INDEPENDENT VIEW: For Roger Smith, this film is the crowning achievement of a campaign that began several years ago, when he saw his first Spike Lee movie.

ROBERT GUENVEUR SMITH: I sat through She's Gotta Have It, and I sat through it twice which I rarely do. And I said, who is this Spike Lee, where he is, what is he doing next. I found out that he was doing film about college campus. I had the audition in a cattle call with Spike Lee. He felt that I was mad enough to play a rather demented fraternity fledge in schooldays, and the rest is history. This is our seventh collaboration.

When I heard about what he was doing next, a weekend in the life of one black in Brooklyn, I thought that there must be some sort of contribution that I might be able to make to that. But he didn't write me a role. But he said that, maybe there's something that you can come up with.

I came up with the idea of Smiley, this guy who walks up and down the block trying to sell personally colorized photographs of Malcolm X shaking hands with Martin Luther King.

The popular, of course, propaganda about these two men is that they were somehow arch enemies, diametrically opposed, but you can see in the flash of that bulb that they genuinely respected and loved each other. And I'm very happy that Spike and I were able to put that image out there for the world to make it a standard piece of American iconography.

INDEPENDENT VIEW: You've collaborated with Spike on so many films. Tell me about your collaboration on The Huey P. Newton Story.

ROBERT GUENVEUR SMITH: Spike has long supported my independent work in the theater. Huey, of course, is simply the latest and ongoing series of independent work for the stage which includes solo work, solo biographical work on Christopher Columbus, Frederick Douglas, two-man cabaret piece called "Inside the Creole Mafia," and many multimedia pieces in Los Angeles. Spike has always been supportive of my work. He's been the first person there in the front row. And he came to see Huey at the Public Theater here in New York City. And we immediately started talking about how can we somehow document this. How can we make this live forever on celluloid.

Huey is a man of profound, extreme, and largely self-acknowledged contradictions. He trained as a concert pianist as a child. He also trained as a boxer. He claims that he was graduated from high school functionally illiterate. He also claims that he taught himself how to read by going through Plato's Republic six times.

And then the authorities said, Newton, that guy is very dangerous. You did a good job with him. You should work with him, boy. But I'm going to keep on fighting however that may come. If you know what to do. But for the time being, I would like for you to maintain discipline within the ranks. I'd like a straight story, minus the rhetoric. I would like to know how many Black Panther papers we have been selling on the outside.

Somewhere along the way he lost his own self-discipline and was murdered tragically in front of a crackhouse on the same streets where he and Bobby Seale had co-founded the party.

INDEPENDENT VIEW: You present Huey at the end of his career. He is ravaged by drugs, as well as his own personal demons.

ROBERT GUENVEUR SMITH: I don't come to lionize Huey, neither do I come to demonize him. I come to try to find the common human element within the man. He says, I'm really what they call a regular human being. And I try to constantly illuminate that humanity to re-humanize the poster.

INDEPENDENT VIEW: You collaborated with Mark Anthony Thompson, who's also known as the recording artist, Chocolate Genius. In the play he's the sound designer. Tell me about your collaboration and how music works as both memory as well as a narrative cue in the play.

ROBERT GUENVEUR SMITH: Christopher Columbus was a solo performance with live sound design by Mark Anthony Thompson. While we were doing Columbus in 1992 we started talking about, what's next. Who's next. What are we going to next. And Huey just continued to push up.

INDEPENDENT VIEW: You didn't write a script?

ROBERT GUENVEUR SMITH: No, he asked me, well, tell me about your father. Tell me about the 10-point party platform. Tell me about Shakespeare. Tell me about the blues. And I answered all those questions as Huey, and two hours later we had what we call a play.

INDEPENDENT VIEW: You have an uncanny resemblance to Huey. How did you get the Louisiana accent down?

ROBERT GUENVEUR SMITH: I listened to a lot of tapes, a lot of audiotapes, watched some videotapes. It's a very distinctive way of speaking, and I think it's alarming to people because I don't think that many people know that Huey did speak with a very high-pitched Louisiana drawl. He was born in Monroe, Louisiana. In fact, when Huey came out of prison in 1970, and he went on a collegiate speaking tour, he said it was the worst experience of his life. A lot of people walked out on him. A lot of people booed him because he was not the political poster come to life.

INDEPENDENT VIEW: What the play succeeds in doing is showing the humorous aspect of Huey's character.

ROBERT GUENVEUR SMITH: You know, Huey had a wicked sense of humor. And to bring that out was really not that difficult.

INDEPENDENT VIEW: Every time you perform this play, you perform it differently. Like you said before, it's a staged jazzed improvisation. How is the film version, then, which is a very structured media piece, going to be different from the stage?

ROBERT GUENVEUR SMITH: That's what I want to know, too. And if you find out, please let me know, because this is a really crucial kind of dilemma. No show is the same ever. It's a song cycle, as described by Mark Anthony, in which we sing the same songs every night but we sing them differently every night. So how then do we now commit to a moment. Well, as my brother Spike Lee says, it's no longer a play. It's a film now. And I am now at the mercy of my director and our wonderful editor, Barry Alexander Brown, and director of photography, Ellen Curis. And I entrust to them the spirit of Huey.

People always ask me after the show, how were we? How was this audience? When we did the show in London, a man came up to me after the show and said, well, you must excuse us. We're British. Brussels, which was the first time that we did it for an audience which was not primarily English speaking, I asked the audience how would you translate that, you know, my poetry. Huey's poetry. An argument broke out in the audience between arguing about the French translation of Huey's poetry. That was one way that an audience reacted. I intended the piece very simply. I imagined it as a portrait of a man in a box. And that is something that we all can relate to, I think.

First night when I stepped out on stage in San Francisco, an unforgettable experience. Huey's widow Frederica is there, fifth row center. His brother and sister are in the house. Many comrades. Probably many enemies as well. It's good to know that a Huey P. Newton story can work for those who knew Huey, for those who didn't know Huey, for those who want to know Huey, or for those who couldn't care less.

INDEPENDENT VIEW: What do you want audiences to leave with when he leave the theater?

ROBERT GUENVEUR SMITH: I think the stronger sense of themselves. I think that we come to the theater to see ourselves reflected on stage. And perhaps when we leave the theater, our masks have been shifted, readjusted, traded, demolished. Or reconstructed.