Lange’s ‘Othello’ Challenges the Purists : Movies: Former ‘Love Boat’ bartender struggles to find U.S. distribution for his version of the tragedy.

The first film version of Shakespeare’s “Othello” to star a black man may never make it to movie theaters.

Last fall, actor Ted Lange--best known for having played Isaac the bartender for seven seasons on television’s “The Love Boat”--sank nearly $1 million of his own money into a film production of the classic play, with him in the lead role. But despite accolades from his supporters in the black theater community, the film has failed to attract a U.S. distributor.

Despite months of appeals to distributors, Lange has managed to engage only a small licensing and distribution company, Intercontinental Releasing of Los Angeles, to handle the film overseas and to help him look for a distributor here.

In Los Angeles, the only venue that the movie has garnered so far is at the upcoming American Film Institute film festival in April, which this year is featuring black film makers.

“If somebody said, ‘We don’t like it because it’s boring,’ I’d say fine, I’ll recut it,” Lange said. “But nobody will say what’s wrong. I went to Goldwyn and they said they don’t do Shakespeare. Then they came out with ‘Henry V.’ ”

If nothing else, seven seasons playing Isaac make Lange an unlikely Othello. His height--5-foot-7--and his tendency to play likable characters make the leap to Shakespeare’s menacing Moor all the more difficult.

But Lange, who has spent his post-”Love Boat” years producing Shakespearean drama at urban community theaters such as L.A.’s Inner City Cultural Center, was determined to bring his version of the Bard’s great tragedy to the screen.

“I wanted to reach all the people who had seen ‘Love Boat’ and have them come see Isaac do ‘Othello,’ ” Lange said. “I wanted to challenge the purists by not making Othello 6-foot-2 with a basso profundo voice, and I wanted to reach black people by making it accessible. I wanted to reach people who had never seen Shakespeare.”

Lange sold his house and some investments to raise money for the project, and last September used a cast from an Inner City Cultural Center production of the play. He cast himself in the lead role and acted as director and producer.

Distributors who’ve turned it down say privately that despite Lange’s enthusiasm, the film, which was shot in 11 days, just isn’t very good.

“We’ve had a few nibbles, but it’s a difficult film to place,” said Sharyon Cobe, president of Intercontinental Releasing Corp., the company that has agreed to distribute the film overseas and to help find a domestic distributor. Lange went to 10 distribution companies before he found her.

And without a distributor--a company that signs on to promote a movie and place it in theaters--the film has virtually no chance of being shown to mainstream audiences.

“You present what you do and some people like it and some people don’t like it, but you want it to be seen,” Lange said. “To work on something and have it be hidden--that really hurts.”

The problem, according to Cobe, is two-fold. For one, she said, Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee aside, most black film makers have a rough go of it. “A lot of black films just die on the vine,” Cobe said, while others are distributed only to blacks through showings at museums and schools.

And Lange’s “Othello” is different, Cobe said. A friendly and not particularly big comic actor is cast as the Moor, while a tall, passionate black man--Hawthorne James--plays Iago. Iago is typically cast as white.

Lange said the idea was to add an additional element of racial tension to that already present in the play. Othello trusts Iago because he is black, but Iago considers Othello a rival for the same reason.

More than the casting, however, the film differs from most productions of “Othello” in terms of pacing and language. The actors sound like they are performing American-style television, not traditional Shakespeare. The camera shots and editing style give the film the comparatively flat and immediate look of television, and the music changes with each scene, building like music in a television soap opera to new climaxes every few moments.

To Lange and Cobe, those characteristics make the movie accessible and interesting. “I previewed it for a black audience in New York and they gave it a standing ovation,” Lange said. “I think the people to whom it’s off-putting are the people who are already Shakespeare fans. They want it the old way.”

To the distributors who turned the movie down, however, Lange’s “accessibility” makes the movie amateurish and slow.

“It’s obviously a passionate film to him and he put a lot of heart into the project, and that comes through,” said an executive at one major distribution company, who turned the film down (and asked not to be identified). “But it’s a bad movie. I didn’t think it had good actors or good production values.”

Cobe said that Lange now has two choices. He can stick with his plan to reach a mainstream audience by raising more money and actually paying a distributor to take on the film. (Normally, distributors accept a product in exchange for a piece of the earnings, but are not paid up front.) Or he can target a middle-class black audience and send the movie on a “road show”-type tour of museums, universities and other auditoriums.

If he doesn’t do one or the other, Cobe said, the film will die on the vine.

Taking the show on the road would require Lange, who is currently playing the lead in a touring production of “Driving Miss Daisy,” to travel with the film and speak at its showings.

“We can target certain cities that we know it would be a natural for,” Cobe said. “If we did that, we could reach an upper-middle-class black audience with possible crossover to the white community.”

It is not unusual for black artists to be forced to limit distribution to the black community, said theater director Woody King, whose recent credits include the Broadway show “Checkmates.”

In the case of “Othello,” King said, black audiences would support the film in part because of Lange’s stature in the community. Among blacks, the actor/director is known not just as Isaac the bartender, but as a philanthropist and a strong supporter of black theater, film and television work.

“Ted makes his living in television, but his work within the (black) community has been known throughout the country for years,” King said. “They would recognize him and support him.”

So far, Lange is holding onto his idea of reaching mainstream audiences, because he is convinced that given the opportunity, Middle America will turn out.

They’ll come because using American-style acting and two black leads “is a concept that Olivier did not do, that Orson Welles did not do, that (Paul) Robeson did not do,” he said, referring to some of the better known actors who have played Othello. “Just the fact that you have a TV actor--known as a comic actor--will bring people in.”