Cinema Editors society, John Carter co-edited the George Plimpton football tale Paper Lion (1968); Lean on Me (1989), starring Morgan Freeman as real-life high school principal Joe Clark; The Karate Kid Part III (1989), one of three features he did with director John G. Avildsen; and Men of Honor (2000), about African-American Navy diver Carl Brashear. His editing skills also were on display in the Marlon Brando and George C. Scott mystery The Formula (1980); in The Heartbreak Kid (1973) and Mikey and Nicky (1976), both directed by Elaine May; and in the Ice Cube comedies Friday (1995) and Barbershop (2002).
“John Carter was a beautiful spirit, and it could be felt and seen through his work,” director Bill Duke, who partnered with him on Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, The Cemetery Club, Deep Cover and TV’s The Killing Floor, told THR. “His craft and spirit influenced my films in a very positive way.”
BOJAN BAZELLI, ASC
“Filmmaking is a global language that began with silent movies. I remember my father taking me to a cinema where I saw a movie through the glass window in the projection booth. It was an amazing experience—like watching poetry being written with light. A cinematographer’s language includes light, lenses, camera angles and movement, as well as the films we choose and how we expose and process them. We can do things with film today that we wouldn’t have dreamed about trying 10 or 15 years ago. That gives us more freedom to experiment and try different things, but the important question isn’t how a cinematographer shot a scene. It’s why they did it that way. You have to trust your instincts and not be afraid to break the rules.” —Bojan Bazelli, ASC
“Noir is an idea that critics, academics, and the film industry have collectively ‘projected onto the past,’ in Naremore’s words, to the detriment of understanding that this nostalgia constitutes a privilege that not all subscribe to or can afford. Set in a neon-soaked Los Angeles, Deep Cover stages not a simple derivation of noir but the meeting of the idea of noir and the idea of Black film. Bojan Bazelli’s cinematography shows how the aesthetic codes of classical noir can be expanded to accommodate a different sense of light and shadow, with all manner of high-contrast reds and blues used within the film’s evocative framings.” —Deep Cover: Who’ll Pay Reparations on My Soul?, by Michael B. Gillespie
Here are several photos taken behind-the-scenes during production of Bill Duke’s Deep Cover. Photographed by Joel David Warren © New Line Productions, Image Organization. Intended for editorial use only. All material for educational and noncommercial purposes only.
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