MOVIES : Finally, He Gets His Shot : Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, known for his work with Spike Lee, has waited 8 years to direct a coming-of-age story he co-wrote called ‘Juice.’

NEW YORK —  The cavernous downtown dancetorium is ablaze with the lights of a visiting movie crew, and Diamond J. Plastic Man and a few other local club deejays are hanging out, awaiting orders for an afternoon shoot. They make a very hip group of bit players, but not too hip to be impressed that they’re in a film directed by Ernest Dickerson.

Dickerson isn’t famous, and it’s not that he has directed any mega-hits--in fact, he’s never before directed a movie. But to these young actors and hip-hop musicians, Dickerson’s credentials bear a compelling cachet: “You know,” said Omar Epps, one of the teen-age stars of Dickerson’s film, lowering his voice almost reverentially, “he’s Spike Lee’s cinematographer.”

As Lee’s longtime friend, going back to their days at film school, and a collaborator on all of Lee’s five features, Dickerson is the recipient of a little reflected Lee worship. But Dickerson is not Spike Lee. Subdued in dress and manner, Dickerson is low-key and unassuming as he goes about the business of directing his first feature, a low-budget coming-of-age movie called “Juice.”

It’s a movie that Dickerson, 38, co-wrote eight years ago, when he was waiting for his break as a cinematographer. The story of four Harlem youths whose dalliance with petty crime turns deadly in their search for “juice”--respect on the street--has a familiar resonance now, but when Dickerson and his co-author first showed it around, “I didn’t get any encouragement,” he recalls. “My agent at the time never gave me any positive feedback.”

But that was then, the world before Spike Lee. Now, Dickerson can get a deal to direct “Juice” himself, and his finished film, shown to distributors last week, was eagerly awaited.

Still, there was a time when Dickerson had to put away the script for “Juice” and go to work on his career as a cinematographer. He made a name for himself quite apart from his association with Lee; last spring, he was honored at the San Francisco International Film Festival for his body of work. In the meantime, his pal Spike was creating conditions that would prompt Dickerson to turn his hand to directing, and to return to “Juice.”

With his ability to attract a diverse audience and critical attention, and his knack for controversy and publicity, Spike Lee almost single-handedly created a market for African-American-themed films and, therefore, a market for black directors, actors and writers. Dickerson’s co-writer, playwright Gerard Brown, dusted off the “Juice” script and submitted it as a writing sample to his new agent in Hollywood, where this time it was met by a willing industry. “The next thing I knew, a lot of people were interested in it,” Dickerson says.

With the tables turned, Dickerson was in a position to pick and choose, and he immediately eliminated those studios that didn’t want the untested Dickerson in the director’s chair. “I had very specific ideas of what I wanted the story to say and how I wanted it to be said,” Dickerson says. “I wrote it to be a piece for me to debut as a director.”

Dickerson’s directorial style is subtle, his command of a set subdued; he mills about, conferring quietly with the crew members, many of whom have worked with him before (there are a lot of “Do the Right Thing” T-shirts in the crowd and Dickerson himself wears a baseball jacket bearing Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks emblem). He neither draws attention to himself nor gathers the little storm of activity around himself that some directors do, and even though filming is hours behind schedule, the atmosphere is low-key.

“They were pretty cool, not like other shoots I’ve been on,” says DJ Diamond J, one of the local musicians asked to perform in the dance club scene over three days of filming. “They said to go with the flow and play off whatever goes on.”

A week later, filming has moved uptown to Harlem. During a lunch break, Dickerson reflects upon his long-delayed directorial debut. “Juice,” he believes, only ripened with the passing years.

“I wanted to do something that dealt with coming of age and the hard choices teen-agers had to make and about the forces that sometimes push young men into making the wrong choices,” Dickerson says. “Peer pressure has always been a driving force in the lives of teen-agers. Unfortunately nowadays, peer pressure sometimes has deadly consequences.”

That dangerous mix of violence and thrills is at the heart of “Juice,” which tells the story of Q (Quincy), whose success as a deejay in the local rap scene allows him to hope for a future beyond the streets. He betrays his conscience and his dreams, however, by joining his buddies in a series of two-bit crimes, and pays for it when, in one life-shattering instant, the spree turns violent.

A number of similarly themed, socially relevant movies by black filmmakers are in the works these days. Peter Frankfurt, executive producer of “Juice,” speculates why: “They are cool. They’re cheap. There’s always a music tie-in.”

That “Juice,” budgeted for under $5 million, scores on all three fronts makes it a prime candidate to become one of those “small” narrow-target movies with big potential for crossover appeal. “Our core audience is 18-year-old black males, but we think the film will be hip enough, cool enough, that other people will want to see it--people who want to know what’s going on,” says Frankfurt, whose partners on “Juice” are the team of producers Neal Moritz and David Heyman, with backing from Island World Productions.

“I’ve read a lot of black scripts now that that’s the ‘flavor-of-the-month,’ and it’s not often that you read one with as wide appeal as this one,” Frankfurt says. “This was a story I could relate to--not black or white. It’s about four best friends and the forces that pull them apart.”

In light of the noisy opening of John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood”--whose first weekend was marred by gang-related violence at theaters around the country--will “Juice” be a difficult sale?

Of course not, says Dickerson. “I think the bottom line in Hollywood always counts. I think what distributors are going to look at is the dollars ‘Boyz N the Hood’ is making and see that ‘Juice’ has the same potential.

“I saw ‘Boyz N the Hood’ last night and it’s not a violent film at all. . . . It’s a very life-affirming film. ‘GoodFellas’ (about life in the Mob) is far and away a much, much more violent film.”

Dickerson also knows that if black filmmakers want to rise above what Frankfurt called “flavor-of-the-month” status they will have to move beyond violence-tinged urban black stories.

“Not everyone will make it,” Dickerson says of the current Black Pack, “but those who do, I hope, will be regular contributors to filmmaking. . . . I hope they will be able to do what our black writers have done, work in different genres, tell different kinds of stories, add a universality.” As for himself, after photographing Spike Lee’s movie about Malcolm X this fall, Dickerson plans to develop and direct a science fiction film he and Gerard Brown have written.

Dickerson based his story on a series of interviews he conducted nearly a decade ago with some young men from Harlem, not any incident from his own life in the projects across the Hudson. Dickerson grew up in Newark; he loved movies as a kid but later aspired to be an architect. If not for a downturn in the building industry, he might have stayed with architecture--unable to get work as a draftsman during his student days at Howard University, he took up photography for the school newspaper. “Juice” co-author Brown, a friend from Howard, says Dickerson’s talent with a camera was apparent from the start: “He was always messing around with the camera, taking pictures of his girlfriend or me or his other friends, and you could see then he had a great eye.”

After graduating, Dickerson’s hobby landed him a strange job--photographing operations and medical procedures at Howard’s medical school. But it allowed him to stay in Washington, which, he remembers, “had a nice bunch of theaters that showed classical films, old films, little-known films, and I saw a lot of movies. And I think it was then that I started thinking a lot more seriously about film. I saw that’s the way I’d really love to spend the rest of my life--making movies.”

Brown remembers it was an amputation Dickerson shot that finally drove the photographer off to film school at New York University. That’s when Dickerson met Lee.

Lee would become an influence, but it was director John Sayles who gave Dickerson his first feature job, in 1983, photographing “The Brother From Another Planet.” Next he shot the first season of TV’s “Tales From the Darkside,” then moved on to Michael Schultz’s feature “Krush Groove.” And then, pal Lee called.

“As soon as ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ came up, he called me,” Dickerson says of Lee’s first feature, a small film that hit big critically and made Lee an up-and-comer in the film world. “That went a lot of places--that went places we never expected,” Dickerson says. “It worked out pretty good. Spike and I are just continuing basically the relationship we had in film school, because I shot most of Spike’s student films. ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ made ‘School Daze’ possible. After that came ‘Do the Right Thing’ (for which Dickerson won the New York Film Critics Award for cinematography).”

At the moment, Dickerson’s camera work can be seen in Lee’s “Jungle Fever,” and next month in John McNaughton’s film of monologuist Eric Bogosian’s “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll.” “The film looks great,” says McNaughton, who had added Dickerson’s name to his list of prospective cinematographers at Martin Scorsese’s suggestion. “And I was very impressed with ‘Do the Right Thing.’ It just had a great look.”

Dickerson now appreciates the distinctions between cinematographer and director, and when asked if he’s comfortable being out from behind the camera, there is a trace of hesitation as he answers, “Yeeeeaaaah, I think I am.” Then, after an instant’s reflection, he adds more surely, “I am.”

“Cinematography is a craft that sometimes rises to the level of art, depending on the subject matter and what you’re able to do with it,” Dickerson says. “As a cinematographer I’m able to paint. It allows me to try to express the emotions of a story, through color and camera angles and lighting, light and shade. Being the director, I’m not as concerned with that as much as I am with telling the story with the actors.” He chose his friend and former gaffer, Larry Banks, to shoot “Juice” for him, and says he resisted any urge to offer the first-time cinematographer any hands-on supervision.

“I think every film should have its own look, and as a director I can set it in the right course,” he says, “and then I have to step back and allow my cinematographer room to express himself.”