THE PATH

Saturday, Sept. 16, 1995, Ladera Park, Baldwin Hills, 9 a.m. -- The first day of rehearsals. Five tall, muscular black men, ranging in age from their middle 20s to early 30s, stand around on an asphalt court in torn T-shirts, gym shorts and high-top sneakers, shooting baskets. * “Larry Bird--that fool was overrated. Man, I hated all the Celtics.” * “Hell, yeah. Especially that punk-ass Danny Ainge. I was glad when Ralph Sampson kicked his ass.” * “That wasn’t Ainge. That was the other no-game fool.” * Rubber thunks on the asphalt, and the metallic reverberations of the backboard punctuate the conversation. The court is nestled among oak trees that scatter dry leaves across its faded white boundary lines. For more than 20 years, black men have gathered here on weekends to play ball and argue passionately over a wide range of topics, from the racial implications of the O.J. Simpson trial to speculations about the sexual talents of Tamara Dobson to who would win in a no-blows-barred battle between Bruce Lee and Mike Tyson.

But these five are not court regulars. They are a group of actors rehearsing a scene for a 12-minute USC student film, “Blacktop Lingo,” by a 22-year-old director, Rick Famuyiwa. All five appear regularly in episodic television and on stage, but they have signed SAG waivers, agreeing to forgo any salary for a chance to portray characters who are not pimps or gangbangers.

Famuyiwa stands on the sidelines, observing the action with his eight-person crew, all of them undergraduate students in the USC Cinema-Television School’s most advanced production course, known as “480.” Directing a 480 is the pinnacle achievement that all USC cinema students aspire to. These much-coveted, 12-minute movies serve as the students’ calling cards when they leave the university to seek work in Hollywood. Famuyiwa--6 feet, 4 inches tall, with broad and powerful shoulders--wears a black baseball cap turned backward, a red USC T-shirt and black sweat pants. He played for the USC basketball team before enrolling in the cinema school in his junior year; he grew up playing on courts like this one in and around Inglewood. Now he wants to capture this arena of black life on film.

In most Hollywood movies, streetball is depicted as a form of urban blight; the players are gangbangers and jive artists and the courts venues for drug dealing and random violence. But streetball offers a much richer social mix. “It’s amazing, the different types of people who go there to play,” says Famuyiwa. “When I first started, I’d see all these guys dressed all beat-up and I’d think: These are guys who just play and don’t have any real goals in life. But then I talked to them and found out some were doctors, some lawyers, others blue-collar workers and some gangbangers. All of these people who wouldn’t normally interact with each other coming together to play ball. There are very few places like that left in black communities. That’s what I’m trying to capture with this movie.”

“Blacktop Lingo” has no plot. Famuyiwa wants the movie to unfold like a jazz riff: a loose series of vignettes about the characters who congregate around a court in Inglewood’s Rogers Park on a Saturday afternoon. (The more scenic Ladera Park fills in as the location.) Interwoven with the vignettes are balletic action sequences of the games--fast breaks, fake-outs, layups and dunk shots--in which the players strive to transcend the laws of physics and the stresses of their everyday lives.

Rick’s parents, Idowu and Florence Famuyiwa, immigrated to the United States from Nigeria in 1970, then separated when he was 4 years old. Rick and his younger brother, Kevin, moved frequently--from Northern California to North Carolina to Los Angeles--as Florence pursued degrees in biology and medical technology and then secured a job as a laboratory technologist. She found life in the United States to be different than in Nigeria: there were great economic opportunities, but racism pervaded all levels of society. Black people had to work much harder to get ahead and to keep prejudice, both subtle and blatant, from warping their self-esteem.

When the family moved to Northern California so that Florence could obtain a degree in biology from Cal State Hayward, Rick enrolled in the third grade at Castlemont Elementary School. “I was one of four black students in an all-white school,” he says. “I was really happy because I got into Miss Wilcox’s class. Everybody wanted to be in her class; she was one of the most popular teachers in the school.” When it came time to separate the students into reading groups--advanced, average and remedial--Wilcox put Rick into the slow group.

When he got home that afternoon, his mother asked: “How was your day?”

“Cool,” he answered, handing her his new reader.

When Florence saw the label across the cover--”for slow readers”--she blew. “Rick had been reading since preschool,” she says. “There’s no way he could be remedial.” She grabbed her son’s hand, marched him out to the car, drove back to the school and burst into the principal’s office. “What is the meaning of this? Why is my son in the slow-reading group?”

“I don’t know,” the principal stammered. “Let’s bring in the teacher.”

The beloved Miss Wilcox materialized. “Rick could not perform at the same level as the other kids,” she explained.

“Have you actually seen him read?”

“Well,” Wilcox equivocated, “not exactly.”

“Then how do you know?”

By this time the advanced-reading teacher had appeared. “All right, let’s settle this.” She brought out a set of reading books and handed Rick a book for average readers. “Read this paragraph.” Rick read it. She handed him a book for advanced readers. “Read that paragraph.” He read it.

“By the time we got done,” Rick chuckles, “I was all the way up to a fifth-grade book. If my mom hadn’t gone to bat for me then, and many, many other times, who knows where I would be today--probably in some junior college taking bull- - - - classes, or hanging out, going nowhere.”

In 1986, Florence moved her boys into a two-bedroom apartment in Inglewood. She sent Rick to St. Bernard, a Catholic high school in Playa del Rey. The tuition was more than $5,000 a year, and Florence lived from paycheck to paycheck. Basketball had been Famuyiwa’s great passion since junior high school. Every Saturday morning he hit the neighborhood courts. The game came easily to him. He was quick, strong and tall for his age, standing over 6 feet, 2 inches by the time he was 14. He played small forward on the St. Bernard varsity team, but the rough-and-tumble pickup games in the city parks were what he came to relish. The men he played with and against were often 10 to 20 years older, but he had no difficulty keeping up with them. “Don’t let Rick fool you,” says Simba Sims, a friend from his junior high school days. “He can dunk like Michael Jordan if he wants to--that’s who he based his game on. He’s a great player.”

*

Saturday, Sept. 23, 1995, Ladera Park, Baldwin Hills, 9 a.m. -- The first day of shooting. Producer Kent Masters-King and assistant director Leah Kihara position a silver reflector, big as a picture window, to fill in some shadows. Cinematographers John Bradley and Will Znidaric assemble the 16mm Atton camera, brushing and blowing each of the parts before attaching them, twisting the 9mm lens onto its mount, taping the seams of the film magazine. At a picnic table where the first dialogue scene will take place, the five actors pull on the torn T-shirts and gym shorts that make up their costumes.

Down at the other end of the court, an actual game is in progress among the locals. The ball flies from player to player amid plenty of wisecracks, back-slapping and clowning. When one player calls a foul, a cacophony of protest erupts.

Back at the other end, one of the actors, Lorenzo Newton, saunters up to Famuyiwa, who is shooting baskets and thinking about the upcoming scene. Newton nods toward the hollering coming from the real game. “That the kind of energy you want?”

Famuyiwa pulls at the loose waist of his baggy shorts, glances downcourt and smiles: “Yeah.”

Newton nods and gazes.

“HE ELBOWED ME, MAN! HE ELBOWED ME!” the fouled one protests.

“I DIDN’T HIT YOU. YOU HIT THE POLE!”

“LIKE HELL I DID. HIT YOUR ELBOW, IS WHAT I HIT!”

The argument continues for a good five minutes, with the other players gathered around the two debaters, shouting their own opinions. Then, suddenly, with no discernible judgment rendered, the game resumes.

Famuyiwa positions the actors around the picnic table according to a storyboard that he’s drawn. In the scene, Drac, a drug dealer, played by Mark Wheatle, tells the others a tall tale about a legendary streetball player named Ray Lew, who could dunk baskets with one hand while mooning a crowd of onlookers with the other. On the courts of Inglewood, Famuyiwa heard hundreds of such stories.

After a general discussion about the scene, Famuyiwa asks the actors to run through the lines. The camera sits to one side, not even positioned yet; the rest of the crew watches. Famuyiwa squats on the asphalt, one hand over his mouth, as the actors rattle off the dialogue. The actors are good. The lines roll smoothly off their tongues. But they sound like lines. The actors look like actors doing a scene--certainly nothing like the human beings downcourt.

“OK,” Famuyiwa sighs, walking toward the picnic table and sitting down among the actors. They stare at him expectantly. “Maybe more energy,” he says at last. “You got to move it along more. I’m looking for more energy. It’s too mellow.”

They try again, and again Famuyiwa squats and watches. “How was that one?” asks James Lesure, who plays Mario, an ardent Afrocentrist. Famuyiwa takes his baseball cap off and curves the brim in his big hands. He doesn’t answer. “‘How was that one?” Lesure persists. “What’s wrong? What’s missing?”

“He doesn’t look happy, folks,” Newton says with a tense smile.

Famuyiwa puts the cap on backward, balls his fist and brings it to his mouth and thinks: “Maybe we need more of a reaction to the story Drac’s telling.”

Lesure performs a wide-eyed Rochester double-take. “WHAT DAT?”

Famuyiwa laughs. The tension breaks. “Not over the top, but more excitement.”

“More excitement, the man wants more excitement, a bigger reaction.” Now they are all doing Amos ‘n’ Andy reactions at one another. Suddenly, everything begins to loosen up. They run through the scene again and again. Little by little, the wisecracks and clowning seep into the scene itself. Instead of clamping down and forcing the actors to adhere strictly to the dialogue, Famuyiwa tells them: “F- - - the lines, I like this a lot better. You don’t have to be married to this just because I wrote it; just follow the skeleton of the scene. There are certain lines you have to hit, like ‘Why do you always say ‘nigga’? Hit those lines and throw anything else you want into the dead spots.

“I got you. I got you.” Lesure nods.

They try another rehearsal. Famuyiwa snaps his fingers as they run the lines. “Keep it moving. Wherever there’s a dead space, fill it in with something. Remember there’s a game going on out here on the court; react to it.”

The scene is alive, bristling with dozens of interactions, muttered responses and flickers of expression. Members of the crew, who have watched it performed a dozen times now, laugh harder than they did the first time. Famuyiwa takes his cap off and curves the brim. “Yo, let’s film it.”

*

Tuesday, Sept. 26, 1995, Room 108 of the George Lucas Building, USC, 9 a.m. -- Thirty-odd students and half-a-dozen faculty members have gathered to screen the first set of dailies from the four 480 productions. Famuyiwa and his crew screened their footage last night and made a discovery that horrified them: Six shots were bisected by long, blue negative scratches, rendering the footage unusable. A piece of debris must have been in the camera gate and raked the emulsion, despite all of the blowing and brushing by Bradley and Znidaric.

Each 480 production is allotted exactly 3,000 feet of raw film stock--not a foot more. A few more fiascoes like this and Famuyiwa might not have enough footage to finish his movie. His two cinematographers straggle in late, both of them looking as if they’ve been punched in the stomach. They sit down beside Famuyiwa, who broods with a clenched fist held to his mouth.

The dailies from the other productions are screened first. There are problems galore: scenery-chomping performances, bad lighting, awkward camera angles and staging. Finally comes the footage from “Blacktop Lingo.” The first two-thirds of it--all different angles of the same scene--is flawless, and the audience responds with enthusiastic laughter. When the negative scratches appear, the hall fills with a collective gasp.

The lights come up, and Famuyiwa and his crew walk to the front of the auditorium for their critique. “What were you going for?” asks the directing teacher, Tom Abrams.

“I was going for blue lines through the middle of the frame,” Famuyiwa says with a weak laugh.

“Were you happy with what you accomplished?”

Famuyiwa shrugs. “I was very happy until 10 o’clock last night when I saw the dailies.’

But the consensus of both the faculty and students is that he has more than enough coverage of the scene from other angles. He can do without the scratched footage; the scene will cut together and still work. In fact, it’s a great scene.

Famuyiwa enrolled at USC because his mother worked for the university. “It’s an employee benefit,” he says. “You can put your kids through college at a discount. If it wasn’t for that, I never would have been at SC.” He entered in the fall of 1991 as a political science major. “I didn’t even know they had a cinema department. I was going to become a lawyer.”

But then he saw “JFK.” “I didn’t know what the film was going to be about. I thought it was going to be about the life of Kennedy. Afterward, I thought: Wow! Whether you agree with what Oliver Stone was saying or not, for three hours he told a story, whether it’s true or not, that grabbed ahold of you and didn’t let go. And there was the controversy that surrounded it--you had Congress and the president and everyone talking about this film, this one film. That one film could elicit that kind of reaction was fascinating to me That’s when I said to myself: This is what I want to do.”

He asked around and discovered that USC not only had a cinema school but one of the best in the country. He applied twice and was turned down, but he was finally accepted in the second semester of his junior year, based on an essay he wrote about his desire to make films about African American culture. He soon found a mentor in Todd Boyd, a professor in the Critical Studies Department. Famuyiwa took one of his classes, “History of American Film After World War II.” Soon he was stopping by Boyd’s office a couple of times each week.

“We had a lot of similar interests,” Boyd says. “Basketball, jazz, politics, life . . . everything. He was almost a carbon copy of my younger self. He took a class from me every semester he was in the film program. I literally watched him go through the whole program. I guess ultimately what I tried to teach Rick, what I try to teach anybody, is that you don’t have to compromise yourself in order to be successful. Some people want to be kiss-asses and figure if they do everything people tell them, they’ll succeed. I think that’s bull. You don’t have to change who you are to get over. There’s a value to what you have to say and how you say it; just be competent when you present it.”

One day in class, Boyd screened a film by Warrington Hudlin called “Streetcorner Stories.” Hudlin was one of a small group of black filmmakers who managed to break into Hollywood in the 1980s. (He later produced “House Party” and “Boomerang,” both directed by his brother, Reginald Hudlin.) “ ‘Streetcorner Stories,’ ” Boyd says, “is a cinema verite piece about these maintenance workers who work at Yale, and this coffee shop that they stop at before they go to work every day. The film is basically about them talking. But it’s an amazing film, because it captures the place and the characters so truthfully.” All at once, Famuyiwa knew what kind of film he wanted to make as his final project.

*

Oct. 7, 1995, Ladera Park, Baldwin Hills, 11:10 a.m. -- The third and final weekend of principal photography. Chad Wilson, the Steadicam operator, straps himself into his rig, a heavy harness with a hinged metal arm attached to a camera, a series of weights and counterweights and a tiny video monitor.

Famuyiwa has already re-created the courtside aspect of streetball--the divergent characters who gather to play, watch, argue and spin tall tales. Now he must convey the transcendent experience of the game itself--the feats of physical wonder, the inner euphoria of the players. A formidable challenge, made even more difficult because “Blacktop Lingo” is running low on film and behind schedule. Famuyiwa and his camera crew are hoping the Steadicam will help them catch up. If it doesn’t, many of the slow-motion shots of the basketball games and several elaborate action set pieces will have to be dropped. The Steadicam makes it possible to get inside the game and shoot long complex pieces of action in one fluid movement instead of breaking them up into a series of stationary angles or short, lumbering dolly shots.

Famuyiwa takes full advantage of the Steadicam by mapping out a long full-court shot. The camera will move diagonally through the running and ball-passing players. Coordinating the movements of all the players with the camera is complex and difficult. After several run-throughs, the Steadicam operator’s wet T-shirt clings to his torso.

They run through it a fifth time and then a sixth, the timing of all the elements nearly there now.

“Yo, let’s film it!”

The first shot of the day is in the can. It went flawlessly. But when Al flipped Fish off, did the camera pick it up, or should they stage that closer? “Let’s try it once more.”

With each shot hundreds, even thousands, of things can go wrong. The film jams, the boom throws a shadow across an actor, someone forgets a line or fails to hit a mark. Correct one mistake and another crops up in the next take.

They move on through another series of Steadicam shots. While Famuyiwa and Znidaric film a piece of action at one end of the court, Bradley works with another group of actors at the other end, choreographing the next shot, which Famuyiwa will then fine-tune. They operate like a great pickup team, no one issuing orders or exerting authority or even apparently organizing the action.

Famuyiwa, Znidaric and Bradley huddle over the remote video monitor and watch as the Steadicam captures the last complicated fast-break shot. The three look up from the monitor and smile at one another. On a railing above the court, a group of kids who’ve gathered to watch begin to applaud. “Looks great,” Bradley says.

Famuyiwa walks off to line up the next shot. It’s 1 o’clock and they’re back on schedule.

*

Dec. 12, 1995, the USC Cinema-Television School, 10:04 a.m. -- Boyd arrives at his office to find a message on his voice mail. Rick. He’s just been notified that “Blacktop Lingo” has been accepted to the Sundance Film Festival. More than 1,500 short films were submitted; only 29 were chosen. “I just want to let you know,” Famuyiwa’s message says, “none of this would have been possible had it not been for you.”

Dec. 19, 1995, the Norris Theater, USC, 8 p.m. -- The first public screening of this semester’s 480 productions. The plush red seats fill up quickly. Cinema students, faculty, friends of the filmmakers, Famuyiwa’s crew, the actors sauntering in leather jackets, Boyd and Famuyiwa’s mother, beaming from behind a pair of huge tortoise-shell glasses, a Santa Claus hat perched jauntily on her head. A few people from the industry also have come--junior agents, low-level development executives for production companies.

Famuyiwa sits half-a-dozen rows back from the screen, his girlfriend, Glenita Mosley, at his side. As the lights dim, he emits a small, giddy laugh. The audience begins laughing at the very first scene and laughs longer and harder as the movie goes on. When the lights come up 12 minutes later, applause thunders through the hall.

Afterward, as the audience mills about, a tall, sandy-haired man in a gray sport jacket approaches Famuyiwa. His name is Greg Fields. He’s with an agency in town: Broder, Kurland, Webb and Uffner. They represent writers and directors. Always on the lookout for fresh talent, he says. Then come the superlatives. “Really, honestly, a wonderful piece of remarkable work. When my associates get back in town, I’d like to set up a screening; you’ll come in and meet them. We’ll sit down and talk.”

“OK, great!” Famuyiwa nods emphatically.

*

Jan. 25, 1996, a restaurant, Park City, Utah, 2:30 p.m. -- Famuyiwa stands in a crowd of filmmakers and press, sipping a navy-blue concoction that’s half vodka, chatting with Boyd. Famuyiwa’s film has screened three times at the festival. Afterward, he was approached by a programmer for the Aspen Film Festival, who wants to show his movie there, and an executive with Hollywood Pictures, who wants to set up a screening of “Blacktop Lingo” for the rest of the production staff when Famuyiwa returns to Los Angeles.

Now, with all the screenings behind him, Famuyiwa finally feels he has a moment to stand back, sip his blue vodka and savor it all. Someone taps him on the shoulder. He turns to find himself facing a man in a yellow jacket, holding a cellular phone.

“Excuse me, are you Rick Famuyiwa?”

“Yes.”

“Robert Redford’s in the next room. He’d like to meet you.” Famuyiwa’s eyes surge against the rims of their sockets. “Oh, OK,” he says, following the man’s retreating yellow coattail.

“I’ve got to see this!” Boyd exclaims.

Boyd plunges after Famuyiwa into a room packed with reporters, flashing cameras and high-intensity lights. In the center of it stands Redford, his bushy hair faded like sun-bleached fabric, handsome features eroded, but still Robert Redford. He has asked, it turns out, to meet all of the filmmakers at the party, not Famuyiwa specifically. It’s a photo opportunity for the media, and Famuyiwa must stand in line while director after director claim their two minutes of intimacy with the star. Only one person away from making contact, Famuyiwa sips at his blue drink again and again. At last, the director in front of him pivots away, and Famuyiwa finds himself face to face with Redford.

“What’s your film about?”

“Streetball, playing basketball in Rogers Park.”

“No kidding!” Redford breaks into a broad grin. “I used to play ball there when I was a kid.” Imagine that.

A few more minutes, then it’s over. Soon afterward, Redford departs, followed by a dozen reporters as he makes his way to the next party.

May 10, 1996, Shrine Auditorium, 2 p.m. -- With his mother looking on, Famuyiwa graduates from the USC Cinema-Television School. More than 100 graduates receive their degrees and listen to an address from Brian Grazer, co-chairman of Imagine Films. For a graduation present, Boyd presents Famuyiwa with a Cuban cigar. Famuyiwa fingers its gleaming aluminum tube, smiles and says: “I’ll smoke it the day we sell a screenplay.”

*

May 24, 1996, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Figueroa Street, across from USC, 9 a.m. -- Boyd threads his way through the pastel-dappled interior of a generic coffee shop on the hotel’s ground floor. He orders a cup of coffee, empties a packet of Equal into it and waits for Famuyiwa to arrive. Looking out the broad windows at the cars whooshing past on Figueroa, he sighs wearily. “Sundance feels like a million years ago.”

When Famuyiwa returned from the festival in late January, his phone rang off the hook. “Rick was calling me two or three times a day,” Boyd says, “to tell me that this agent or that producer called. They had seen or heard about his film, and they all wanted to meet with him. It was hectic for a while.”

“I had a lot of friends who said to me, ‘We should write a screenplay together,’ ” Famuyiwa says when he arrives a few minutes later. But he chose instead to collaborate with his former professor. It was a natural transition. Boyd had been intimately involved with the making of “Blacktop” and Famuyiwa’s other student films. “There was never really a moment where we looked at each other and said, ‘OK, we’re going to be writing partners,’ ” Famuyiwa says. “We just started kicking around ideas, and then we said, ‘Well, maybe we should sit down and actually write this.’ ”

The two talked with agents at CAA and ICM but finally signed with Greg Fields, the agent who attended the first screening of “Blacktop” at USC. Fields’ agency handles a number of top television writers (for such shows as “Frasier” and “The X-Files”) and a few prominent screenwriters (John Lee Hancock, author of “A Perfect World,” and Randi Singer, who co-wrote “Mrs. Doubtfire”).

In late February, Fields flooded Hollywood with videotape copies of “Blacktop Lingo.” The calls from independent production companies and studios began to come in; more than a dozen development executives had seen “Blacktop,” loved it and wanted to meet the young man who made it. Has he written a screenplay? Does he have a project that might be right for us? If he’s got product, we’d love to see it.

Through most of March, Famuyiwa and Boyd labored to produce that sought-after screenplay; the two met weekly at the coffee shop and communicated daily by telephone and e-mail. Together, they laid out a detailed plot outline for “March Madness,” a story about a college basketball team and a point-shaving scandal; then Famuyiwa wrote a first draft, which he and Boyd refined together. In late March, they turned in a final draft to Fields, who submitted it to 20 studios and production companies, including Caravan Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Witt/Thomas Productions, Outlaw Pictures and Universal.

Every company passed.

“We got a lot of positive feedback, and a lot of people wanted to meet with us, but nobody wanted to buy the script,” Boyd says. “They told us that serious sports films don’t do well at the box office and kept pointing to ‘Blue Chips’ as proof, as if that one movie defines how all sports movies will perform.”

“There wasn’t anything new or unique about ‘March Madness,” says one development executive who turned down the script. “The dialogue and characters were good, but it was about point-shaving, and it seemed similar to several other basketball films that have already been done. There was nothing in it that made you sit up and say: Yes, this is something worth putting money into. If they had had a big star attached to it, like Shaquille O’Neal, it might have made a difference.”

The roller coaster that had hurtled Famuyiwa toward the sky now plummeted him to earth again. “Rick did all the things a young film school graduate is supposed to,” says another development executive. “He made a great short film, he got accepted to Sundance, generated some heat, signed with a good agent and wrote a screenplay. But the screenplay didn’t sell, and now he finds himself in a much more difficult position. He made a short film about basketball, then he wrote a feature script about basketball, and he is a former basketball player. So some people are beginning to wonder: Is this all this guy can write about, basketball? His next script will have to be about something totally different to demonstrate he has a broader range and can deal with a wide variety of subjects.”

Famuyiwa and Boyd now had the option of “taking meetings” and pitching story ideas to producers who liked their work. Instead of laboring for months on a screenplay that executives might dismiss as “uncommercial,” they could go in and pitch a story in just 10 minutes and possibly score a huge advance. Their favorite films are hard-edged--”The Godfather,” “Raging Bull,” “Salvador”--and at first they tried to sell gritty stories featuring black characters. But development executives were unenthusiastic. “They just weren’t interested in dramas that raised racial issues,” Famuyiwa says. “We didn’t pitch anything militant, like ‘We’re angry black men and we’re coming to get you.’ They were simply stories about facets of black life that you never see in mainstream Hollywood movies.”

Instead, the executives suggested that Famuyiwa and Boyd come up with a comedy--one of those low-budget hip-hop gag-fests, packed with plenty of vulgarity and zany slapstick, something like “House Party,” “Phat Beach” or “Booty Call” that could be made for a couple of million and reap a healthy profit margin from black audiences.

So Famuyiwa and Boyd came up with a pitch for a high-concept movie, “Willie Popcorn,” about a modern-day Don Quixote obsessed with the blaxploitation stars of the 1970s. “It was really ridiculous,” Famuyiwa admits. “We knew it at the time, but we thought: Hey, this is what they want, so we’ll give it to them.”

Fields set up a meeting with the “hottest producer on the lot” of a major studio. He had recently bought a script by a black writer--enough, by Hollywood standards, to establish him as black-friendly. It was a degrading encounter. When the pair finished their pitch, an uncomfortable silence enveloped the room. The producer frowned, deep in thought, then shook his head. “No,” he said, “No, totally wrong. You see, you need to understand something: The black audience is getting more sophisticated by the day. They don’t want to see sports movies anymore, they don’t want to see gangbanging, they don’t want to see action flicks.”

Famuyiwa felt his blood coming to a slow boil. “This guy had bought a screenplay by a black writer, and suddenly he’s an expert on the social evolution of African Americans,” Famuyiwa says. “What was he implying, that up until a few years ago black audiences were illiterate? That thanks to people like him, they’re becoming more sophisticated? He talked as if he were upgrading the consciousness of African Americans single-handedly.”

Famuyiwa was even more disgusted with himself. After the meeting, he said to Boyd: “Enough. I don’t want to pitch any more high-concept stories. Maybe we have to write a comedy to get our foot in the door, OK, but let’s at least write something we really believe in, something with a little substance and truth.”

Boyd agreed. The two would come up with some new ideas, then settle on one and write a script imbued with their own sensibilities, instead of those of development executives.

*

Aug. 13, 1996, USC’s Troyland apartments, noon. -- Famuyiwa types away at the keyboard of his computer, pages of a story outline strewn all about his desk, the door to his ground-level apartment open for relief from the 100-degree-plus heat. Outdoors, as happens every day in this neighborhood, sirens wail and helicopters chop angrily at the sky. On the kitchen counter, the Cuban cigar still sits in its aluminum tube.

Famuyiwa now has a full-time job selling shoes at Niketown in Beverly Hills; his basketball experience helped him land it. “It’s an interesting company to work for,” he says. “The people are cool. Obviously it’s not something I would ideally want to be doing, but there are worse things.”

He and Boyd are polishing the screenplay. It’s called “High Stakes.” The story focuses on a black man in his mid-20s, a college graduate with a degree in architecture, who, unable to find work in his chosen profession, takes a job selling shoes at Macy’s. His luck goes from bad to worse when he loses a lottery ticket worth millions and embarks on an epic search for it through the streets and back alleys of Los Angeles. “It’s a comedy, but I identify with the characters and the story, and I think a lot of other people will, too.”

After he finishes this draft, Famuyiwa will turn it over to Boyd. A couple of weeks or more of rewrites will follow before they give it to Fields, who will, most likely, add notes of his own, which will mean yet more rewriting. It does, indeed, seem as if Sundance occurred a million years ago.

“It’s very, very tough to break into this business,” Fields says. “You really have to have that long-term view of things. It’s unfortunate that there’s so much build-up around the people who come out of film school and sell their first script for a million dollars. You never see an article in the trades that says, ‘Rick Famuyiwa tried to sell a script but couldn’t, and he’s really struggling, but he’s really talented.’ You never see that. The expectations are a little out of kilter for what’s really possible for young filmmakers. But if you hang in there and ultimately write something that everybody wants, the returns can be enormous. Rick’s got the talent to go all the way, but a lot of it’s timing and luck, writing the right script at the right time.”

*

March 2, 1997, an apartment, Culver City, 8:30 p.m.

Famuyiwa is still working at the Nike store five days a week, but with his sixth draft of “High Stakes,” he has finally produced a version that Boyd and Fields approve of. Fields is attempting to attach a star to the project; then he will submit it to about a dozen studios and independent production companies. A week after it’s submitted, Famuyiwa will know whether the last seven months have paid off.

Meanwhile, he’s already started another screenplay. This time, though, he’s not molding it to mainstream Hollywood. “The Wood” will be a personal film about his teenage experiences in Inglewood. He plans to submit the screenplay to the Sundance Institute’s director’s lab, which helps independent filmmakers develop and line up financing.

“When I wrote ‘High Stakes,’ I followed the classical format. I wrote an outline first, then a first draft, then got feedback and rewrote and rewrote it. I’d never done that before. But this script is just flowing out of me like ‘Blacktop’ did. I’m not really thinking about structure, and all of the scenes are falling into place.

“I am proud of ‘High Stakes,’ but writing it felt more like a 9-to-5 job, whereas with this script, it’s more like playing ball with your buddies. There’s no real sense of time. You’re just out there having fun. Maybe I’m more suited to making small independent films. I feel like I’m getting back to the subject matter that made me want to become a filmmaker in the first place.”