CONCERN VOICED ON `MALCOMB X' ABSENCE

Angered by the fact that the movie "Malcolm X" did not open in Cape Girardeau Wednesday as it did in other locales across the country, Michael Sterling called Hollywood. And Hollywood answered.

Sterling, president of the Cape Girardeau branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, phoned Warner Brothers on Thursday to ask why the film opened in Carbondale and Paducah but not Cape Girardeau.

Barry Reardon, president of distribution for Warner Brothers, didn't have a good answer.

"It must have been a miscommunication from our people who are on that end," Reardon said in a subsequent phone conversation.

He promised Sterling that the film, which was not scheduled to open in Cape Girardeau until mid-December, would open this Wednesday "as long as we can get a theater."

"Malcolm X" is director Spike Lee's 3-hour, 20-minute biography of the assassinated 1960s civil rights leader.

It premiered Wednesday in 1,124 theaters across the U.S., which in movie distribution terms is a medium-size opening. By contrast, "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" opens nationally today in practically every town with a movie theater, and has secured two screens at the Town Plaza Cinemas.

Reardon said the decision whether to open a film like "Malcolm X" in an area "depends on the ethnic make-up of the market."

After listening to Sterling, who versed him on the black demographics of Southeast Missouri and Southern Illinois and told him people were upset about having to drive more than an hour to see the long-awaited epic, Reardon concluded that his company made a mistake in bypassing Cape Girardeau.

"It sounded like a legitimate concern," he said.

Wehrenberg Theatres and Kerasotes Theatres, who own Cape Girardeau's two first-run movie houses, still could choose not to bring the movie to town. Many movies never open here because of competition for the small number of screens.

Neither had yet been offered the movie by Warners when contacted Thursday. But John Lewis, executive vice president of St. Louis-based Wehrenberg, said the company confidently opened "Malcolm X" in six theaters in St. Louis on Wednesday.

Three of the theaters were in St. Charles, West County and South County, which means audiences would not be predominantly black.

Lewis called it "a fine, well-made film very much in the way `Gandhi' was done."

Rachel Hasenyager, advertising director for Kerasotes Theatres in Springfield, Ill., said the company opened the movie in eight of its 200 theaters.

Ronnel Smith, president of the NAACP branch at Southeast Missouri State University, said he was "kind of satisfied and not satisfied" by Warner Brothers' explanation.

"It seems funny, when these people are looking for a place to make money, for them to say it was a mistake," he said.

He said another explanation is "due to Cape being predominantly white."

Smith claimed the movie theaters have an established pattern of bringing few black-oriented films to Cape Girardeau or of moving them quickly out.

Lewis called that charge "absolutely without basis."