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By now, the skirmish over Amistad shares a few traits with the story on the big screen: It's hard to tell the heroes and the villains apart, and the stakes are high for both. Even if Chase-Riboud doesn't succeed in keeping Amistad out of theaters--and she probably won't--the public will see a black author going to war with a white filmmaker for allegedly ripping off an African-American tale, and that unseemly perception could become the iceberg that rips a gaping hole in Amistad's commercial and critical potential. Anticipation should be running high--it's the first "heavy" Spielberg film since Schindler's List swept the Oscars in '94--but lately audiences have torpedoed a boatload of historical movies, from Rosewood and Ghosts of Mississippi to Nixon and The Crucible.

If Amistad suffers a similar fate, Spielberg won't be the only one feeling the chill. Amistad, after all, is the first prestige film to issue from DreamWorks, a new studio eager to prove its seaworthiness in Hollywood. "Suddenly people know about this movie, but they know about it in the context of a lawsuit," sighs one DreamWorks executive. "Which is disappointing." The lawsuit is bound to get a lot more ink, too, because Amistad's behind-the-scenes sniping involves some of the most powerful people in America. There's the top-grossing director in Hollywood, the man who produced Michael Jackson's Thriller, two of California's most fearsome lawyers, Dustin Hoffman, and a former first lady of the United States. Yep, as with all good paranoid yarns, there's even a Kennedy connection.

Debbie Allen soaks her feet in a bubble bath while a blond named Angela tends to her cuticles. It's a balmy evening in October, and Allen wants to talk about Amistad at Anushka, a spa on Manhattan's Upper East Side, while she and her sister Phylicia Rashad--that's right, Mrs. Huxtable from The Cosby Show--treat themselves to manicures and pedicures.

It's a quiet and lulling ritual, but it can't keep Allen from steaming up every time she thinks about the studio overseers who gave Amistad the cold shoulder. "I didn't want to throw in the towel. I wanted to just go and jack a couple of people," Allen laughs. "I just wanted to go and slash a couple of tires and throw a couple of bricks. You know, you get angry!"

"You go, girl!" comes the exclamation from her sister's chair.

Allen first came across the Amistad mutiny at a time when her soles could've used a touch of pampering. It was 1978, and she was a young actress-choreographer pounding the showbiz pavement. On a swing through her alma mater, Howard University, she bought a collection of essays and opened to the first page. There she found an old story about 53 Africans who broke from their shackles, overtook a slave-trading schooner off the coast of Cuba, wound up in New York waters, and got trapped in a web of legal and political intrigue. "I just was devastated that I'd never heard this story, and I wanted to do something about it," she says.


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