KINDEST CUT?

During an interview with Calendar in May, producer Diane Silver spoke confidently of filming “Native Son,� based on Richard Wright’s 1940 novel, without compromising Wright’s vision of protagonist Bigger Thomas as a raging, violent black man.

When Cinecom releases the movie Dec. 24, we may get a different picture: Silver has excised a crucial murder scene over the objections of director Jerrold Freedman to make Bigger (played by Victor Love) a more sympathetic character.

In the story, which dramatizes the degradation of racism, public attention focuses on Bigger for killing a white woman (Elizabeth McGovern) in a moment of panic--while ignoring his premeditated murder of his black girlfriend Bessie (Akosua Busia).

When Silver saw Freedman’s cut of the film, she told us, she found the scene of Bessie’s death “brutal and without motivation and it had nothing to do with the essence of the book.� She said the scene was not in Richard Wesley’s screenplay--�I don’t know who wrote the scene (that Freedman) shot�--and “there was no time or money to reshoot it.� (Freedman declined comment.)

Lindsay Law, exec producer of PBS’ “American Playhouse,� which co-financed and will televise the film after its theatrical release, agreed that the murder and its motivation “form an enormous section of the book,� but its inclusion in the film might cast Bigger in too unsympathetic a light. “Eventually we decided to leave it in the script to see if it would work.�

Wesley said that because of filming delays, he was asked to condense his original three-scene version of the murder into one scene--�So my careful setup of Bigger’s motivation was lost. The scene never worked on any aesthetic level. The murder seemed completely unmotivated.�

So, said Wesley, “we dropped it, knowing that people who are familiar with the book will probably raise questions.�