News Addition; 837

I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is. I don't know what that is. The following program contains material which may be offensive to some people. Viewer discretion is advised.

I don't know what that is. Viewers were one of severe segregation and so we knew there was no chance for us in Hollywood. Hello and welcome to News Edition I'm Terry Fitzpatrick.

This week we go behind the scenes of an actual trial in Dallas to see how psychologists are used to pick juries. We'll also speak with two performance artists whose material has prompted a controversy at the National Endowment for the Arts. And we'll revisit an important period in film history when African American actors and directors produced movies that broke the Hollywood stereotype. First two psychologists in court and Laura Randall. You might not think that the clothes you wear and the kind of job you hold or even your religion could determine if you get picked to serve on a jury, but it's true. Many attorneys are now using psychologists to help them during the jury selection phase of a trial. They look for things you wouldn't believe. In many ways jury selection is a trial by style. It's day one in a $40 million trial. 25 families are suing 11 asbestos manufacturers or the death or illness of loved ones. The attorneys carefully study each potential juror. They know the next two hours can make or break their case.

Good afternoon members of the jury panel. My name is Lisa Blue. Lisa Blue is one of the attorneys for the families. She is also a psychologist and a former sex therapist. My training with masters in Johnson taught me a lot about body language. So that taught me a lot about how to listen and look and use my senses as a psychologist and try to get their jurors. This is Ms. Mason. She is one of the clients and members of the jury panel, her husband. Thank you. Was the owner of two corporations and his economic loss alone is $4 million. So I need to ask you, is there anybody on the jury panel that those numbers are such that you say, Ms. Blue, I have a bioester prejudice. I'm looking for compassionate people and I'm looking for people who are true environmentalists, who want to protect society. And what your job is going to be members of the panel is to put value on human life.

Close make a statement. And if you have somebody who is casual and the message is, I really don't care what you think about me. I feel comfortable with me. That's a kind of person that I like, independent and has a lot of courage. I need courageous jurors on an asbestos case. Blue's reputation for picking juries is so good. Other lawyers often hire her to help select juries in their cases. She assisted in the perjury trial of former Dallas police chief, Mack Vines. So to be very honest with you, that was a very easy jury to pick. He had a lot of popular support in the community and I knew that going in based on jury community surveys. Blue's survey conducted before the trial began indicated that people believed the chief never should have been indicted for perjury. The average Dallas citizen felt that his punishment was too harsh. That's exactly what one of the jurors told reporters after Vines was acquitted.

So, let's talk about some of the jurors. Blue and her adversaries have each had an hour to question potential jurors in the asbestos case. Now each side huddles to go over its notes. 26, I don't want one on my jury. Really? Yeah, he's very cynical. Lawyers don't get to pick their jury. Instead they excuse or strike the people they think would hurt their case. Seven are worried about. Seven is single and he's 30, although he is Baptist and we have a lot of Baptist clients. In this trial each side gets five strikes whoever's left will serve. And even though this woman's divorce she lives in a good part of town with three kids and she is Baptist. Some lawyers believe that the case is over at the end of jury selection because the jury's heard enough and they've already formed their attitude or opinion. Robert Gordon, another combination lawyer psychologist, has devoted his entire practice to jury consulting and research.

This is our courtroom, the MG Gordon courtroom which is named after my father. Gordon arranges mock trials and hires people to form focus groups. Lawyers use them to see how potential jurors are likely to react to the evidence. How do you calculate something like pain and suffering? How much did you give? We were given permission to show you this focus group taped by Gordon in his mock courtroom on the condition that we did not name the people involved or reveal how the case was resolved. The question in the case is one of the least whether the car could have been made safer. Lawyers are summarizing a lawsuit for the focus group. It involves two young men suing the car company over the design of the rear seat lap belts. This crash test shows how such belts can crush the abdominal area. The boys suffered serious abdominal injuries and an accident. But the lawyers reveal a serious flaw in the case.

The boys had all been drinking. There would be no evidence to the contrary. The lawyers need to know if the drunk driving issue will cause the focus group to shift blame from the car company to the boys. And they had nothing to do with them being drunk cause of injury. And then do it the guy that was driving cause of injury. The fact they had the seat belts on. I understand what you're saying. What I'm saying is when they crawl in that car and drink it and hit that car, that's what caused them to go forward. There is always a risk going before a jury with any case. All we're trying to do with the focus group is to reduce the magnitude of that risk. Turley got what he calls a very favorable result on that case. A focus group costing eight to ten thousand dollars can help prepare lawyers for trial or lead to an out of court settlement. So if we can determine through a focus group that a case is worth a quarter of a million dollars less, then we had evaluated it. And therefore we can resolve and settle that case. Instead of taking a risk, then there's a great deal more justice and more economy for our client who's going to make a recovery.

But wait a minute. Isn't this just a rich man's game or rich corporations game? And what about the poor guy and the poor woman? Can they access your services? The question is typically not that is the part of it that is not fair. Gordon wants to correct that. He's collaborating on software that lawyers could take to court to help pick ideal jurors. And so this tells you in this particular case that you want people who's thinking style is emotional and who's feeding style is expressive. They're expressive of their emotion, but their behavior tends to be conforming. Peek has programmed the issues from an actual medical malpractice case into the computer. It involves a baby disabled by an error during delivery. We want people who are not professionals who work for a living. Females are preferred two to one to males. We want people in middle age, not old and not young. With children who are married or remarried, coming from average to large families with education less than graduate or professional level.

So help you God. I do. Please be seated. Twenty two hundred people report for jury duty each weekend Dallas County when a lawyer invests two hundred dollars an hour or more in a jury consultant. The object is not to get a fair jury, but to get a winning jury. Number nine I think has to go number ten is fine. Female, compassionate, warm individual trial psychologists are always limited by one feature of the system. They don't pick who gets on a jury, only who gets off. And in a typical case, there are not enough strikes to tilt the scales very far. From all these people, we think would be very pro asbestos companies. We have to think about which ones are going to be the weakest bad ones. How did Lisa Blu do in that asbestos case? Well, that's a long trial. It is still going on. She says she's very happy with the jury that was selected, but it'll be several weeks before you know how they did.

How fair can these trials be if only one side has the psychologist on the legal team? Well, it depends how good the lawyer on the other side is. A good lawyer has some trial instincts and we'll see some of these things that would point out a biased juror. That person, that lawyer would strike those jurors and theoretically you end up with a fair trial. Thanks very much, Laura. Our next report contains some language and scenes that might be offensive to some viewers. It's about the work of Tim Miller and Holly Hughes, whom theater Gemini brought to Dallas a couple weeks ago. Miller and Hughes are performance artists who focus on gay and lesbian life. The requests for funding from the National Endowment for the Arts became part of an intense controversy, the issue, is whether some artists crossed the line from art to obscenity. This is the Dallas Police Department. If you're not this person being like all of you here, if you're a K&P, you'll be placed under arrest. You wonder how I'll come under arrest. You wonder how I'll come under arrest. My goal is I really honor the reality of people coming into a room, whether it's a theater, a museum, whatever, to go through an experience together.

As a performer, my goal then is to bring up stuff from my life, for the lesbian and gay people in the audience to be there as a gay person and not be blacked out in this culture as we are. It's very clear that my crime was my identity, being openly lesbian artists. One of the few openly lesbian artists to ask for and receive federal funding. And in a year when the Congress equated homosexuality with obscenity, it meant that any openly gay or lesbian artist that was receiving federal funding was kind of in the sitting duck category. Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea at all who you're porkers? I mean, I am a pre-adventure lesbian player out of my generation. The panel of the theater program had recommended Holly Hughes, John Fleck, Karen Finley and I, and a number of others unanimously for funding as solo performers. Then through a whole complicated political pressure that was being put from the White House on the Chairman, John Fronmeyer of the National Endowment for the Arts, and through an old complex set of events within the press and leaking and stuff.

They overturned, or he chose to overturn our unanimously recommended fellowships. He's never bothered to come and see me. He's had many opportunities and he's pointedly refused to come and see, so how would he know what the audience responds to my work is? I couldn't make a living as an artist if my work was as repugnant as some people tend to paint it as. My mother folds up her menu straight into her thigh foes. I want to ask you a question. Do you like boys or girls or both? I think my work is very deliberately constructed to provoke discussion. I don't tell anyone how to feel in my work. I bring up controversial issues, things that I haven't made up my mind about, and I hope to engage the audience in some kind of conversation about it.

Why both is after the rape instead? You know, you're lucky, you can't sit on a calm, they like to kill. Don't you know? I'm slept with 50 men by the time I was 18 or I didn't come with one of them. Didn't think about killing them. At times I was really angry and very uncomfortable, but I think it'll stay with me a long time. I think that she really is honest and very poetic, and she knows how to put in the shot value to keep your interest also. I pretty much knew what was coming and I enjoyed it. I didn't expect as many people to walk out, but it was kind of fun. Is your work obscene? No. If it were obscene, if I were making pornography, I would not need to apply for peanuts from the National Endowment for the Arts. I could buy the National Endowment for the Arts. I mean, pornography is big business. It makes a lot of money, you know.

What is it about your work that bothers people so much? Do you think that bothers some people so much? Well, it's interesting until, I mean, as a gay person, I know that my identity as a gay person upsets some people, especially in a land and a country and a society that says racist, sexist, and homophobic, because ours unfortunately is. But the next day I called my friend Dennis to ask him what he thought safe sex was. We were all sort of new with this, then it was 1983. Said, hmm, safe sex. I've heard of that. Wait, give me a minute. I know. I know what this is about. I think basically you can do whatever you want. Oh, wait, but whatever you do, don't suck. We have more kids than that. How can art change the political system? Well, only the American left, as well, how art can change the world. In fact, the American right knows very well that my work in Tim's work and Karen Finley's work and work of other artists has an impact in the flow of ideas, raises questions. And that is exactly why the American right wants to put the clamps down on American artists.

And this goes right here in my piece to show that I believe actually art plays a transformative role in society. I take a performance art piece that I created after living in front of a county hospital in Los Angeles for a week. The biggest hospital in the world that is two years ago was without an AIDS ward and a grotesque example of like disregard for human life. I begin. For the AIDS coalition to unleash power, active L.A.'s week long vigil in front of county general hospital, where he is in a man proper care programs on an AIDS ward, here at the biggest hospital in the world. And I do that because I want to show that that activists as part of act up the AIDS coalition to unleash power, lots of artists through a year long pressure as artists and activists on the county of Los Angeles, there now exists an AIDS ward to be sick in L.A. is now different. Because maybe any function of art covers spiritualism or politics that does not in some way in some tiny little incy-weency direction work towards healing the sick, fostering communication or saving the planet just ought to get back to an apolitical Reagan-esque 1981 where it would be much more comfortable.

He brought forth a lot of feelings that I've been through in dealing with AIDS in the AIDS crisis and civil disobedience, which I've taken part in, and I could relate a lot to what he was saying. So it was kind of more or less what I was expecting. I did not expect him to take off his clothes though. Uh-oh. I got myself in trouble again. I'm here with my pants around my ankles, painted into a quarter. Well, when he pulled his pants down, I guess you could consider that obscene, but I've seen statues that look the same way, so I guess it wasn't. Well, when he talked about them all having sex in the jail cell at the basement of the Los Angeles jail, I guess that could be considered obscene.

Is there a blacklist getting created in this country, do you think? Uh, blacklist, I think, perhaps is too strong a word, but you want to stop something before it gets to that. I mean, yeah, maybe we're not at the point of 1950s McCarthyism. Do we have to get to that point before we do something about it? I don't think so. I think that's the point of trying to learn from history. I think it's a real possibility. I think the artist in this country, people who care about civil liberties and civil rights in this country, really have to get off their button, start doing something because I think the right and the religious right are very serious about this. A footnote, Holly Hughes would not allow us to videotape her entire Dallas performance unless we gave her an opportunity to censor our report. The scenes we used came from a tape of her performance in New York. Melissa Getchell North joins us now with a look at American films known as Race Movies.

Race movies were produced in the 2030s and 40s and presented a view of African Americans that wasn't seen in Standard Hollywood Fair. These films launched the careers of many black actors and directors who brought an accurate image of Black America from Harlem to Hollywood. Director DW Griffith, Silent Epic, the birth of a nation premiered in 1915. It created a national outrage. African American and white audiences alike were offended by Hollywood's racist depiction of blacks and the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. The Times were one of severe segregation. They knew that we knew that there was very little opportunity for us to go into Hollywood.

If we went, we would either be buffoons or portrayed as servants and some of us didn't look like the Hollywood stereotype and so we knew there was no chance for us in Hollywood. And in response to the birth of a nation, a number of people began to make films that were about life for the African American. Produced between 1912 and 1948, Race Films dramatized the concerns, hopes and dreams of African Americans. African American people could finally, with these films, look up on the screen and see themselves represented, but see themselves represented in all walks of life, not just like in the Hollywood films as buffoons, as servants, as meanials of some sort. Oscar Mischo, the son of X Slaves, led the way by producing and directing his own films. Murder in Harlem portrays a black man discovering a white woman's body. Mischo often tackled controversial issues like racism.

Oh, Mischo said, Mr. Mischo, I want to go home. I want to go home. You shut your damn mouth and come on and have people somewhere else. Others followed Mischo's example. Their films were made on shoestring budgets and often shot in less than two weeks, but they dealt with topics important to African American audiences. Spencer Williams, best known as Andy in the Amos and Andy television series, wrote, directed and starred in the Blood of Jesus, a loving tribute to Black religion. William Alexander, chronicled Black America's struggle for upward mobility in his feature film, Souls of Sin.

Talking about a story that nobody's going to buy, while the whole world spits in your face. You dumb turkey. Go ahead. Step there. Pack a way on that stinking type right until you arrive. Sit here and take the himself from that broken-down crumb of death. Go ahead. Sit here in this jungle like an animal. No world steps on you. Well, nobody steps on dollar bill. There was a scapest fair too, genres which were popular in Hollywood were also popular with African American audiences.

But these gangster films, love stories, musicals, and even westerns featured all black castes. For 40 years, audiences packed 1,200 black only theaters in Texas and across the nation to see Ralph Cooper, Ruby D, Charles Gilpin, Ethel Waters, and Harold Tillman. I think this was an opportunity as fanciful as it was to show what potential they had, what they could be if given the opportunity, what they perhaps really are. Many of the star portraits, movie posters, and film clips are on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It's really wonderful to see all these posters and the excerpts from the films. It's important because it's a whole segment of our American history that we've forgotten. As a young man, Harold Tillman, an attorney and Houston's first African American judge, appeared in six pictures, including love and syncopation, and the fight never ends. Today, I think that people can see these films and see what they can do. If they extrapolate upon what people like Oscar Mischor and William Alexander did.

The Houston Museum is screening some of these films in June and July. The scar of shame, a silent film produced in 1927, follows an interracial couple's struggle to remain together in a cast conscious society. An aspiring black concert pianist rescues a white woman from her abusive stepfather. They fall in love, but become tragic victims of social pressure. It's not surprising that today's audiences can still relate to the visions of the early African American filmmakers. Not a whole lot has changed in 60 years. We still have pretty much the cast system in the black community, and that's unfortunate.

You know, it's something that should be shared with more people. As an American history teacher, I was interested. I never knew this kind of film ever existed. They never did anything like this. It's only been 15 years that we've been free of separatical American apartheid, and so there were complete shadow societies, black societies that existed. There were completely set aside, put away. So it was very interesting to see the texture that they had in the culture. By the 1950s, the promise of an integrated America brought an end to the production of race films. The feeling was that, okay, now, black actors and actresses are going to be integrated by Hollywood in front of the camera. And that, of course, means that black writers and producers and directors will have more and more of an opportunity. And so who needs these films made just for black audiences anymore?

Lena Horn, Paul Robinson, Dorothy Dandridge, Eddie Anderson, and others did make the transition to mainstream Hollywood. But the unsung African American artist who worked to break down racial barriers in the 20s, 30s, and 40s paved the way for hundreds of others. Terry, the movie posters and film clips that are included in this piece are part of the from Harlem to Hollywood exhibit that's currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and will be there until July 12th. Okay, thanks, Melissa. And that's our program this week. We are winding down this season of news edition. For the next seven weeks, we will be broadcasting on-core presentations of this year's best news edition reports. Next week, we'll visit an unusual drug and alcohol treatment center in Fort Worth. Thanks for joining us. So long. Thanks for joining us.

News edition is made possible in part by the members of Channel 13 and by the Peter W. Baldwin program fund.