TRYING TO TURN 'THE CORNER'; HBO SERIES EXPLORES 'CULTURE OF POVERTY' FROM THE POVERTY SIDE.

Byline: David Kronke Television Writer

When the scripts for HBO's six-hour miniseries ``The Corner'' landed on Charles S. Dutton's desk, he was a little skeptical. Though the story focused on a neighborhood near the one in Baltimore where he grew up, it arrived in the heat of the NAACP protest of the dearth of African- American faces on network television, and his first impression was that it fell into what he calls the ``black-folks-as-junkies'' stereotype.

``I read the first couple of scripts, and they didn't do anything for me,'' Dutton admits. ``Then I read the next two, and as a unit, it hit me that, finally, this was the most urban of urban stories. It was about the culture of poverty and drugs from the perspective of addicts, not the dealers, gangsters and police. It was sad and bleak and horrific - and I found it totally refreshing.''

Still, Dutton had his doubts. ``I asked HBO point blank, 'Why are you doing this?' When HBO said they were in the position to ask politicians, 'What the hell are you going to do about this,' I felt that it was a noble undertaking - maybe a fruitless one - but their hearts were in the right place.''

And so Dutton, who has seen his own family members struggle with drug addiction, signed on to direct all six episodes of ``The Corner,'' debuting tonight on HBO. The series is a social statement in the guise of an unflinching drama about a family clinging tenuously to humanity in a West Baltimore neighborhood overrun by the drug culture. It centers on the McCullough family, particularly Gary (T.K. Carter), whose fall from grace was spectacularly steep and who, even buried beneath the haze of smack, is essentially too decent a man to survive the cutthroat addict lifestyle. Fran (Khandi Alexander), his ex-wife, is an inveterate partier struggling to go clean; DeAndre (Sean Nelson), their son, is conflicted between the easy money of dealing to losers like his parents and living an upright life to support his unborn son.

``The Corner'' was written by David Simon, whose previous book inspired the TV series ``Homicide: Life on the Streets,'' and Edward Burns, a former Baltimore policeman, who basically camped out 50 to 60 hours a week on West Baltimore's Fayette Street in 1994 and took down everything they saw - and what they saw was shocking and heartbreaking.

Of course, it wasn't easy convincing the addicts to let them hang out. ``I expected everything we got and more in terms of distrust,'' Simon admits. ``They were very cynical - actually, their fears were rational, so it wasn't cynicism. Some people remembered Ed as a detective; we're both white. But it wasn't any different from the suspicion of the police detectives I got when I worked on the first book.''

George Epps, a recovering addict known in the book and the miniseries as ``Blue,'' agrees. ``At first, I was very distrustful of him and Ed Burns,'' says Epps, who has been clean for six years and works at a neighborhood rehab center. ``They were two white guys in a black neighborhood, asking a lot of questions. But Mr. Burns and I went out in the park and talked. Most people thought addicts had no minds. But I gave him a different perspective, that even though we're caught up in the drug culture, that doesn't mean we don't have aspirations and emotions.''

Simon suspects that the addicts' cooperation was a covert cry for help. ``I think they had this sense of, 'This has gone too far, this is more than any of us bargained for,' '' he says. ``Even those in the game didn't want it to be as brutal and demanding and painful as it had become. Old-timers would say, 'Dammit, there used to be rules to this (stuff).' ''

Soon, Simon and Burns became a regular stop on the neighborhood grapevine. ``When something big happened, we'd get five different versions within the hour,'' he remembers. ``There was a murder, and we got the story of who did it and why from 10 people. Of course, the police didn't solve it.''

Watching the inevitable parade of body bags move through the neighborhood, Simon concedes, was ``very hard. When you say, 'I'm going to go to a drug corner and do a book,' you know what to expect, empirically. Bad things are gonna happen. But you don't know that you'll come to love a guy like Gary while watching his struggle. He was the guy I got most invested in. In the beginning, you worried about your involvement in the story. After a while, though, you get a sense of how complete an array of forces is operating against them.''

Epps says, ``They wound up getting caught up in people's lives, part of a culture and society that they hadn't intended to get caught up in. They saw our humanity and tried to help some of us. Some of us got to the road to recovery; some tried to get help and failed.''

In the book and the miniseries, Blue desperately tries to empty his late mother's home - which he had transformed into an addict's shooting gallery - of junkies. ``It was my monster,'' Epps admits. ``It only added to people's suffering. When I started the process of recovering, I had to do something. I walked in, saw who was still there, and said, 'You have to leave, I'll call the police.' But everyone looked at me like, 'Yeah, right. You'll be back (on smack).' ''

When it came to casting the miniseries, Carter, a former stand-up comic eager to prove his mettle fought for his role; early reviews have singled out his empathetic performance as the tragic Gary.

``I was always the comic-relief guy,'' Carter says, still exasperated. ``I did 'Runaway Train' and no one took notice. I went through a dry period.''

``I don't' think another single director would have hired him for this,'' concedes Dutton. ``But he had a certain humbleness and vulnerability at the auditions, and Gary isn't a hardened street guy.''

To better understand Gary, Carter hung out in the neighborhood with the regulars. ``I went to the Greased Chicken, this little bar filled with smoke and old men with little yellow eyes,'' he says. ``You have to do that to fill the role - this isn't strolling through Beverly Hills. I spent time with (Gary's son) DeAndre. We went to the places he frequented, and he said, 'This is where I almost died' in a Burger King parking lot.''

For Dutton, it was a homecoming of sorts, a reminder of his reckless youth. ``I ran into a guy, we had had a shootout before,'' he remembers with a soft chuckle. ``A guy I had had five fights with in two years. It was bittersweet. There were guys I thought would've gotten their acts together by now and hadn't. I was embarrassed: I'm doing an anti-drug film and they're part of the problem, these guys I've known since I was 7, 8 years old. I told them, 'The only thing you can do is pray that you can get a cool spot in hell - just a toe grip - because that's where you're going.'

``We shot in the most horrific locations,'' Dutton continues. ``Man, we sure weren't in the Bahamas. We'd shoot in rat-infested, feces-infested alleys and dilapidated homes. All the actors were flea-bitten, we'd need flea spray every night. But everybody felt, top to bottom, that we were doing something important.''

Carter had a deeper connection to the material: His father died a drug-related death in 1978. ``I was aware of (his problem),'' Carter says, choosing his words carefully. ``I grew up without my father, he would come around every now and then. The last year of his life, he was on the run, basically. He got mixed up with some guy and some heroin went missing, and before I knew it, he was gone.'' Carter pauses. ``I felt a lot. Kind of tough, you know. You move on.''

Dutton, too, understands the toll of the drug culture. ``I lost my only brother in 1993 of AIDS - he had been a heroin junkie 20 years,'' he says. ``My only sister is a recovering coke addict, and she's still on the fence. So I've dealt with this for 20-odd years. I've spent tens of tens of thousands of dollars trying to help, so I know damn well this is a disease. If addiction were just a crime thing, I wouldn't waste time and money. But it works both mentally and physically - it's definitely a sickness.''

Do the principals share HBO's hope that tangible good will come from this televised revolution, this call to action? Not really.

``When I was very young, I had some vague illusion that journalism could lead to better policy; I don't believe that anymore,'' says Simon. ``They're fighting a war as meaningless and costly and tragic as Vietnam, and many believe that with just a little fine-tuning, it'll work. But the whole premise is corrupt. It's simply a war on our underclass.

``Our country is under the simplistic notion that drugs are bad, so people caught up in them are evil,'' Simon continues. ``But the real world is gray, and we require a policy that takes that into account, and the soulless (politicians) will never do anything right. Ordinary people might realize from watching this that addicts are as human as they are. That's the best we can hope for. But if someone says, 'Let me stare at this train wreck,' and afterwards says, 'I cared about those people,' that's a victory. I'll take that.''

Dutton, to a certain extent, agrees. ``Fifteen years ago, I was idealistic enough to say I want to change people's lives. Not anymore,'' he confesses.

But he adds, ``I told most of the real people, particularly DeAndre, who's still on the fence with his addiction, that I'm not looking for anything to come out of this, but if you guys don't amount to anything, I'll feel like I wasted my damn time and energy. I told DeAndre, there's a point where being the victim stops and being the damn fool starts. After a while, you're the damn fool.''

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3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) There's no escape from the drug war in HBO's gritty new series - 'CORNER'-ED

Sean Nelson, left, Khandi Alexander and T.K. Carter in 'The Corner.'

(2) T.K. Carter, left, and Khandi Alexander star as members of the McCullough family, regular folks who are trying to escape the burden of poverty and drugs.

(3) Charles S. Dutton, right, directs "The Corner," an HBO miniseries told from the perspective of addicts.