LIFE ON THE OTHER SIDE FAMILIES SEE PREJUDICE COME TO LIGHT AS THEY TRADE RACES FOR FX SERIES 'BLACK. WHITE.'.

Byline: Valerie Kuklenski Staff Writer

TWO WELL-DRESSED black men were walking in Beverly Hills' shopping district when a white woman approached them. As she walked closer, the woman clutched her purse and moved to the edge of the sidewalk as the two men passed going the other way.

Discussing the incident later, one of the men contended she was making a racist presumption that they might harm her. The other said she was just yielding space because the men were taking up more than their share of the sidewalk.

The reason for their different views could be because the second man is not really black, but a white man in black makeup. Brian Sparks, a black computer networks specialist from Atlanta, and Bruno Marcotulli, a white teacher from Santa Monica, and their families are the subjects of ``Black. White.,'' a new documentary series that explores racial issues among individuals who see themselves as unbiased and honest.

Brian, 41, perceives racism in small gestures, while Bruno, 47, argues that Brian is hypersensitive because of his past experiences.

``You see what you want to see,'' Bruno says to Brian at the end of that first episode, airing Wednesday on FX.

``And you don't see what you don't want to see,'' Brian replies.

Filmmaker R.J. Cutler put together the Sparks family - Brian, Renee and son Nick - and the Wurgel family - Carmen Wurgel, Bruno Marcotulli and Carmen's daughter, Rose Bloomfield - in a house in Tarzana for six weeks last summer. Sometimes they were sent out in public expertly made up as the opposite race, and other times they kept the cameras rolling at home as they talked about their experiences, views and misconceptions in their natural states.

``It's as much a critique about liberal points of view as anything else,'' Cutler said in an interview. ``I wasn't interested in the white 'cracker' who doesn't like black people. I wasn't interested in the militant African-American who can't stand whitey. I was interested in what ... your basic American progressive, open-minded, open-hearted man and woman think about race. That's an issue worth exploring because that's as broken as anything else.''

As part of the series, Rose enrolled in a Hollywood poetry slam class with unsuspecting urban black teens. Asked to name their favorite entertainers, the young poets around her cited Prince, Michael Jackson and Mary J. Blige. Rose chimed in with the Cranberries - then immediately regretted it. The black teens read from tattered notebooks their own words about gunfire, pain, death and loss. Rose flipped open a laptop and read from the screen her polysyllabic opus on sex and love.

``I came into this estranged from my own issues with racism because I never thought about it,'' said Rose, 18, who graduated last spring from Santa Monica High School. ``Then I'm reading 'Black Like Me' in my makeup chair and I'm overwhelmed.''

She learned to adapt, befriending some kids at the slam and then shocking them later when she revealed her secret. (They soon forgave her for the deception, and she's still friends with several participants.)

During production, Rose had to conceal from her boyfriend and close friends what she was really up to; they just knew she was working on a documentary. She craved the company of people her own age, but Nick, 17, was too withdrawn to fill that void for her.

``This makes it actually worth it,'' Rose said last week after a screening and frank panel discussion at 20th Century Fox. ``For the first time, I can share and talk about it. That's what's so cool. People want to talk about it.''

The makeup process - layers of multiple colors sprayed on all exposed skin followed by contact lenses and wigs - took up to five hours to apply and two hours to remove, so the Sparks' and the Wurgels' public experiences were limited and carefully planned.

``We suspected from the very beginning that the core of the show was going to be their relationships,'' Cutler said.

And it was. Tension was palpable between Renee, 38, and Carmen, 48, stemming from Renee's impatience with Carmen's naivete and public mistakes. Bruno threw around the N-word with a carelessness that set Renee and Brian on edge, and Nick got fed up with Rose's inquisitive nature, which he saw as prying.

Eight months later, it's still very much about their relationships. During the panel discussion, Bruno, the son of Italian immigrants, said he'd been taught that immigrants or minorities must pull themselves up by their bootstraps and learn how to make it in a nation of equal opportunity. He echoed some sentiments he voiced to TV reporters in January: It's up to you to make your life what you want it to be, and blaming others for your situation is fruitless.

Brian silently shook his head at Bruno's remarks, prompting some chuckles from the racially mixed audience.

Rapper, actor and producer Ice Cube, who executive produced ``Black. White.'' with Cutler, rejected Bruno's suggestion that ``individual responsibility'' was the answer.

``We have been the victims for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of government-sponsored racism, government-sanctioned racism, institutional racism,'' he said. ``It's not just 'be yourself and everything's going to be all right.' ''

Some of their experiences in public as the opposite race were more profound than others.

One day Brian ventured into a white country club, discussing golf club choices easily with a member and then secretly thrilling as a salesman in the pro shop not only brought him a shoe he requested, but slipped it on his foot with a shoehorn. That act of civility, he said, had never been extended to him before.

As a white man, he also took a job bar tending at a neighborhood joint in La Crescenta. He casually asked one customer to tell him about the area, and the man easily volunteered that it was one of the last white areas of Los Angeles - and the locals want to keep it that way.

Carmen and Bruno faced the heat of going out as an interracial couple - Carmen in her own skin and Bruno in makeup - one afternoon in Leimert Park. And Nick mingled uneasily with well-to-do white kids at a Beverly Hills etiquette class.

``I don't think we ever can understand anyone else's life completely, period,'' Carmen said. ``But a willingness to truly enter into the possibility of understanding it is amazing in itself. And I got a window, just a peek, into a world that I never had access to, and it was a privilege and it was life-changing, and I just appreciate that.''

Ice Cube says the show's ultimate lesson is in celebrating people's differences rather than worrying about them.

``Nobody should want the world to all be the same. And that's really what the show is bringing out - dealing with the ills that face us every day, the cancer of racism that faces America every day, and two families dealing with it, trying to teach each other about it, trying to learn about each other. And that's not always pretty, but it's definitely always interesting, provocative and definitely gets us talking about it.''

He said viewers likely will hope the Wurgel and Sparks families become good friends, but that was not the producers' goal.

``What I wanted people to recognize is that racism is in all of us, in layers - some in more layers than others,'' Ice Cube said. ``It's not just the Klan guy and the black-fist guy, and it's about peeling away those layers.''

At the Fox panel discussion, each was asked, if they had a prayer, what would it be?

``My prayer is that each of us look inside our own hearts,'' Carmen said. ``It takes a willingness to pause before we make an assumption. I think all this erupts because we don't wait - we react. And the willingness to have empathy and just imagine what it would be like to be in someone else's skin - that's my prayer.''

Brian said: ``When you meet someone, instead of meeting them with your eyes open and your mind closed, meet them with your eyes closed and your mind open. I think you'll have a different experience.''

Valerie Kuklenski, [phone]

valerie.kuklenski(at)dailynews.com

BLACK. WHITE.

What: Six-week documentary series in which a white family and a black family trade experiences, using makeup and wigs to pose as the opposite race.

Where: FX.

When: 10 p.m. Wednesdays, beginning March 8.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) BLACK WHITE

FX documentary shows stark differences - and discrimination - as two families swap races

Photo illustration by Shane Michael Kidder

(2 -- color) Left: The Wurgel family - Carmen Wurgel, Bruno Marcotulli and Carmen's daughter, Rose Bloomfield - without makeup, near left, and in black makeup and wigs, far left.

(3 -- color) Right: The Sparks family - son Nick and parents Brian and Renee - without makeup, near right, and in white makeup and wigs, far right.