Arsenio Hall: comedy is his sword, painting his shield - talk show host - Interview - Cover Story

Mimicking Miles Davis' raspy voice, talk show host Arsenio Hall relates the late jazz trumpeter's warning to him: "You're gonna kill yourself. You need outlets." Davis was referring to Hall's hectic nightly schedule as the host and executive producer of the Arsenio Hall Show, and he suggested that Hall try painting, a hobby that Davis had taken up in the early 1980s. At first Hall didn't think much of the idea, as he watched Davis pull down a huge roll of canvas and start painting. "I just ignored it, and he said, |Do you hear what I said?'" Hall recalls, laughing at his imitation of Davis. "|It's about expressing yourself and getting some of that stress out. You need this.'"

Hall was never the best art student in school. As a matter of fact, he wasn't the best student. Growing up in blighted neighborhoods in southeastern Cleveland, with two parents who were constantly at war with each other, created its share of emotional upheaval. Hall's parents divorced when he was 7, leaving his mother to raise him single-handedly. Despite the troubles surrounding them, she was determined to provide her son with a culturally and educationally rich upbringing.

Every summer she sent him to take classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Between summers she focused on his schooling, ensuring that he would make it to college. Hall majored in photojournalism, but that grew expensive, and after two years he changed his major to communications. He never lost interest in art, however; he simply shifted direction.

"God gives us our weapons to fight with," Hall explains from the shadows of his Hollywood office. In the middle of a bright, sunny day, the small office with purple wallpaper is dark - blinds drawn, lights dimmed - and Hall is wearing shades. Though the setting conforms to his hip on-screen persona, his calm, understated demeanor does not.

"The gift and the weapon that God has given me is comedy," continues this son of a Baptist preacher, "and I manage to use it to fight and work with." Hall's latest battle hasn't been with Roseanne or Madonna or Leno, but with Paramount executives over his first motion picture as executive producer, Bopha!

He has an exclusive production deal with Paramount Pictures that so far has spawned several projects, including the educational videotape Time Out: The Truth About HIV, AIDS and You, co-hosted by Earvin "Magic" Johnson, and Bopha! which was released to favorable reviews last September.

The Zulu word "bopha," meaning both "arrest" and "detain," has become a rallying cry of protest in South Africa, where the movie is set. Based on a play by Percy Mtwa, Bopha! stars Danny Glover and Alfre Woodard in a family conflict over civil strife.

"It takes a long time to find good projects," Hall says, "and probably as long to convince a studio like Paramount that it's important and prestigious to balance your plate with this kind of work." Historically, serious films set in Africa - A Dry, White Season; Cry Freedom; Sarafina - have not been box-office hits, so when Hall decided to produce Bopha! he engaged Paramount Pictures and then-Chairman Brandon Tartikoff in a long, serious debate on reputation versus profit.

"The most important color in Hollywood is green. When you have anything to talk to them about other than that color, you better be a really smo-o-o-oth operator," Hall confides. "Menace II Society shows a reality of the street, and this movie shows the reality of the motherland. And they're both important."

Hall believes the public should be surprised that Bopha! made it to area theaters, not because he chose this film over hundreds of others - he has turned down hilarious scripts that crossed his desk simply because "that's not what America needs this brother to do right now" - but because America's white media seldom portray blacks accurately or totally. "They would prefer to have a photo of me with my jacket over my head going into a police station for cocaine possession or illegal possession of my |nine' than they would prefer to tell you that I am the executive producer of this movie," he says, leaning forward.

It's no secret that African-American filmmakers in Hollywood have constantly confronted studios that are interested in producing "urban" films that portray blacks in a negative light. Hall refused to fall into that category. Facing the possibility of personally, losing money, he propelled Bopha! forward because he wanted to lead with subject matter that he considers important. He hired his own publicist for this project, and he says he did not accompany the director, Morgan Freeman, to Zimbabwe, where Bopha! was filmed, because he couldn't afford to do so.

Hall laughs when he acknowledges that he has the power to give a film the green light, "as long as in the future something makes more money than Bopha! ... Hollywood is a reflection of the society we live in," he explains, no longer smiling. "The bottom line is: Paramount will make any movie you'd like to make if America will come. And if America will buy tickets."

So it is on black Americans to support serious black films. For that reason, Hall does not totally blame Hollywood for the dearth of blacks who can green-light a film - after mentioning Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg and Spike Lee, he struggles for more names - or for the lack of blacks behind the cameras and on the screen.

Hall credits Hollywood with making him a shrewder businessman and a funnier comedian. Richard Pryor used to tell Hall all the time that to succeed in Hollywood, blacks must be better than the rest. "By the time a Richard Pryor becomes number 1 in America," Hall says, "believe me, he had to be better than Robin Williams. Because what don't kill you makes you stronger."

According to Hall, that's how racism in Hollywood work - every time you take one step forward, it knocks you back two. That's why once Hall achieves one goal, he immediately sets another, and he says he has achieved every goal he ever set. It hasn't been easy, and now that he has reached a plateau - he's the first African American to own and produce a talk show in America - he does not believe he has what it takes to advance to the next level as a businessman or as a comedian.

He says he has too much heart to become a better businessman. "My biggest fault," he proclaims, "is I'll keep an employee much longer than I should because I feel for the human being. ... I want to stick and survive with that person when they might be bad for business. ... I think I'd rather have mediocre accomplishments than go to that next level, knowing what I'd have to be at that level - cutthroat." ,

When the topic shifts to comedy, Hall's language shifts to coarse. "I think the funniest guys, or the funniest moments, are heartless moments when you just don't give a f- about nobody's feelings. The funniest comedy you can find is brutal," he says, backing up his words with an example. "I heard a guy say a really, really funny thing about River Phoenix's death. Very soundly written joke that I could never do. He went to a club, and he killed with it. But you gotta say, |F- a River Phoenix's death.' Don't think I'm willing to go to that."

Hall has been working his brand of comedy since 1979, when he was 23 years old. After graduating from Kent State University - the first in his family to attend college - he pursued an entertainment career. He met with moderate success in Detroit, where he began performing stand-up comedy on a dare, and then moved to Chicago. There he met Nancy son, who recognized his potential and gave his career a boost by helping him move to Los Angeles and becoming his mentor. Soon he was opening for such popular acts as Aretha Franklin, Tom Jones, Patti LaBelle, Wayne Newton, Tina Turner and Joe Williams.

Not until 1983, when Hall became the announcer for the late-night show Thicke of the Night, with Alan Thicke, did he re-establish his childhood interest in art - although this time it was the art of the deal. "The producer for that show was a guy named Freddie Silverman," Hall says. "He was notorious in this town for making things happen, for making magic. I used to do my announcing, then follow him until he would tell me to get outta there. Because I wanted to know what makes this magic."

"I study people who I admire the business talents of," Hall continues. During a two-year development deal with ABC, Hall became acquainted with producer Dick Clark, who would let him spend time in his office. Hall would also sit with his agents while they worked, learning the business side of his trade while they argued about booking the Pointer Sisters in various cities or hiring contract writers for the Jackson tour.

In 1987 Hall spent 13 weeks as the interim guest host on the Fox network's Late Show, serving as Joan Rivers' replacement. His success led to a development deal with Paramount and a role in the romantic comedy Coming to America. By January 1989, when the Arsenio Hall Show made its debut, Hall was accustomed to using his weapon called comedy. Aiming to peacefully coexist with Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show, he succeeded where so many Hollywood personalities - Merv Griffin, Joan Rivers, Pat Sajak - had failed.

"I thought, Why is everybody going after Johnny's audience? Why not go after an audience Johnny doesn't have? Why not fill a void that doesn't have a talk show - the children of Johnny's audience? I felt I had the plan if I could unify the team and go after one goal."

Hall read only one opening-night review that gave him a shot. "And that's when I'm best - when you all say I can't, and you count me out," he says. So he set out to prove the critics wrong. "Sinbad won Star Search, which is hosted by Ed McMahon, and Ed couldn't get him on the Tonight Show. So I knew what my mission was. And it wasn't just a black thing; it was a huddled-masses thing. If you can dig it, come on." The MTV generation dug it.

Five years later, at age 38, Hall is a powerful force at Paramount Studios, reportedly commanding a $12 million salary. The combination of his business acumen and his sense of comedy has produced a formula for success. "I know people with one or the other, and it always makes life harder," Hall says. "The funniest guy I knew in high school is dead because he didn't balance the humor with that other side - living rationally, intelligently, and being a good businessman in life."

That's exactly the point Miles Davis was trying to make that day several years ago when Hall was visiting him at his home - Hall needed an outlet to relieve the tension of a Hollywood career. Davis was spending many hours a day painting when he was not on the road, and he found the hobby soothing and therapeutic. It also kept him occupied during his spare time; more importantly, it kept him from going back to smoking, drinking and snorting.

Hall identifies himself as "a kid from the ghetto of Cleveland who has an obsessive personality - bold and wild," he says. "If I'm not doing something positive, I will get tripped up by the devil." Perhaps that's why he took Davis up on his entreaty, "Promise me you'll try it."

He's amazed at the benefits. "I love what it does as far as stress and relaxation," he says, elated. "All of a sudden, I found myself at my house, with the phone off, in a room, for hours. And every time I looked at a painting, I could almost see how I was feeling that period, what I was going through."

The bulk of Hall's paintings, which he has been creating at home for several years, remain in his house. His mother has one, of course, and he has given one to the producer of his show as a housewarming gift. "Only people really close to me, probably, have ever seen them, or have them," he says.

Members of his staff pass one every day - an abstract work done in acrylic that is hanging in his second-floor office on the Paramount lot. Hurried brushstrokes in varying shades of blue move across the canvas, from a colorful jumble to something of a resolution. Hall needs to be prodded to divulge the story behind this painting, and when he does, his face musters all of its boyish charm. "The story is a woman," Hall croons. "Isn't it always?"

"There was a woman who I was very much in love with, but I knew I wasn't ready for what she was ready for, and knew the end was near because of that. I thought, I'm about to lose somebody I care about, but it has to be that way. ... And now I'm over her." A testament to the restorative powers of painting for recreation?

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