- by Jerry Rice
[Friday, November 22, 2002]

Much ado about nothing.

That's how Ice Cube describes the "Barbershop" brouhaha over jokes made in the hit comedy about two esteemed civil rights figures, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.

"When it was going on, I kind of just made no comment because to me it was a non-issue," Cube says. "It's nothing that should even take up that much brain space."

At the center of the storm was a two-minute scene when a cranky barber named Eddie, played by Cedric the Entertainer, sounds off on Rodney King (saying he deserved to be beaten), O.J. Simpson (saying he was guilty of murder), Martin Luther King Jr. (commenting on his alleged philandering) and Parks. Eddie wonders if her action refusing in 1955 to move from the front seat of a public bus that was reserved for whites in the segregated South was even the statement against racism everyone thought it was.

"Rosa Parks ain't do nothin' but sit ... down," he says in the movie.

The sequence drew angry responses from the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has political aspirations that include the White House, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the target of a profanity spouted by Eddie. Sharpton at one time sought a public apology from MGM, the film's distributor, and threatened to organize a "Barbershop" boycott.

Despite that, the movie opened atop the box-office charts in mid-September and remains a top 20 performer in its 10th week of release, earning $75 million so far.

"That (scene) was a footnote to what `Barbershop' is and what it means to people and how much people enjoyed it," says Cube, who plays the owner of the barbershop a struggling business he inherited from his father. "That one little scene people wouldn't even trip on unless they put a spotlight on it."

MGM says it has no intention of altering the movie either for the remainder of its theatrical run or the upcoming DVD release. A sequel is already in the works (although a script has yet to be written), and there's talk of a TV spinoff that could make it on a network schedule by fall 2004.

"When it comes down to it, it's a movie about honesty," Cube says of "Barbershop." "You see that the same people don't have the same opinions. ... What's the most interesting about the movie is that people can be a fly on the wall in a world they would normally never be privy to, or even if you walked into a black barbershop would everybody act the same way as they would if you didn't?"

[Read more about Ice Cube in Where every day is like Friday.]