Director Charles Burnett turns hobby ambitions into an Oscar

LOS ANGELES » Charles Burnett expected filmmaking to be a hobby, a way for him to tell the stories of the people he knew growing up in south central Los Angeles.

They weren’t stories Hollywood told, Burnett said in a recent interview, and for most of his four decade filmmaking career, they’ve been stories that have eluded Academy Awards recognition. That changes on Saturday, when Burnett will receive an honorary Oscar that will recognize his honest portrayals of African-American lives in his feature films and documentaries.

It’s a surprising, but welcome, honor for Burnett, an independent filmmaker whose work has drawn praise for decades, but has never been nominated for an Academy Award. “It’s totally unexpected,” he said during a recent interview. “It came out of the blue.’

Burnett, 73, will receive his Oscar at Saturday’s ninth annual Governors Awards, a gala dinner attended by major stars and academy leaders. Fellow honorees include actor Donald Sutherland, director Agnes Varda and cinematographer Owen Roizman.

Burnett joked that family and friends have been calling him asking to attend the event, and he’ll feel a sense of relief once he’s delivered his speech. “I’m the worst speaker in the world, and that’s my biggest concern,” he said. “I’m stage struck, shellshocked and everything else.”

Burnett’s first film, “Killer of Sheep,” starred his neighbors and friends from Watts and showed the realities of the lives of its residents and the impact poverty had on many of them.

“It was just a practical solution, to use non-actors,” he said. “I couldn’t afford any named people at the time.”

It was finished in 1978 and earned praise and recognition, but didn’t receive a commercial release until nearly three decades later. By that point Burnett had wrote and directed several other films focusing on the black experience, including “My Brother’s Wedding” and “To Sleep with Anger.”

Burnett said since his days in film school at the University of California, Los Angeles, he sought to tell stories Hollywood wasn’t showing filmgoers. In films about Los Angeles, Burnett said, “you never saw people of color with dignity, as real people.

“Most of us that got into film school wanted to treat people fairly and wanted to show what reality was and wanted to show people of color in a true fashion,” he said.