Charles Lane

A highly enterprising black filmmaker and actor, Lane played the leading role in his own low-budget comedy-drama, "Sidewalk Stories" (1989), which he also wrote and edited. An unusual effort in that it was silent as well as black and white, it paid overt homage to the great silent comics of yore and garnered critical acclaim for its sensitive, Chaplinesque portrayal of a homeless man who cares for an abandoned little girl. Lane followed up with the decidedly more expensive and mainstream comedy "True Identity" (1991), based on an Eddie Murphy "Saturday Night Live" sketch about a black actor who disguises himself as a white man to hide from the underworld. Despite containing some interesting satirical insights into the social construction of race and racial identity, the film did less well with critics than his initial effort and, lacking any big names, did very poorly at the box office.