When Matty Rich started shooting his stark Straight Out of Brooklyn in the housing projects of Red Hook, a local drug dealer laid down some ground rules. The dealer was maybe 17, a kid Rich grew up with. The two were flip sides of the same coin: Rich, a 17-year-old with a gold front tooth, a nonexistent budget and a head of anger, scratching together a movie about the neighborhood that had already killed his best friend, his aunt and his uncle. The dealer was a premature adult with a different solution, a kid with weight as long as his luck held out.
To film anywhere in the neighborhood, the dealer said, Rich had to ask him first; if the dealer told him to move, Rich better move. The dealer also offered to provide security for the crew. A deal was struck. Rich finished his film; the dealer didn’t live to see its premiere. “There’s another one in his place now,” says Rich.
The liquidity with which these two worlds flowed together, the criminal and the legitimate-and the volatility with which they flew apart-is the pulse of “Straight Out of Brooklyn.” Like Joseph Vasquez’s new Hangin’ With the Home. boys, and the slew of other new black movies due out shortly, Rich’s film struggles to find a vocabulary to describe a world not seen on the screen before.
The movie follows Dennis (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), a teenager trying to figure out how to become a man in a world that offers no clues. His father, played with palpable menace by George T. Odom, beats his mother (Ann D. Sanders). The father is a knot of hatred and brutality, a cycle waiting to repeat itself in the son. He’s mad at the world; particularly the white world. “Remember me?” he asks in one drunken soliloquy. “I’m the one you destroyed, and now you’re going to destroy my goddam son.”
Dennis wants a way out. He wants to go to college; he wants a big score. His girlfriend Shirley (Reana E. Drummond), a waitress, counsels the kind of patience Dennis will never know. Death is sudden in Red Hook; deliverance must be also. When his friend Larry Love (Rich) suggests a job at a filling station, Dennis has another idea: robbing a drug dealer. It’s his flaw that he can’t see the madness of this plot-or that he can’t heed it-but the flaw hangs over the whole community. Everybody’s riding the same roller coaster, and it’s moving too fast for anyone to stop and think about death; all you can do is hope to catch up.
“Straight Out of Brooklyn” is a blunt instrument, but that’s one reason it works. The loose ends it scatters chart a world running under its own logic. The violence feels immediate and random. The wrong people die for the wrong reasons; life goes on unaffected. Even where the film buys into the father’s diatribes against whitey, it knows they don’t add up to much. Rich doesn’t preach, or impose rational arguments on an irrational world. He makes the irrationality sing.
What’s missing from the largely autobiographical film is the poetry and romance of Rich’s actual biography. Matthew Satisfield Richardson launched “Straight Out of Brooklyn” on the advances from two credit cards and a lie about some money he didn’t really have. Most of the crew worked for free. He used his grandmother’s apartment as a set. For the fight scenes, he destroyed her dishes; he put holes in her walls.
The credit cards went far enough to produce an eight minute trailer. Staked with that and his own chutzpah, he went on New York’s black owned WLIB-AM to raise money, and collected another $70,000. He gathered more money as he went along, finished the film and won a Special Jury Award at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival. Now, two major studios are fighting for his next film, a $10 million affair. His is a classic success story: a hustler who through sheer talent and desire triumphs against long odds. “Straight Out of Brooklyn” shows only those odds.
Vasquez’s touchy-feely comedy, “Hangin’ With the Homeboys,” maps another path to manhood. Four friends-two black, two Puerto Rican-take a prosaically tumultuous Friday-night trek from the Bronx into Manhattan and back again. They argue, they dance, they meet girls and police. They philosophize; boy, do they philosophize. They act like they’ve only got 90 minutes to reveal their higher truths, and so make every curb a soapbox.
It’s “The Breakfast Club” moved uptown. Crossing cultural lines, the four learn that despite their differences, deep down inside, they’re all human-or, in the film’s terms, each is “a piece of s– like the rest of us.” It’s a feel-good message that doesn’t exactly make you feel good.
