Danny Glover on acting and activism

NORFOLK
 
When actor Danny Glover was a youngster, he would listen to his parents talk about social injustice and ways to improve their world. They were postal workers, activists who labored on behalf of the union.
 
Glover took the lesson to heart and, when necessary, has gladly taken the heat for his own efforts. Last month he was handed a $100 fine for trespassing at a Niagara Falls hotel, where he spoke in a 2006 rally on behalf of its workers.
 
"We went there to protest layoffs and penalties the workers were experiencing," Glover said, explaining that the owners were not honoring a union contract.
 
Nothing new here. For most of his life, the star from all those "Lethal Weapon" films, "Places in the Heart" and "Grand Canyon" has been deeply involved in groups that aid underserved Americans and Africans. He has not shied from controversy.
 
Glover's human-rights activism, reflected in his films as well as his life, has earned him the 2008 lifetime achievement award at the ONFilm Festival, sponsored by Old Dominion University with the city of Norfolk. It takes place Saturday through April 5.
 
"Man, world ain't supposed to work like this," Glover's character tells a terrorizing gang leader in "Grand Canyon."
 
Glover will be honored at 8 p.m. April 5 at Granby Theater in Norfolk. For $25, the public may attend the gala event.
 
This year's film festival has an election-year-appropriate theme: "Reel Politics." More than 30 films will be screened, primarily at ODU.
 
Last week, Glover spoke by phone during a break from shooting new episodes for ABC's Emmy Award-winning, prime-time drama "Brothers and Sisters."
 
When asked about the festival award, he brushed away credit. "It's not false humility. I don't have ownership of this, whatever this career is. It's a career whereby others have paved the way to make things happen."
 
He was thinking of black actors such as Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier - his role models - and countless others.
 
"A career is the embodiment of many struggles, not exclusively your own. People laid the groundwork, whether they were people who protested or demanded change or came before and set another standard.
 
"Where do I get the inspiration?" he said, picking up steam in his mellow baritone - the same warm voice heard in so many compelling characters, from Moze, the itinerant laborer in 1984's "Places in the Heart" who taught Sally Field's character how to farm cotton, to Jake, the reclusive Vietnam vet of 2005's "Missing in America" who breaks out of his shell when a Vietnamese girl is left in his care.
 
"Where do I get the food? I get it from the human experience."
 
From his childhood, Glover saw how working with other people toward a common goal created community. "You are not a single person," he stressed. "You have relationships."
 
It's an awareness that seems at the center of his life.
 
"I learned what things were valuable. Ideas, ideals were valuable. My parents were that. That set a foundation for me. And when I was 13, 14, I saw young people who were not too much older than me marching and making change. All that stuff.
 
"It was enough to intrigue me. I wanted to emulate them."
 
Glover, who is 61, was raised in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, where he still lives. He came up in a time of social ferment, in the 1960s. Hoping to make a difference, he studied economics at San Francisco State University then worked a decade for the city and county, specializing in housing and educational programs.
 
Meanwhile, he took acting classes. His hobby quickly turned into a career when, in 1982, he made it to Broadway in South African playwright Athol Fugard's "Master Harold... and the Boys," about apartheid.
 
In Fugard's work he found "a more human way of saying the same things I had performed as part of the more strident, agitprop theater in college," he told a Chicago reporter in 1987. "Here was a real play with characters and not just positions."
 
Film director Robert Benton saw him on Broadway and hired him for "Places in the Heart." Glover's mother died the day he was cast. Not long before, she had prophesied that he would soon appear in an important film that would be about him.
 
"She was right," he told a reporter in 1992. "This part of Moze was so much about me that it was beyond me." How so? "His optimism...his ingratiating, often diplomatic way of dealing with the world."
 
More important, Moze transcended his fears. "He was still able to hold onto something that was more important: That we are our brother's keepers."
 
Glover quickly became a celebrity, but has never lost his passion for public service. Among his many involvements: In 1998, he became the first goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme. Glover was focused on raising HIV/AIDS awareness in Africa, especially regarding children.
 
He chairs the TransAfrica Forum, devoted to educating African Americans about the economic and political impact of American policies on Africa and advocating on behalf of that continent. He also is active in UNITE HERE, a North American union for hotel, restaurant and industrial workers.
 
Glover still takes roles in mainstream movies, though his filmography is heavy on independents, often ones with socially redeeming messages. He's in two recent films - "Be Kind Rewind," in which he plays the owner of a struggling video rental store, and "Honeydripper," a John Sayles film set in 1950 Alabama, starring Glover as the owner of a floundering blues club. (The former is playing at Cinemark at Military Circle theater in Norfolk.)
 
In 2005, he co-founded Louverture Films, which is devoted to producing films of historical relevance and social purpose. One of its projects, "Trouble the Water," about post-Katrina New Orleans, won best documentary in January at the Sundance Film Festival.
 
The company is named after Toussaint Louverture, who led a slave revolt in 1791 that freed Haiti from French rule. The colony became the world's first independent black republic.
 
Glover has long wanted to direct a film about Louverture, and a film called "Toussaint" is listed on the company's Web site as "in prep or development." A big chunk of funding for that project came last September, when Hugo Chavez, president of oil-rich Venezuela, announced that his government would give Glover's company about $18 million for that film, plus another couple million toward a movie about South American liberator Simon Bolivar, a native of Venezuela.
 
Chavez, with his "21st century socialism," is a hot button. The Bush administration watches warily for signs that he is evolving into another Fidel Castro, Chavez's friend and mentor, whereas some Americans, including Glover, admire his efforts to aid the underprivileged.
 
Many Americans were offended that Chavez called President George W. Bush the "devil" in 2006 at the United Nations, and some noticed that Glover was by Chavez's side the next day in Harlem, as Chavez announced he would provide low-cost Venezuelan heating oil for people in that New York City neighborhood.
 
Glover the protester has himself been the subject of protest.
 
Last June, a Miami-based group of Venezuelan-American activists chided Democratic candidate John Edwards for campaigning with Glover, citing the actor's support of Chavez, reported The Miami Herald.
 
Organizers of the Old Dominion University film festival said they do not expect any protests regarding Glover's appearance.
 
"I would welcome any discussion," said Austin Jersild, associate professor of history at ODU, who stressed that the scheduled films represent a wide range of viewpoints.
 
Glover isn't bothered by the possibility of confrontations. "They have the right to protest me, and they do that."
 
He defended Chavez, calling him "my friend," and reeled off what he sees as the good deeds of his populist government - improved health care and literacy, free universities, attempted land reforms.
 
"I have a right to talk to him if I want to. We're talking about the possibility of doing a film that no American company has touched in the past, or will touch in the future. They're not interested in doing that kind of film.
 
"I found someone who understands the relationship of the slave revolt to their own history. The slave revolts were the precursors to the independence movements in Latin America.
 
"It's about black people revolting against the empire. The slave revolting against the empire. Whenever the slave has revolted against the empire, the empire has hung them."
 
Glover was thinking of Nat Turner and the white abolitionist, John Brown.
 
"Some people say I'm a tool for propaganda, but that's their preconception. If you want to challenge me, I'm willing to talk about it."
 
Glover will be coming to Norfolk from Memphis, where he will have just taken part in the 40th anniversary commemoration of the assassination of Martin Luther King.
Over the years, Glover has been pleased to have the chance to meet some of the movement's key figures - and to be another link in the continuum of their work.
 
He sounded supremely moved whenever he touched on multiracial alliances, such as those he's witnessed through UNITE HERE.
 
"When I go into the bowels of a San Francisco hotel, I'm going to see Chinese workers and Filipino workers and African American and Latino workers. All these people. Remarkable.
 
"It's the real face of a multiracial country. I'm going to see that in action. It's a beautiful thing to see.
 
"And they understand that I'm there to give presence and notice to their work and to their issues. I love the words brother and sister. I love to play with calling them brother and sister.
 
"It makes me smile. I believe in my heart that that is the beloved community that King talked about."
 
Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com