Wesley Snipes (left) with Cylk Cozart (right) in 'White Men Can't Jump'
By Martin Dotterweich
Martin Dotterweich is professor of history and director of the King Institute for Faith and Culture at King University.
Cylk Cozart remembers the moment that he knew he wanted to act. He was 6 years old and had been cast as one of the Three Wise men for his Knoxville church’s Christmas pageant. His stage debut called for only one line: “I bring the baby Jesus frankincense.” But in the bright lights, young Cozart forgot his line and blurted out “Frank sent me!”
The laughter that followed did not put the young actor off. “I realized that the laughter wasn’t a bad thing. That current, that energy went through me like somebody stuck a water hose in my mouth and turned it on full blast, and I wanted to be on stage,” he says. A theater visit after this confirmed the feeling. “I wanted to jump up on that stage.”
From that early impulse, Cozart eventually found his way to work alongside Julia Roberts, Wesley Snipes, Bruce Willis and Woody Harrelson; and that way went through Bristol.
As a teenager, Cozart excelled in sports but also wanted to act. However, his desire for the stage was thwarted throughout high school. “They wouldn’t let me audition. They would say, ‘There’s nobody that looks like you in this play.’ I knew that was wrong, but you’re not going to talk back to the teacher. I would go to the plays and think, ‘I could do that.’”
But once Cozart enrolled at King College, the stage doors opened. He approached theater director Penny Mattice and told her he wanted to act. She told him, “Just find a character and play it,” so Cozart put together a short monologue as Cassius Clay. He took the role of the blind seer Demetrius in an outdoor production on the Oval, then switched gears to play a woman in “He Done Her Wrong.” Decked out in a dress with his stacks on, his aunt couldn’t help but laugh at him. “I didn’t know what other shoes to wear,” he says. The laughter continued to energize him.
After college, Cozart found that both acting and basketball beckoned. Coach Al Nida encouraged both, supporting Cozart’s athletic and theatrical ambitions. Cozart tried out for the Denver Nuggets but got hurt, so Nida got him a tryout for the Atlanta Hawks – but he skipped this for a screen test in Los Angeles, California.
Learning the profession of acting took a while. “I learned very quickly that show business is business show. When you first start something like that, you’re really naïve. Nobody really helps you, especially then. There were not many roles for anybody that was other than white,” Cozart says.
Fortunately, Cozart could make a living with modeling in the meantime.
His first screen work was in “227” with Marla Gibbs, then he did a show called “Amen” with Sherman Hemsley. “I played a sailor that came in town and met a girl and wanted to get married real quick.” His breakthrough into studio film was Spike Lee’s “School Daze” (1988) as Doctor Feelgood. “It took everything that I had been working on to a whole different level. It was fun, and it was tough at the same time. Spike was a pretty tough director, but a really good director. I got to work with people like Larry Fishburne, Giancarlo Esposito and Tisha Campbell,” he says.
Coach Nida’s lessons also kept guiding him in acting. He made a point of speaking to gaffers, sound people, camera people. “It takes a team. That’s why basketball helped me make that transition to the entertainment,” Cozart says. He learned from fellow actors, from the crew, and from directors from Spike Lee to Ron Shelton and Dick Donner. “It’s like in class. Other students will teach you as much as teachers sometimes. You extract what you need, then you go to the next one and learn something else.”
Cozart’s best known films, “White Men Can’t Jump” and “Conspiracy Theory,” brought him a new level of success. He’s acted in comedies like “Hot Shots!” and dramas like “16 Blocks,” all told appearing in more than 30 films and 20 television shows. But from those first moments on stage, what he has found the most rewarding is “the overall process. I’ve learned to enjoy the process.”
This has helped him learn his own technique, which is now on display in his documentary “Inherit the Land.” He worked on a “plain, fresh, brand new canvas,” on this story that was little known, and this allowed him to find his own style. Part of this was finding descendants of the individuals covered in the film’s story, set in the 1920s in North Carolina, and enlisting them to play their own ancestors. He likes working on the other side of the camera, telling stories that are educational as well as dramatic.
He’s come full circle, moving back to Knoxville, and he’s been back to visit his college town. “Bristol played a huge part in the development of my careers, one in sports and one in entertainment. Bristol helped me combine those,” says Cozart. “Bristol gave me opportunities I never knew I had. It gave me confidence.”
He remembers with particular fondness the influence of his first director. “Penny Mattice gave me the ability to look beyond.” He was in a dinner theater production during college, but only had one line, so he didn’t mention it to Mattice. She found out, and she showed up to the last performance. After the show, she encouraged him. The show was about a bar, and Cozart played the bartender, so he was in most scenes. Hence, she told him, “The play is about you. There’s no such thing as a small role.”
Today Cozart is mostly interested in directing, with several projects in the works, but he remains open to acting if the right role comes along. In the director’s chair, with a position of leadership, he returns again to his basketball years with Coach Nida. “He taught me something as captain of the basketball team. If someone makes a bad play and you give them a dirty look, they’ll be discouraged. You need to know your teammates and celebrate with them.”
It’s a long road from Knoxville to Hollywood, but Bristol was an important stop for Cozart. He’ll be back in town Nov. 1, when he’ll screen “Inherit the Land” at Theatre Bristol at 7 p.m., then engage in a discussion with the audience. You can learn what it was like to work with Spike Lee or Bruce Willis, you can ask him about what gaffers and sound engineers do, and you’ll find that he still makes people laugh on stage. And in case he asks you what you’re doing there, just remember to tell him that Frank sent you.
