COVER STORY : Black Power in Its Glory : What’s the legacy of the militant activists known as the Black Panthers? Father-son filmmakers Melvin and Mario Van Peebles bring it all to life for a new generation to decide.

A drive along Carroll Avenue, slightly uphill from Echo Park Lake, is a voyage to another era. Architecturally significant Victorian-style houses in various stages of renovation grace the street. Magisterial and imposing, they are out of character with the stucco, tiled-roofed, single-story dwellings on the neighboring streets.

It’s a warm, sunny, slightly humid day. The time is exactly 3 p.m. The year is 1966.

A pickup roars into the driveway of one reconstituted gabled structure, where a back-yard barbecue is in progress. A dozen or more African American men and women, dressed in brightly printed dashikis , chat and drink lemon-colored punch from cut-glass cups as Gladys Knight plaintively intones “If I Were Your Woman.”

Several men in black leather jackets, sunglasses and berets, carrying shotguns, jump out of the truck. They march into the back yard in military formation. There is a pointed confrontation that stops just short of violence.

In the midst of the standoff, everyone freezes in place, like plaster-cast statues. Director Mario Van Peebles, casually dressed in faded denim overalls, weaves his way to the eye of the storm, quietly speaks and gesticulates and drops back again.

The action resumes.

Carroll Avenue is standing in for downtown Oakland in this sequence of Van Peebles’ new film, “Panther.” It was written by his father, Melvin Van Peebles, who adapted it from his upcoming novel about the early days of the Black Panther Party, the controversial militant African American organization founded in 1966.

The elder Van Peebles keeps his distance from the action, available for consultation (he also has a small part in the film), otherwise content to amble about, which he does with a slight limp. Van Peebles chews on an unlit stogie and complains about his bandaged toe. “I was bitten by a racist spider,” he says with a laugh.

“Panther,” which is to be released early next year by Gramercy Pictures, evolved from a fictional tale on which Van Peebles has been working sporadically for 15 years. The novel will be published at the same time.

The timing of both projects seems right. After fading into relative obscurity--”because history is written by the winners,” according to his actor-director son--the Black Panthers are back in the news. Rappers like Tupac Shakur glorify them; autobiographies by former Panther leaders Elaine Brown (“A Taste of Power”) and David Hilliard (“This Side of Glory”) were published in the last few years.

The Panther renaissance arrives as the baby boomer generation tries to make sense of its youth, says Hilliard, a lifelong friend of Huey P. Newton and former chief of staff for the Panthers. Also, he adds, as with any historical event, distance is required to measure its importance over time.

Not all the Panther reassessments are favorable. The recently published “The Shadow of the Panther,” by Hugh Pearson, focuses on the charismatic Huey Newton, a Panther founding member, and takes a less-than-flattering position on the organization, which he characterizes as a “petty gang” and less than altruistic. Others are seeking to present segments of the Panther history with warts intact as a demonstration of its place as part of the continuing struggle of African Americans.

Roger Guenveur Smith’s one-man play “A Huey P. Newton Story” premiered recently in San Francisco and is due in Los Angeles early next year. Reviewers have cited it as a complex distillation of Newton’s tragic life, which ended in 1989 when he was murdered by a drug pusher on the streets of Oakland.

“I don’t demonize or deify Huey. I try to find the human core,” as well as Newton’s links to other African American freedom fighters, Smith says, citing Frederick Douglass and Marcus Garvey.

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The Van Peebleses’ film is not designed as a hagiography like Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X.” Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver are central to the story, but so is a fictional composite and audience surrogate named Judge, a reluctant Panther and inadvertent police informer.

The reason for this more democratic approach is to show that “the real heroes were not Bobby and Huey but the folks who were needed to man the ranks,” the younger Van Peebles says. “The genesis of the Black Panther Party was unlike any other civil rights movement. It was not about jobs or a seat on the bus. It was directed at the lumpen proletariat.”

For Van Peebles senior, the groundbreaking writer-director of “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” a 1971 film that he says was once required viewing for the Panthers, the mantle of fiction allowed him artistic license “to be everywhere I want to be.”

“This film is meant to be more a forest than a tree because there are a thousand different perspectives on this story,” he says. “A Panther was born every minute in the ghetto.”

The ensemble consists of several relatively fresh young faces, including Marcus Chong, Kadeem Hardison, Bokeem Woodbine and Courtney Vance, with cameos by Bobby Brown, Angela Bassett, Chris Rock and Dick Gregory. The youth and relative inexperience of some of the actors, the director says, is meant to reflect the attitude of young, raw talents who founded and peopled the Panther Party in its early days.

Another, more practical reason for using relatively unfamiliar actors is that they mirror the demographics of the core African American audience the film is trying to reach, says one of its producers, Preston Holmes.

For African American youth, author Pearson says, current interest in the history of the Black Panthers is yet another attempt “to shore up their sense of self.”

But for too many of them, “Panther” will serve as their introduction to a pivotal moment in recent black history and to the volatile political era that gave rise to its creation.

“There was a focus group of black youth, age 16 to 19,” Holmes says, “in which we discovered that many had never even heard of the Black Panthers.”

And when they were told about the organization, says Mario Van Peebles, they were upset: “They wanted to know why this story hadn’t been told before, why it’s not in the history books.”

Even the 31-year-old filmmaker acknowledges that he knew only the broad strokes of the party’s history. Several of the film’s actors were aware of the Panthers only as a minor historical footnote. Since being cast, they have made up for lost time. Chong and Vance embarked on crash courses, not only reading autobiographies of former party members like Newton, Seale, Brown and George Jackson but also books that influenced them, such as quotations from Mao Tse-tung and Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of peaceful resistance.

“I’ve never worked so hard in my life,” says Chong, who plays the brilliant and troubled Newton.

His goal, says Chong, son of comedian Tommy Chong and brother of actress Rae Dawn Chong, is not to imitate Newton but to capture the essence of this black leader: “If I can get the text across, I’ll have accomplished something--to make others understand how a man could come to such an insightful love for his people that he would become a revolutionary. Revolution is basically against the law in this country.”

Vance revels in the opportunity to open a window on recent history that has been stubbornly shut for 25 years.

“It’s amazing to portray and deal with a time period, when black men stood up to cops, when society was threatened by any black man who knew what he was about and wanted to do,” Vance says. “But when you stand up, there’s a price to be paid. You have to try to stay alive.”

But the Van Peebleses say they have not set out to deliver a history lesson. Their ambitions are much narrower: They simply want to crack open a door that was previously shut and engender awareness. In part, that is why the filmmakers created the character Judge, “a reluctant hero,” says actor Kadeem Hardison, who plays him. Judge functions as an audience surrogate and as an active participant in the party’s tumultuous early days.

“Young people want to see young people do things. They can relate to that,” Hardison says. “When they see young people standing up for themselves, they’ll get excited. Then maybe they’ll be able to see beyond that.”

For those old enough to remember the Black Panthers, the film is intended to be an antidote to what its creators regard as a one-sided demonization of the party through the media.

The birth of the grass-roots organization was an inextricable part of a turbulent political era marked by race riots and anti-war protests. The Panthers’ militant stance was vilified in the press, which fed on the era’s existing “racial paranoia,” says Van Peebles senior.

Says producer Holmes: “It was called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. But the image that was generated was of black people with guns. People are still afraid of that image. Ironically, the same people who tried to take the guns out of our hands then are the same people who are fighting against gun control today.”

The filmmakers are concentrating on the birth and early years of the movement, mostly in Northern California (though the party eventually had chapters around the country), both for the sake of dramatic clarity and to demonstrate that the creation of the Panthers was as much socially motivated as political.

It all began, says Tarika, an early Panther member who serves as a consultant on the film, because there was no traffic light at the corner of 55th and Market streets in downtown Oakland, the scene of several pedestrian fatalities.

An early scene in the film depicts a peaceful protest at the corner that turns violent when the Oakland police intervene.

Overlooked in most media accounts of the Panthers, she says, were the organization’s founding principles, a 10-point program calling for such goals as decent housing, full employment and trial by a jury of one’s peers.

The ideas were sound, but the party’s disintegration erased many of its real accomplishments, such as the creation of community-based medical testing for lead poisoning and sickle-cell anemia, food giveaways and the Oakland Community Learning Center. The Panthers also worked to register voters and to ease bigotry in the police force and local government.

And to get that traffic light on 55th and Market.

“I hope this movie brings to light the principles, ideals and sacrifices made by the youth, some of whom gave up their lives for the community,” says Tarika, who left the party in the late ‘60s to join the Nation of Islam.

By then, she says, the Black Panther Party was beset by growing pains. Newton was sentenced to prison for his involvement in the death of a police officer, and the party was infiltrated by agitators and informants.

“Panther” ends before some of these and other more troublesome problems--such as misogyny, extortion, homicide and drug dealing--begin.

In the film, however, the central character of Judge is recruited by the police and blackmailed. Throughout, he barely stays one step ahead of them.

This is likely to be one of the most controversial aspects of “Panther”: the argument that there was a conspiracy between local police and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to systematically destroy the Black Panthers through harassment and infiltration.

Whereas Pearson says his research goes against this scenario, Hilliard fires back with reams of documents that he says clearly prove governmental interference dating to 1966.

T he paranoia that surrounded the Panthers was due in part to their emergence during one of the nation’s most politically volatile periods, aided and abetted by the characters of Hoover and then-President Richard Nixon, Holmes says.

“To some extent they overreacted,” he says. “There were so many challenges to the status quo at that time, including the Vietnam protests. Nixon feared that if the Panthers became focused, they could capture the imagination of the black masses and become a vehicle for their anger and frustration.”

A more incendiary contention is that the destruction of major inner-city neighborhoods through drugs and violence was commandeered as an outside effort to pacify and control the African American urban population. Director Van Peebles compares it to the influx of opium in China by the British as a means of quelling the Boxer Rebellion.

Even Pearson, who is openly suspect of the Panthers’ motives and effectiveness, says that “there’s evidence that drugs were brought (into African American communities) deliberately.”

However, Holmes says, “it’s not documented, so it’s hard to prove. Still, there’s no question that the massive influx of hard drugs into black communities has served to douse the flames of protest. In a documentary I saw recently about the South Bronx, one of the police commanders said that he considered drugs and alcohol his best friends for keeping the lid on the black community. He said he would hate to see what would happen if most of the population wasn’t narcotized.”

Also going against the grain is the fact that one of the most reprehensible of the film’s characters is an African American, an FBI informant, played by Roger Guenveur Smith.

“I had to fight to introduce a bad black guy,” Mario Van Peebles says. “It would have been easy to finger-point, but the question is more complex than that. If there is no enemy within, you can do no real harm.”

That was just one of the battles Van Peebles fought in trying to get “Panther” made. Though his directing debut, “New Jack City” (1991), grossed nearly $50 million domestically, the search for financing on “Panther” was a back-to-square-one proposition.

“Most people were scared of the material,” says Van Peebles, who has been offered many more lucrative assignments that he lumps under the collective title “Revenge of the Crackheads, Part 2.”

As he had done with his second film, “Posse” (1993), an African American Western in which he also starred, he preferred to use whatever clout he had acquired as a director to take on a subject that might otherwise never make it to the screen.

Rather than spend the years it would take to self-finance the film, he approached PolyGram Filmed Entertainment President Michael Kuhn, who had helped finance “Posse.” After “hammering out numbers,” a deal was signed.

Hammering out numbers meant doing a period piece for less money than Van Peebles had used to shoot the contemporary “New Jack City.” That required whittling his shooting schedule to 39 days and asking people like Holmes to work for a lot less than they could normally command.

Holmes has worked frequently with Spike Lee and had already begun production on “Crooklyn” when the call came. The Van Peebles project, however, was too good to pass up, and he asked Lee to be relieved of his duties so he could sign on. He had wanted to make a movie about the Black Panthers since college, but it was also important to him that it be done right.

The industry’s reluctance regarding “Panther,” he says, is not political but practical.

“There’s a lot of talk in the black community about what Hollywood will or won’t allow us to make,” Holmes says. “The answer is they will allow what makes money. Before ‘Posse’ started there were half a dozen other films about the black West in development. Because ‘Posse’ didn’t do better, none of them are getting made.”

In return for bringing his movie in for a mere $7 million and working for scale, Van Peebles is not only getting “Panther” made, but he gets final cut--that rarest of all rare privileges for directors.

By the middle of shooting, he says, he was too committed inside the process to know whether “Panther” is truly commercial: “Right now, I have no idea whether it will make 5 cents.” He would like it to make much, much more, he says, which would help him and other black writers and directors deal with a broader range of African American subjects on film.

But the simple accomplishment of getting “Panther” made is significant, Van Peebles says, reflecting the ideals with which the party was created.

“They went out and they did it,” he says. “And that in and of itself was cathartic.”

Says Holmes: “This is not a film about victims and victimization but about people who took their destiny into their own hands.”

He hopes “Panther” will effectively show young African Americans “who believed that their actions as individuals and as a group could make a difference. Most black youth today have no sense that they can make a difference. That’s dangerous to our society.”