CAMPANELLA JR. FOCUSES IN ON BLACKS IN FILMS

By LEE MARGULIES

May 13, 1986 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

It’s no surprise to learn that Roy Campanella Jr. was captain of his baseball team in high school. Or that he played catcher, just as his father once did so splendidly for the Brooklyn Dodgers, earning him a place in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

What is a surprise, considering that heritage, is to find out what he’s done since then.

Campanella went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Harvard, worked as a film editor at CBS News, added a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia, served as a production executive at CBS Entertainment and, for the last five years, has been pursuing a career in Hollywood as a producer, director and writer.

“My dad never pushed me to get involved in baseball as a career,” the younger Campanella explains. “He always encouraged me to do that thing which I loved the most.”

And that, he says, was film making.

“From an early age I have been fascinated by motion pictures, by images,” he says. “Though I read a lot--I think I suffer from insatiable eye hunger--I’m much more a visual person than a literal person.”

Ensconced in an office at Universal, Campanella at 37 is an established television director--having done episodes of “Knots Landing,” “Simon and Simon,” “Dallas” and “Knight Rider”--and is trying to get a foothold as a producer. He’s got a TV movie project in development at CBS and recently completed work on an hourlong documentary, “Passion and Memory,” which airs on KCET, Channel 28, tonight at 10. (It also will be broadcast Wednesday at 8 p.m. on Channel 24 and at 11 p.m. on Channel 15.)

The film, which Campanella directed, co-wrote, co-edited and produced for KCET under his Morningstar Productions banner, discusses the history of blacks in Hollywood movies by focusing on the careers of five representative performers: Stepin Fetchit, Hattie McDaniel, Bill Robinson, Dorothy Dandridge and Sidney Poitier.

Undertaken in 1982 as what he calls a labor of love and made for $150,000, “Passion and Memory” is based on the book “Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks” by Donald Bogle and has Robert Guillaume of “Benson” as host. Campanella readily acknowledges that it is not a definitive study of its subject.

“I would call it a character study, through which one can examine some of the historical themes and incidents involving blacks in Hollywood,” he says. “The definitive history obviously would take more than an hour--although some people are so ignorant about it that they’d think you could do it as a commercial.”

It is not a pretty history, with blacks encountering the same prejudice and discrimination in Hollywood that they found elsewhere. But “Passion and Memory” addresses the issue in measured tones, letting the facts speak for themselves.

“If the film is not strident and full of bitterness, it’s because I was trying to reach out and communicate, as opposed to pointing my finger at people,” Campanella says. “I decided early on that I was not going to do a piece where the blacks were victims and the studios were victimizers. I think that’s a very simplistic equation that doesn’t allow at all for examination of the gray area that exists between the two extremes.”

His goal, he says, is for viewers to come away knowing more about the five performers, understanding the social confines under which they worked and better appreciating the contributions they and other blacks have made to American films.

The problems of being black in Hollywood haven’t disappeared, but Campanella is not inclined to talk about them.

“I don’t have a combative personality that way,” he says. “You’re kind of damned if you do and damned if you don’t when you get into discussions in that area.”

Instead, he says, he prefers to employ the positive thinking he learned from his father.

“The more you tell yourself that there aren’t opportunities, the less they exist,” he explains. “The more you tell yourself that there are opportunities, the more you are going to find them--or create them yourself.”

He’s shown an inclination to make his own. Although his educational degrees are not in conventional film-making disciplines, he saw them as means to his end.

“There’s probably no better area of academic discipline for film making than anthropology,” he reasons. “It’s the study of man. The technical aspects of film making can be grasped within six months to a year at the most--and that’s if you’re a slow learner. It’s the creativity and thought and feeling that are difficult to come by. That’s why I think you should have not only an active, creative intuition but also a familiarity with society and culture.”

And the master’s degree in business?

Besides exposing him to marketing and accounting practices, “business school examines the nature of uncertainty and risk,” he says. “Those two attributes are certainly dominant ones in the film business.”

One of five children--and the father of two teen-agers--Campanella says his recognizable name has been a “double-edged sword” in trying to establish himself as a film maker.

“I haven’t gotten any assignments because of it,” he says with a laugh. “But my father has built up such good will around this country that 99 out of 100 people I meet have nothing but favorable things to say about him, and they treat me with a warmth and friendliness that I appreciate. I know it’s an intangible, but I think that kind of response is important.”

On the other hand, he notes, he occasionally finds his name is an obstacle because it is so strongly associated with baseball that some people don’t want to take him seriously in a different profession.

Obstacles notwithstanding, the same determination that drove Roy Campanella to succeed as one of professional baseball’s first black players--and later to come to terms with paralysis after an automobile accident--also fuels his son’s ambition to become a respected film maker.

“I’m indebted to my father for providing me with a wonderful example of commitment and courage,” he says, “because it wasn’t easy for him.

“It’s not easy for me now, but it’s easier because of people like my father.”