'BARBERSHOP' CREW KNEW IT WAS PUSHING SOME BUTTONS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

While those responsible for MGM hit ``Barbershop'' have been tight- lipped about controversial laugh lines involving civil rights leaders, the filmmakers and stars had no problem talking about them before the film's release.

During a press junket in Los Angeles on Aug. 17, director Tim Story and Cedric the Entertainer - who plays Eddie, the aged, outspoken haircutter who delivers the offending statements - were quite vocal about why they felt it was important to include icon-tweaking gags.

They included Rosa Parks just being tired when she sat in the ``whites only'' section during that barrier-busting bus ride and O.J. Simpson being guilty of murdering his wife. These and barbs about Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Jesse Jackson have drawn complaints from Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

``I think that a good film should push several buttons,'' said Cedric. ``This movie has a lot of great, big comedy laughs where you can really laugh out loud, and then it also has some thought moments. And it has some moments that kind of make you mad, you know, little things that you go, 'Hey, what's that all about?' ''

Eddie's comments, filmmakers noted, are met with disagreement from everyone else in the shop. ``Barbershop'' has topped the box office for the past two weeks, and MGM has said it's already working on a sequel.

``When I first read it, of course, you kind of read it again and go, 'Did he just say that?'' Story said of the script, conceived by Mark Brown and credited to Brown, Don D. Scott and Marshall Todd. ``But that's actually what made it cool. These kind of opinions, you hear ...

``And I think that's one of the things we wanted to do with this movie,'' the director continued, ``is kind of push the edge and kind of like, tempt people to have conversation about it. Because, at the end of the day, it's just opinions. And in the barbershop, you can say what you want to say, you can talk about what you want to talk about. And once you leave, nobody's gonna go (tell), it's not gonna be in the paper tomorrow, your mom's not gonna hear about it the next day. It's just, this is a place where any man, or any woman for that matter, can say their opinion. And some people feel like that.''

Steps were definitely taken, though, to make the scenes as inoffensive as possible without sacrificing the lines' shock/laugh value.

``Initially, there was some concern there,'' Cedric admitted. ``In some of the earlier drafts, I got what they were trying to say but I thought the tone of it was too mean. So we kind of changed it a little bit. I was like, the main thing that Eddie was trying to say was that he is their peer, so he can say this without buying into this whole icon thing you're all trying to put on Rosa Parks ...

``So that was the energy I tried to put on those statements,'' the entertainer explained. ``Yeah, they are bold, and they're a little out of the pocket and out of the norm. Nobody else would say it, but Eddie can say it, and you're gonna have to either go, 'That's funny,' or 'That's wild.' But, hopefully, won't nobody be marching around my house.''

That was then. Now Sharpton says he's considering a boycott against ``Barbershop's'' distributor, MGM, if it does not remove the offending sequences from future DVD and video releases of the film.

As of Friday afternoon, the studio was refusing to change anything.

``MGM stands behind 'Barbershop,' its filmmakers and artists, and we have no intention of altering the film in any way,'' a statement from the studio's public relations department stated.

Story, however, responded to the controversy with a more apologetic statement.

``I have personally apologized to the families of the civil rights leaders who were mentioned in the film and told them that no offense was intended,'' the director said in a statement issued last week. ``These are people that are not just African-American icons, but true American heroes. I would prefer not to add to a controversy that should not exist.''

Back in August at the junket, Story said, ``We just felt that we wanted to stay true to what the barbershop was, and the barbershop is about no censorship. That's what we wanted to do with this film - we didn't want to have censorship.''

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The movie ``Barbershop'' is stirring some controversy over statements made by the character Eddie (Cedric the Entertainer) about civil rights leaders.