LAKEVIEW TERRACE ssss Directed by Neil LaBute Written by David Loughery and Howard Korder With Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington, Ron Glass, Jay Hernandez, and Regine Nehy
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Lake View Terrace, you might remember, was the suburban district of LA where King was pulled over by the LAPD in March 1991 and beaten by four officers with batons for more than a minute while a bystander caught the incident on videotape. After three of the officers were acquitted by a mostly white jury in April 1992, the city’s South Central neighborhood went berserk; six days of violence left 53 dead and more than 1,000 injured. Property damages were estimated at $1 billion. Sixteen years later, a Hollywood obsessed with topical stories has yet to produce a major motion picture about what happened—the closest it’s come is Ron Shelton’s 2002 feature Dark Blue, which uses the riots as the climax to an otherwise routine dirty-cop drama. For the liberal entertainment community, the riots may bring back unflattering memories: as the chaos spread, many wealthy whites were locking and loading, fearful of what might happen should the hordes make their way to Bel-Air and Beverly Hills.
Most of the credit for this will probably go to LaBute, the daring social dramatist who wrote and directed In the Company of Men (1997) and The Shape of Things (2003). But a fair amount should also go to Jackson, who was attached to the script before anyone else and, as LaBute revised it, lobbied hard to make his cop, Abel Turner, more dimensional and problematic. In some respects Abel is a man we’ve encountered many times before: the inner-city patrolman who’s seen too much. He already has several “question marks” on his record for bending the rules of engagement, and even his fellow cops are leery of him. But Abel is a complicated figure: he grew up in South Central and still polices its ugly streets, but he’s repelled by its culture of poverty, dependency, and victimhood. His wife has died, leaving him with a teenage son and daughter to raise, and if he behaves like a martinet that’s only because he’s so concerned about their character. When Abel stands around watering his suburban lawn, you get the feeling he’s fought for every blade of grass.
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