Banner Graphic, Volume 17, Number 74, Greencastle, Putnam County, 26 November 1986 — Page 7

People in the news Racial barriers 'rooted' in film Black performers who gained international publicity in “Roots” discovered that their fame did not lead to better roles in Hollywood because of continuing racial barriers. Almost 10 years after the 1977 ABC miniseries, reports TV Guide magazine, many of the actors and actresses featured in “Roots” still have difficulty finding good roles because, they feel, discrimination still prevails. Many of them are bitter about their experiences. ‘“Roots’ had such a profound impact on people around the world. But in terms of the work generated for black artists, it just faded away to become - another media event, ” actress Beverly Todd said. She played the adult slave Fanta and Kunta Kinte’s love interest in the miniseries. STAN MARGULIES, THE SERIES’ producer, said, “There’s no question ‘Roots’ did not have the same impact on the careers of black actors that it would have if it had starred white actors.” “The hope was that ‘Roots’ would open doors for black persons in television. But it didn’t happen that way,” explained Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs, who played Noah in the miniseries. John Amos, who played the adult Kunta Kinte, said that while opportunities for minority performers have improved since “Roots,” he has not seen any “dramatic changes.” The networks did try to capitalize on the success of “Roots” by presenting programs starring black actors They flopped. Ben Vereen, the singer-dancer-actor, said he is frustrated. “I’LL WANT TO READ FOR a role I like, but they’ll say, ‘You can’t play that, you have to play the janitor. We want a white actor for that part.’ Why does he always have to be white? Sure, they can’t get away with things that they could nine years ago, but we’ve got to watch that we don’t regress. We must not forget the struggle goes on. ” NEW YORK (AP) Maria Burton Carson, the adopted daughter of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and talent agent Steve Carson have decided to legally separate, a spokeswoman said. “Maria hopes and anticipates the separation will be amicable for the sake of their daughter, Eliza, 4,” a spokeswoman for Miss Taylor, Chen Sam, said Tuesday. The couple was married in February 1981. She is 25 and he is 36.

Nimoy, Spock keep on Treking

c. 1986 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK Leonard Nimoy was just out of the Army. His wife, actress Sandi Zober, was expecting. He was in Los Angeles, driving a cab. This was 1955. “I got a call to pick up a certain Mr. Kennedy at the Bel Air Hotel,” he was recalling here recently. “Of course, the ’56 elections were coming up but nobody out there knew who John F. Kennedy was. I’m a Bostonian, so I did. “He asked me to take him to the Beverly Hilton, and seemed excited that somebody actually recognized him. And the legend was true even then he carried no money on him. When the fare came to sl.lO, he told an aide to ‘give the man $3.00,’ and asked me what I hoped to do in life. I said I hoped to be an actor. He said it must be hard to get started, but stick with it.” Nimoy stuck with it so well that 30 years later he’s the beloved half-human, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock of the Starship U.S.S. Enterprise, on view now in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” For “Star Trek IV” takes the intrepid crew through a time-space warp away from outer space of the 23rd century to San Francisco of 1986. They’re there to try to prevent the imminent extinction of the humpback whale, which would prove an ecological disaster three centuries hence. “It’s a departure from the earlier ‘Star Trek’ movies,” Nimoy admits. “But it’s closer to the TV series. There was one episode called ‘The City on the Edge of Forever,’ in which we journeyed to the New York of the 19305.” “I have no qualms about putting our characters in a contemporary scene. Our major ingredient has always been our sense of family. Bill Shatner Admiral Kirk thinks it’s alchemy, not mere chemistry, that does it.” “We’d always been limited by time and budget, so we always dealt with character and dialogue rather than special effects tricks. We’re not really for a hardware audience.” Nimoy says he knew “Star Trek” was headed from the small screen to the big one when “Star Wars” was released. “I was (in New York) doing ‘Equus’ on stage, and I said to my wife, ‘l’ll be getting a call from Paramount before very long.’ They were dormant

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“What date does this milk go bad?”

Emmy-winner Barbara Babcock, who made the TV screen sizzle with her portrayal of the widowed Grace Gardner during the first three seasons of “Hill Street Blues,” will return to the series Thursday night. HER REAPPEARANCE, however, is a 180-degree turnaround. Grace Gardner is coming back to the Hill as Sister Chastity, a nun who asks Capt. Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti) to help her organize a counseling center. Gardner’s return stirs romantic notions in Officer Flaherty (Robert Clohessy), despite her new nun’s role. Grace’s old habits, of course, stirred romantic notions in Sgt. Phil Esterhaus, a.k.a. Emmy-winning Michael Conrad, the late actor who traditionally opened the series each week with a police roll call monologue and the advice: “Let’s Be Careful Out There.” Grace also had a fling with Lt. Howard Hunter (James Sikking), but it was no match for the sizzling Esterhaus storyline. “HILL STREET BLUES” airs at 10 p.m. Thursday. It will be moving to the 9 p.m. timeslot on Tuesdays on NBC. • ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) Former jockey Ron Turcotte has lost a SIOO million lawsuit he filed after he was paralyzed below the chest in a 1978 racing fall. New York’s top court, the Court of Appeals, said Tuesday that Turcotte acknowledged “horse racing is a dangerous activity” in which “speeding horses lawfully and properly come within inches of other horses and frequently bump each other.” Turcotte rode Secretariat when it won racing’s Triple Crown in 1973, and was in more than 22,000 races in a 17-year career before the accident at Belmont Park in New York City. Turcotte, now in his mid-40s and living in New Brunswick, Canada, sued jockey Jeffrey Fell, racehorse owner David Reynold and the New York Racing Association.

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LEONARD NIMOY (R): With William Shatner in 'Star Trek ll'

about filming ‘Star Trek,’ but ‘Star Wars’ woke them up.” To research ‘‘Star Trek IV,” he journeyed to Harvard, MIT and the University of California at Santa Cruz “to talk to physicists and futurists about their immediate concerns. We didn’t set out to make a ‘cause movie’ about saving the whales. “But what the scientists are most worried about is the current mentality in this country, which they think is saying, ‘Yes, we’re doing dangerous things to the planet, but when push comes to shove we’ll turn to the scientists and say fix it.’ “It’s a general attitude that even if a terrible nuclear war comes, there will be survivors who would recreate what we have now. “But the resources will be gone. For instance, oil no longer just oozes out of the ground. Now you need very sophisticated equipment to force it out, and by the 23rd century the art of cracking oil will be obsolete. “That intrigued me a lot, and after a month’s work on ‘The Sun Also Rises’ in Paris and Segovia, I had penty of time to ruminate about what we’d do in ‘Star Trek IV.’ “I learned from the physicists that the hardware is being developed for listening to outer space, but we won’t begin getting the answers for another 90 years. The big question is, will we be around then to interpret them?”

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By Bil Keane

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November 26.1986 THE BANNERGRAPHIC.

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