Reading Roger Dodger

Extraordinary thespian Roger Guenveur Smith gives us a Berkeley-born conversation that's even more LA than the boys in blue

When Spike Lee’s School Daze hit Sacramento’s Tower Theater in 1988, I drove up and saw it immediately. Probably on opening night. It did not occur to me, however, to write about the auteur’s second film until later that year, when the Fresno State Black Greeks started recruiting me.

I was then managing editor of the campus daily and on my way to becoming a student of influence. The bros who came by the office seemed nice enough, but I’ve never been a joiner. More importantly, there had been that Spike joint, which took on hazing, misogyny, and colorism within the fraternity system at a fictional HBCU.

Not a lot of people saw School Daze on that initial run. (It only earned $1.8 million its opening weekend.) If the film entered your world at all in ’88, that probably happened via “Da Butt,” the go-go legend E.U.’s infectious, soundtrack anchoring groove.

Here’s Lee’s music video, an inventive presentation of his film’s HBCU aesthetic.

School Daze also gave us “Ice, Ice Baby” and a bunch of excellent actors, including today’s interviewee, Roger Guenveur Smith. The film came along when Smith was not long out of Yale’s drama school and still hanging around Jean-Michel Basquiat whenever the painter was in Los Angeles. As I point out in the podcast version of our talk, the 68-year-old actor has been in more great stuff than I can keep track of (Till, King of New York[!])

Smith’s pivotal role in Do the Right Thing will always be his best known work. My personal favorite, so far, is A Huey P. Newton Story, the acclaimed one-man show.

But that Spike Lee follow-up was my first experience of the artist. His part is small, but Smith gives his all as an eager-to-succeed pledge. The work is visible, and played a role in helping me understand there was no way I’d be going Fresno Greek—vanilla or chocolate. And on the way to knowing I wrote about the issue for film studies, an early effort at sorting my life through analysis of popular culture.

‘I’m definitely a 510 from the git, but we came down to LA when I was three years old or so. I became a Dodgers fan—my nickname’s Roger Dodger.’

My interview with Smith has been edited for clarity, but mainly for brevity. One quick confession before we get down to it:

Do the Right Thing is so quintessentially Brooklyn and Smith’s picture-toting Smiley so indelible that a part of me always wants to place this artist in New York. And because a friend whom I see frequently has a poster from The Magic Theatre production of A Huey P. Newton Story, the second place I want to put Roger Guenveur Smith is The Bay Area.

This is unmistakably an interview with an LA guy. Never mind Yale and the far flung movie sets, the trajectory of Smith’s journey across the city is completely compelling and indicative of this city’s fascinating nature.

Donnell Alexander: This is one of my favorite actors of all time. A genuine thespian. An artist, no matter how you look at it. So, this is a special occasion.

Most people will probably know Roger Guenveur Smith from Spike Lee films like Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, and Summer of Sam. My personal favorite is A Huey P. Newton Story. The body of work is amazing.

Welcome to the podcast, Roger Guenveur Smith.

Roger Guenveur Smith: It’s a beautiful morning. The sun is shining and the weather is sweet. If you look over my right-hand shoulder you’ll see Huey P. Newton looking at me. Yeah, that’s a poster that we had from a long time ago, but the head remains. And here we are.

DA: That is my favorite performance. The most important film for me was your first film, School Daze.

RGS: Well, that was a historic film. We just celebrated School Daze in Virginia. We had a reunion there of many of the great actors from that film from some 30-odd-years ago—my first film.

DA: Can we stop for a minute, just for everyone who doesn’t know? The cast of actors is insane. This is Spike’s second film. I did my big college paper on this film.

RGS: Oh, wow. Alright.

DA: I hadn’t seen anything like it. The themes about colorism and the inside look at step shows and all of that? I’d just never seen it on film. And younger people don’t know that you couldn’t see imagery that resonated like that.

But, the cast. Who all was in it?

RGS: A guy named Fishburne, a guy named Esposito, Jasmine Guy, Tisha Campbell. Darryl Bell, Kadeem Hardison, a guy named Branford Marsalis, a great actor by the name of Art Evans, who was actually with us in Virginia as a senior survivor—wonderful cast, and crew as well.

DA: Did Ernest Dickerson shoot that?

RGS: Yes he did.

And Ruth Carter did the wonderful costumes. Wynn Thomas did the wonderful sets for that. Otis Sallid, a great choreographer. Amazing. Bill Lee, Spike’s father, did the scoring for it. Joie Lee was in it, Cinque Lee was in it. David Lee was the unit photographer on it. So, any still images that you see from that, David actually took. It really was a Lee family (laughs) convention.

DA: That’s most of those films. But I have a question:

Because it was a low budget film at a time when people weren’t making these movies—a musical, for goodness sake—

RGS: Right.

DA: I’m curious to know what film making techniques—what you saw—stayed with you and what were experiments that didn’t work and you never saw again?

RGS: I think Spike demonstrated from example that only hard work will inform good work. We worked very hard on that film. Spike especially, as an actor and as a director, as a producer. But he passed that work ethic throughout the cast and crew.

For example, the Gamites, the brothers who were online. Spike kinda put me in charge of the training of the Gamites, because he was off doing a million other things. We had to train marching and chanting and all of that without Spike’s involvement.

DA: That was you?

RGS: We all had a lot of responsibility that we tried to step up.

DA: I think I mentioned that I want to be kind of neighborhood-y about this whole joint. And I know that you’re a Berkeley dude. When did you leave Berkeley? What’s your recollection of it?

RGS: I have very little direct recollection. I was born in Berkeley. I was conceived in Monterey, at an NAACP convention. (Laughter) Mom said she remembers the place and the position. I said, Mom, that’s too much information.

I’m definitely a 510 from the git, but we came down to LA when I was three years old or so. I became a Dodgers fan—my nickname was Roger Dodger when I was a kid.

DA: What’s the connection? What did bring you back there?

RGS: Well, I’m the first in my family to be born outside of The South. My father was from Portsmouth, Virginia. My mom was from Charleston, South Carolina. So, we’re talking about urban seaside South, and I feel very comfortable when I go places like Virginia, South Carolina. Certainly New Orleans—you were just talking about Eve’s Bayou.

‘[Echo Park]'s right next to the LA River at the foot of the Santa Monica mountain range, which goes from here all the way out to Malibu. Again, the topography of this place is spectacular. So are the fires and the earthquakes and the riots. There's a lot of spectacularity.”

And that was the first time that I went to New Orleans, when I did that film. My mom studied at Xavier University down there, and whenever she came back to LA—from a reunion or what have you—she would bring a big praline for my sister and me. She made us wait for a whole year to finish that thing. There’s so much sugar in a praline, you can’t just eat it in one or two bites. She disciplined us on eating that praline. I grew up in the Catholic church, went to a school called Transfiguration. If you went into the church hall there it smelled like New Orleans. It sounded like New Orleans’ Seventh Ward.

New Orleans was very deep in my imagination. So finally I got to go because I had the opportunity to do this amazing film by Kasi Lemons.

DA: There are some amazing performances in that film.

RGS: Uh-huh. Dianne Carroll—the late, great and amazing.

DA: And the little girl who—

RGS: Jurnee Smollett, who’s a full-grown woman and an extraordinary actress.

DA: As a childs’ performance—

RGS: Even as a child you could see she had it goin’ on. Great to work with that cast.

DA: I wanted to ask, because you have your mother’s name as your middle name, she must have been an extraordinary influence. Is that a fair assumption? You paying homage?

RGS: Well my given name, Guenveur. The name’s originally from Brittany, in the northwest of France. Those people went to what is now Haiti, and during the revolution they got the hell out and relocated to South Carolina. Now, a lot of people went to New Orleans of course, but our particular boat happened to go to Charleston. If you go to the graveyard to see the first [garbled] Americans, you’ll see that those gravestones are in French. It’s very interesting.

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A Sophisticated Iceberg

This is my version of journalism busking. Yearning to tip your reporter? @Donnell-Alexander on Venmo is where you can exercise that option. Gracias!

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DA: I gotta ask the neighborhood stuff that’s around here. We took a ride the other day—you picked me up at the bus stop as I was about to run errands—and you referred to Echo Park as your “adult neighborhood” and I don’t know what that means.

RGS: It simply means that it’s my chosen neighborhood. I chose this neighborhood for myself. The previous neighborhoods that I lived in were chosen, of course, by my parents. And then were chosen because of where I was studying in college. So, this is the first place that I really came to as an adult and chose to live.

DA: You were drawn to it out of necessity, or was it the character of the place? Why Echo Park?

RGS: It’s a very interesting place. It has very interesting topography. The buildings here—the housing stock—are very low, but the hills are very high. So, that’s really interesting.

It has a certain history. Where we were living was once called Red Hill. It was called Red Hill because it was a left-leaning neighborhood. You had people like Woody Guthrie living here. Art Pepper, the great saxophonist. Artists. That, I think, continues to resonate as well.

DA: I tend to think of it as being more raw, as in the nineties. And what I find interesting with this go-around—because I was living in downtown LA before this go-around—I feel like there's gentrification here, but poor people haven't been completely displaced, right? I mean, I’m on the bus. I see. It’s still a mixed neighborhood in a sense.

RGS: Yeah, it is. And I think that it will maintain the kind of demographic mixture that it has maintained. Because of necessity, as you say. There are people here who have been connected for generations and will continue to be connected.

‘I ran into him in New York City. He was going into a Chinese restaurant. And I said, “Mr. Koufax, my name is Roger Smith. I'm working on a play about Juan Marichal and John.” And then he stops me. And he said, “Whatever you hear about that is not true. There's only three people who know what happened that day and two of them are dead.”’

DA: And having said that, I went to a neighborhood party on Sunday and I just walked up toward the end of the block, the street I'm on, and up the hill around the corner where the park begins: Elysian Park. The view is insane. I mean, it's just, it's unbelievable: This is a part of LA that I'm in. It's one of those things I wish more Angelenos could experience or access.

RGS: Yeah, it's very brilliantly situated. And you can, on a clear day, see all the way down to Long Beach, Signal Hill, San Pedro. You can see Rolling Hills, Palos Verdes, straight out to Catalina Island. You can see how the Tongva people were attracted to this place. It's right next to the LA River at the foot of the Santa Monica mountain range, which goes from here all the way out to Malibu. Again, the topography of this place is spectacular.

So are the fires and the earthquakes and the riots. There's a lot of spectacularity.

DA: I want to ask you some baseball questions. I wanted to ask you about Juan and John, which I haven't. Can you tell me about that and why you would make that?

RGS: Well, can you hold on for two seconds?

DA: Yeah, yeah.

(Smith leaves the frame, appears with a photograph of two men)

DA: Is that, is that Juan Marichal?

RGS: This is Juan Marichal and John Roseboro with their arms around each other. And it's signed, :To John. Best regards, Juan Marichal.” The story—

DA: Can you briefly summarize the story?

RGS: I'm going to… try to.

Nineteen sixty-five, Dodgers versus Giants. Great pitcher for the Giants—Juan Marichal, number 27 from the Dominican Republic. Great catcher for the Dodgers, number eight from Ashland, Ohiyah, John Roseboro. Two Black men with essentially the same name.

Juan Marichal goes upside the head of John Roseboro, attempting to kill him during the course of a game in 1965. Roseboro survives. They didn't talk to each other for about the next 10 years while they were competing against each other. But somehow they made up, became great friends, and John Roseboro passed in 2002. Juan Marichal spoke as an honorary pallbearer at his service and said, “The greatest thing that ever happened in my life was this man forgiving me.”

So it's a beautiful, almost Biblical story of forgiveness, reconciliation, Black on Black love.

DA: How did you know to write it and when did you know it was a thing you wanted to write?

RSG: Well, I was watching this game as a child on TV.

DA: What?

RSG: And I was traumatized that Marichal had hit John Roseboro in the head. Roseboro was one of my heroes. He gave me an autographed picture of himself when I was a kid at a community event. He meant a lot to me. So I took Juan Marichal's baseball card out of my collection and I burned it. And I chanted, “Burn, baby, burn.”

So, the story had really gotten deeply into my psyche as a child. Then when I started writing and imagining theater—which is real people in real situations—I thought that I might want to pursue this story.

And I had an opportunity to actually meet Juan Marichal and I wasn't sure if I was even going to shake his hand because he was the biggest villain of my childhood, he was right up there with Richard Nixon and Sammy Davis when he hugged Richard Nixon.

I met Juan and he was very forthcoming. He told me about the early days, coming here as a Black man—as a non-English speaking Black man who spoke only Spanish—riding in the back of the bus and having to go to the back to get a meal at a restaurant in Jim Crow America. And it was the same thing with John Roseboro, because he was from Ohio—one of the few Black families, in fact, in his town. So, when he went into the minor leagues and he was rolling through the South, he was going through some of the same cultural dislocation as Juan Marichal, but he spoke English.

So anyway, I didn't know if I was going to tell Marichal what I had done to his baseball card. And I said, Okay, he's being forthcoming with me. I'll be forthcoming with him. And I told him. Then he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Roger, all I can say is I apologize. And I hope that you can forgive me.”

DA: Did you forgive him?

RGS: Hmm… That's a good question. (Pause) Probably not. Probably not at that moment.

You know, Juan Marichal actually finished his career with the Dodgers. And I did not feel good about that because I thought it was completely ahistorical, that they were disrespecting us, you know, all of the fans who had been so traumatized by what he had done. But I think that, showing the kind of man that he was, he needed to come to LA and demonstrate to the people that he was not a monster.

The first person who welcomed him to LA was John Roseboro. And he said that if I can forgive this man, you should be able to—Let's all welcome Juan Marichal to LA.

DA: Interesting. I feel like we had this luxury of loyalty back in the day. Because if that had happened in the 2010s and twenties, that guy would be traded to your team almost inevitably. And you don't get to experience that as a fan. My kids don't get to experience that as baseball fans.

But that's an amazing story. Tell me about the writing of it. Did you realize that it had the stuff of a one-man show?

RSG: Well, I had referenced the story a couple of times in other pieces. I did an example called the Watts Towers Project, which is about the great Simon Rodia and his 33-year endeavor in Watts, where he built these amazing towers out of wood, with no NEA grant, no power tools. He just built and climbed, built and climbed, built and climbed. And when he thought he was finished, he walked away.

That for me was kind of a focus on solo performance, literally, you know. Rodia was building this thing in, in this community. I tied it in with the story of my parents coming to LA initially, trying to get a place to stay. And they were rejected by a motel because the motel thought that they were a mixed couple. They thought that my mom was white. She was very fair-skinned. My father was a brown-skinned man. They didn't know that my mom was Black—and they didn't know that my father was an attorney, suing places like this motel that discriminated against Black and Brown people.

So they won the lawsuit. They took the settlement and they built their own motel about three blocks away from the offending institution and took their business away from them. That, to me, was another story about building, about construction. Along the way, I told this little story about Juan and John, which then expanded into a larger piece, a fully-born piece, with great production by my longtime colleague Mark Anthony Thompson, who did sound design as well.

In doing the piece, I ran into Sandy Koufax, the great pitcher on the Dodgers who was actually pitching that day. I ran into him in New York City. He was going into a Chinese restaurant. (laughs) And I said, “Mr. Koufax, my name is Roger Smith. I'm working on a play about Juan Marichal and John. And then he stops me. And he said, “Whatever you hear about that is not true. There's only three people who know what happened that day and two of them are dead.”

And I said, “Okay, Mr. Koufax. Do you think we could get together sometime and maybe—” Then he walks away.

DA: And what did you do with this?

RGS: (Laughs) I put it in the play. It's a great scene.

DA: Who's the third person who knows?

RGS: I mean, presumably John Roseboro knew.

DA: Yes.

RGS: I think the umpire, maybe. He was dead. And I guess Koufax was referencing himself.

DA: The documentary about the fighter.

RGS: And letting me know that he wasn't going to say nothing, because he was very protective of the legacy of John Roseboro, and, I think, the legacy of Juan Marichal, who may have been that other person who was still living.

DA: We are Roger Dodgers.

RGS: Yeah, yeah.

DA: I did not know you were that big a fan. Can we talk in terms of that?

RGS: No, I became a non-fan. I'm telling you, because when Marichal was welcomed to the Dodgers I kind of said, Nah, that's it. And it was only through the doing of this play that I had to revive my interest in the game, my love for the game. I realized how deep that love was eventually.

DA: That's powerful. I have to tell you that for that, because I'm not old enough to have seen the game or wasn't in California, it was always about the picture. There was a picture of it that just came and recurred through history.

RGS: Yes, I mean, Marichal's holding the bat up way above his head. And Koufax is in the picture as well. He's got his left arm in the middle of the picture. And then there's Roseboro getting hit. There was blood everywhere.

You know, the real hero of that moment was Willie Mays. And today is Willie Mays' birthday. Happy birthday, Willie.

DA: Huh? Why is he the hero?

RGS: I'm going to tell you.

He got Roseboro away from the fracas, because Roseboro was not playing. He was gonna retaliate by any means necessary. Willie Mays crosses team lines and says, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, your eye is out, your eye is out. So he gets him away from Marichal at that point, because he really wanted to fight him seriously. And then he gets him off the field, out of the stadium. He actually puts his cap on Roseboro's head, which is bleeding profusely.

So Roseboro is in Candlestick Park in San Francisco wearing Willie Mays' cap. Then Willie Mays comes up the next inning and hits a two-run home run against Koufax and wins the game.

DA: Of course he did.

RGS: This brother was phenomenal. And it's crazy that you and I are speaking on what's his, I think it's his 93rd birthday. Wow.

DA: Is he the greatest baseball player?

RGS: Huh? The greatest?

DA: Living baseball player.

RGS: Oh, without a doubt.

DA: I guess it checks out.

RGS: Without a doubt. I mean, we got a couple people playing now. Ohtani, you know, who's a rather good player, pitcher and hitter. He's not pitching now because he's in recuperation for that. But Willie Mays could do it all. He was a five-tool ball player.

DA: We're going to have to wrap up in a minute.

RGS: We're just getting started.

DA: That's the thing about this. Half hour is brutal, but it keeps me in check.

You have baseball at the center of your life now, frankly, right?

RGS: Yes, six days a week, I have three kids who play. So there's a lot of baseball happening. And they're students of the game as well. I mean, we have these roundtable discussions, arguments. You know? About who was the best this. Who did this the best? Who's the best of all time? Who's the GOAT? And they obviously didn't see any of these people play, but they studied. They've studied the game and they've studied the history and they've studied the biographies of all these cats.

DA: Why do you think people have a hard time passing down the game of baseball in 2024? Your kids are exceptional in that sense.

RGS: I think that there's a certain cult of baseball that's still active in this country, but the game of baseball is an international endeavor. You know, Dominicans. Juan Marichal was that first wave of Dominican players, but now the game is kind of dominated by Dominicans, Japanese players. We have a new Cuban cat, Pages—Andy Pages. He's from Havana, Cuba. He's 23 years old, and he's rocking it for the Dodgers right now.

So the dynamic of the game has definitely changed. One of the great things about Willie Mays and his generation, of course, is that they did not come into MLB directly from teenagehood. They went to this thing called the quote Negroes. And this generation also enlisted for World War II. So that was another—I'm not going to say impediment—but it was just a way of delaying the gratification of the nation who now can embrace a Willie Mays, a Hank Aaron.

When these cats came in, the Birmingham Black Barons, Indianapolis Clowns, that was Henry Aaron’s team. And then these guys who barely made it in to MLB, like Satchel Paige, who came in at a rather advanced age, but still showed that he could do his thing.

DA: There's just so much of our history—of American history—tied up in it, I think more than other sports. That’s probably circumstantial— maybe because the nature of the game reflects the sort of plurality. I don't know.

But it's really interesting to hear you talk about it. You're definitely going to be the first repeat guest. You're right; we barely touched the surface. Let me ask you one more thing. Is it possible for you, someone who's had so many distinct roles live and in front of the camera, to have a favorite performance?

RGS: I think my favorite performance is the current one. Because I'm in conversation with you and we're improvising this conversation. And the tenor of the scene is really unlike any that I've ever had, because I think of your respectful preparation for this.

But I think also the moment that we're in currently, in which we are trying to understand our nation. I'm not just talking about what's going on on college campuses because of what's going on in Gaza or the fact that our former president is on trial today and being testified against, you know?

DA: Why not? That's enough, isn't it?

RGS: That's what it's about. Yeah, that's part of where we are today. And that's why I said, what's my favorite performance? It's this, we're creating this. (00:33:16): And this will presumably live for a minute.