By Charles Flowers

TAMPA -- Anyone desiring to have history told in a feature film in 1997 better check his facts at the door. Although lauded as a "genius" at a $100-a-ticket premiere of his movie Rosewood, director John Singleton drew harsh criticism from Rosewood survivors Robie Mortin and Wilson Hall.

"It's scandalous," said Ms. Mortin, 81 of Riviera Beach, whose uncle Sam Carter was lynched and murdered to begin a week of racial violence in 1923. "It's not right to take those peoples' lives and names all over the world."

Added survivor Wilson Hall, 80: "I don't think it's right. They're not only building the fire bigger, they're throwing gas on it."

Hall, who was seven years old when he fled with his family to the woods where they waited for a train to escape to Gainesville, told the Associated Press: "They waited 72 years to make the story. Why let it sit that long and then screw it up -- especially when some of the people that was in Rosewood are still living, and they know that that's not the truth?"

Siskel & Ebert may have given Rosewood two thumbs up, but author Michael D'Orso (Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood), and University of Florida historian David Colburn, think Singleton went too far in the direction of dramatization and missed the reality that was Rosewood.

"If it would be possible to exaggerate and sensationalize something so horrific as a lynching, it's done in this movie," said D'Orso, who saw the film as a guest on Oprah and was disturbed by the "whooping and cheering" in the audience's response to the shooting of whites.

Colburn said what really happened at Rosewood "would have been fascinating enough as it was."

Singleton shrugged when asked by this

reporter if fictionalizing a real event like Rosewood did not weaken it. "No, I think it makes it stronger."

The full-page advertisements by Warner Brothers in The New York Times say Rosewood is "Based on a true story. Inspired by extraordinary people. This film is for them."

But it is not for Robie Morton.

"I don't have any feelings about it (the movie) because I don't intend to see it," she told the Seminole Tribune at a Rosewood educational

forum in Opa-Locka organized by Janie Black, the niece of Lee Ruth Davis, a Rosewood survivor who

was interviewed in this newspaper as part of continuing Rosewood Massacre coverage that began in 1993.

"I've been a Christian all my life and I've been taught that hate can destroy you. Hate destroyed my whole hometown," Ms. Mortin said. "I would have liked to have been accepted into the family. I'm a loner, out here by myself. But I am a Rosewood survivor."

Separating the true from the fictional parts of Rosewood is only the first problem. Yes, there were two Levy County towns named Rosewood and Sumner, and yes, violence which grew to massacre proportions did occur there in January 1923. This has been reported in the Seminole Tribune and elsewhere, D'Orso's book, and radio and television documentaries. Three "mysteries" remain despite that exhaustive reporting:

* Was Fannie Taylor assaulted, or raped by a white man? Black lore says yes, but DeWitt Taylor, her brother-in-law, who was 78 when contacted by this newspaper in 1993, said simply, "God knows that's a lie." Whatever the truth, Ms. Taylor took it to her grave.

* Did Sylvester Carrier survive the Rosewood violence? Again, the oral tradition handed down by Rosewood survivors says he did. But there is no evidence of it in the documented history produced by Colburn and four other Florida historians to justify the relief bill. Ms. Mortin, who lived near Sylvester's wife Gertrude in Riviera Beach, said she never saw him again after Rosewood, and Gertrude re-married. She is buried in Riviera Beach.

Gertrude is identified in the film as "half Seminole," one of two references to the Tribe. The second occurs when Sam Carter, beaten and bloodied after being interrogated by the mob in the wake of Fannie Taylor's accusation, tells his killers, "You can kill me, but you can't eat me."

"You ain't no Seminole!" comes the reply, along with a shotgun blast.

Singleton's film explains the male body found in the Carrier home after it was burned as being that of a character known as Big Baby. After the white sheriff and others rush into the burning Carrier home, they agreed that the corpse was Sylvester Carrier. An apparent error in fact. Not only because Sylvester is later seen in the film, but because Big Baby was later seen in real life.

"Big Baby (Evans) did not get killed at Rosewood," Ms. Mortin told the Tribune. "He's been to my house many times."

Arnett Doctor, of Spring Hill, a paid consultant to the film, said Carrier escaped the massacre and died in Louisiana in 1964.

* How many people were killed at Rosewood, and is there a mass grave? There has never been an accurate death toll reported. The state's history documents eight deaths, including one (Sam Carter) by lynching, and four during the Jan. 4 seige of the Carrier home: whites Poly Wilkerson and Henry Andrews, Sarah Carrier and, possibly, her son Sylvester. A woman, Lexie Gordon, was shot as she ran from her home. The elderly James Carrier was shot over his sister Sarah's grave. And the eighth documented death, of Mingo Williams, occurred near Bronson.

There are more fatalities in one minute of Singleton's epic than that, and a gut-wrenching scene of black bodies being dumped into a mass grave observed through the eyes of a young boy. This echoes retired Levy sheriff James Turner's account in Gary Moore's first Rosewood story in the St. Petersburg Times 15 years ago. Turner said he witnessed the mass grave as a child and was told it contained17 bodies. Moore later wrote in a synopsis of his Rosewood research which is appended to the state-funded documentary history finished in 1993, that a black man from nearby Wylly, Buster Burns, told his sister Lillie Washington that he was brought to Rosewood to help bury the dead, that most of them were white, and none were young children.

On the number of black victims of Rosewood, Ms. Mortin and Singleton come closer to agreement. "There had to be many more people killed than they said. My Aunt Katie, Uncle Sammy's wife. The Borden family (of five). They were never heard from again. They talk about that mass grave. It's there. There were lots of people killed."

Singleton's film answers these unsolved mysteries in dramatic fashion: Not only was Fannie Taylor not assaulted by a black man, all the whites in Sumner knew it and went on their rampage anyway. At least a half-dozen were lynched besides Sam Carter, and the on-screen death toll climbs like a Rambo movie, with predictable cheering by black audiences when the "bad" whites get their just rewards. The mass grave includes no whites, but does include babies, which brings the young white boy (played by Tristan Hook) to tears.

But there were clearly no white people killed by a drifting World War I veteran with a trained horse who rides to the rescue of the Rosewood persecuted and shoots the white vigilantes from the train which has been brought to take the black women and children to safety. That is sheer "movie magic" inspired by Singleton's affection for John Wayne westerns.

"It's all in keeping with the hero," says Singleton. "I wanted him to be like John Wayne used to be in those old movies. John Wayne used to come in and slap the Mexicans on the face and knock the Indians down, killing the Indians. I wanted a black man in a very strong role."

Singleton continued, "You need something to hold it all together, so that the audience could see Rosewood through a stranger's eyes. If I made this film straight, docu-style, nobody would go see it."

Ironically, the name of lead character Mann (played by Ving Rhames of Pulp Fiction and Mission Impossible fame), sounds like the real-life nickname "Man" of Sylvester (played by Don Cheadle). The Rhames character also seems inspired by a widely discredited Chicago Defender account of the Rosewood Massacre in which a World War I vet helps defend the Carrier household from the angry mob, using skills he learned "over there."

Singleton, a 29-year-old director from South Central Los Angeles previously directed Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice and Higher Learning. All deal with racial themes. Industry sources say that only Boyz returned a profit. Doubtless, the key creative divergences from fact in Rosewood owe much to commercial considerations.

A thin, serious-looking man, Singleton was the darling of the Tampa premiere, posing for photographs with voluptuous women at the African-American Museum of Art. Singleton is not known for his sympathies to white people. So it is not surprising when the first white character shows his naked buttocks in the first scene. He is storekeeper John Wright (played by Jon Voight), by most accounts a hero in the Rosewood Massacre. But in Singleton's take, he is "the Massa of Rosewood."

On the other side of Wright's naked butt is a black girl the storekeeper is sexually exploiting within earshot of his wife, Mary. He is also buying up as much property as he can. His efforts to stop the carnage are motivated by material concerns. He is afraid of losing customers. He shelters a wounded black man, but only on condition that "we'll talk about that deed later."

Wright experiences his epiphany when he tries to keep the mob from killing and fails. His arc of character takes him to the woods where he coordinates with Mann to bring the children to a waiting train. No mention is made of the many children sheltered in the Wright home.

Ms. Mortin remembers Wright as "a nice man who always gave us children candy."

A surprisingly more sympathic character is the sheriff, Elias Walker (Michael Rooker), who watches the situation get out of hand as he tries desperately to control it. He tells James Taylor, Fannie's husband, what he and the whole town know about his wife, but only after Rosewood is in ruins and the population either dead or in flight. Singleton's answer to this revelation is another beating for Fannie, this time at the hands of her husband.

Two faces in the crowd at the Tampa premier were Florida Sen. Daryl Jones (D-Miami), who sponsored and voted for the relief bill that paid survivors $2.1 million, and Holland & Knight lawyer Stephen Hanlon. Jones told the Tribune that the Rosewood compensation was "a one-shot deal," at least in Florida.

"Our history is replete with similar situations," Jones said. "We had to find a way to

distinguish Rosewood from most other flash acts of racial violence. In this case, the sheriff was well aware of the rising sentiment. People from as far away as South Carolina had come to participate in the carnage. Because there was a clear opportunity to intervene and because the governor and other state officials were well aware of it, Rosewood was a unique case."

Still, Jones said, it would not pass the Legislature now.

"That bill would have had no chance of passage with a Republican majority in the Senate," Jones said. "That bill would not have even been heard." The Senate Judiciary Committee passed it to the full Senate by a 14-11 margin. Two votes could have killed it.

Hanson emerged from the theater and pronounced the experience of watching Rosewood "like a punch in the gut. It's an Afro-American Schindler's List."

Except for a few differences.

For one thing, the survivors of Nazi persecution whom Schindler helped were accorded more respect than the survivors of Rosewood. Wilson Hall and Robie Mortin are boycotting Rosewood, in part because they say Warner Brothers would not let them see the movie before it was released.

The studio had no response. But Greg Galloway, the Orlando attorney who negotiated the life story agreements for most of the survivors, did. Although he would not disclose the amount of the rights package, he said it was "substantially more" than $150,000. He said that each survivor who signed agreements earned more than Arnett Doctor did as a consultant. Galloway said he explained to each of them that signing the agreements in effect meant the survivors were endorsing the project, and that they could be depicted in any way the producers saw fit.

"You never get that kind of access to the storyteller," Galloway said. "They had an open invitation to the set. Every one of them was invited to the set."

Hall and Ms. Mortin, who declined the invitation, wanted one thing more. They wanted the truth of their lives told. After 2 hours and 37 minutes, the only fair thing to say is that it isn't up there on the screen. This Rosewood is closer to Shane than Schindler's List. Arnett Doctor has begun a lucrative career speaking about the movie on behalf of Warner Brothers. At the premiere, he said he was off to Hawaii, and then Australia where aborigine groups are interested in legal lessons of Rosewood to remedy atrocities committed against them.

"Rosewood is getting ready to take off!" Doctor said.

Singleton left Florida for New York where he will direct the re-make of Gordon Parks' detective movie Shaft. With Rosewood, he left many in Florida and beyond feeling they'd been given it.