Meet Darryl Quarles, Hollywood’s New Red-Hot Idea Man

He co-wrote the script for “Big Momma’s House,” the new Martin Lawrence comedy that is making fistfuls of cash for 20th Century Fox, and he’s got projects in the works with Ice Cube and Chris Tucker. But when he called out of the blue last week, Darryl Quarles sounded peeved.

Sure, the screenwriter would admit later, since the moment “Big Momma” opened (taking in $25 million its first weekend) he’d been fielding breathless calls from movie industry people who said they wanted to be “in the Darryl Quarles business.” Sure, he had received more than a case of congratulatory champagne from studio executives and producers.

“But [in press accounts] nobody seems to be mentioning that ‘Big Momma’ was written by a black writer,” he said, complaining that the film’s producers were “sucking up all the credit. No one has said, ‘Hey, you should talk to Darryl Quarles.’ I’m the hottest writer around now and nobody knows anything about me.”

Seemingly, the time had come to meet this 46-year-old writer with a knack for thinking up mainstream ideas that feature black talent. New Line Cinema is on track to make “Stray Dawgs,” a werewolf-in-the-’hood script (starring Ice Cube) that Quarles calls a mix of “Ghostbusters,” “Friday” and “The Lost Boys.” Fox and New Regency have committed to make “Black Knight,” about an average black man who falls into the moat of a medieval theme restaurant and is transported into the past. (Quarles says he was looking to create a black Zorro.)

Warner Bros. has hired Quarles to write “The Bomb,” a black remake of the Bo Derek-Dudley Moore classic “10.” He’s finished a comedy script for Tucker (based on an idea they developed together) called “Guess Who’s President?” about America’s first black chief executive. And he’s got a romantic comedy spec script out to studios: “So This Is Love,” which Quarles calls “ ‘Waiting to Exhale’ for men meets ‘The Big Chill.’ ”

Not bad for the son of a janitor, the fifth of six children who grew up in South-Central Los Angeles and saw Hollywood as being as remote as Oz. But if you think he’s accomplished a lot already (he says he’s also sold six scripts that haven’t been made), just listen to what’s next.

“I’m really looking forward to becoming a brand-name kind of thing. Producing and directing are the next step for me,” he explained over a light lunch at Shutters on the Beach. “I definitely pride myself on making movies that are entertaining for everybody. They may have black talent involved, but they’re not ‘black films.’ But now I’m ready to franchise myself out. It’s all about constantly re-creating yourself.”

Quarles surely has a penchant for doing just that. Initially, he said he was 42. When a records check revealed he was 46, he said, “Yeah, but I don’t want to tell anybody that. You’ve got to stay young in this business.” He also said his brother, Joseph Quarles, was the superintendent of schools in Malibu. Joseph Quarles is, in fact, the assistant superintendent for personnel services.

Officials at Yale Law School have no record of a Darryl J. Quarles graduating in 1984, though Quarles insists that he did so after transferring from West Los Angeles School of Law. And though he claimed that he and Earvin “Magic” Johnson had partnered up to produce his “So This Is Love” script (“Magic said, ‘This has got to be the first film my company makes,’ ” Quarles said. “He’s involved as a producer.”), spokesmen for Johnson said the deal is still merely in the discussion stages.

But Quarles’ talents for exaggeration and fantasy seem to be paying off in Hollywood. Already, he has begun to develop a reputation as a go-to man for black movie stars who want to keep their core audience but also cross over. A former TV writer who worked with Will Smith on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” he has the same management team (The Firm) as Cube, Lawrence and Smith and considers Tucker a friend. While he says he hopes to work with talent of all ethnicities (“I have ideas for Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler, just like everyone else,” he says), he’s found a niche that’s working for him.

“I’m kind of like an extension of who they are. I have--really, it’s kind of a gift--an ability to make that person appear on the page,” said Quarles, who prides himself on tailoring scripts for black actors who are too often pigeonholed. “Usually, it’s: ‘We have a character that’s harder than the wall, a black brother from the ‘hood that takes no bull. We’ll get Ice Cube.’ My thing is to show other dimensions that people can relate to.”

Matt Alvarez, who runs Ice Cube’s production company, Cube Vision, said Quarles is filling a gap that has hindered even the biggest black stars.

“Cube appreciates what Darryl does because he creates films that cross over,” Alvarez said. Asked whether Quarles is at the center of a new black creative network, Alvarez said, “There are very few working black talent in the industry and it’s a very small community. Everybody kind of knows everybody and looks out for everybody. . . . That’s why Darryl has been able to work with so many hugely successful talents. There’s more shared experience.”

Around Hollywood, Quarles--a UCLA graduate (he majored in political science) who says he’s never taken a screenwriting class--is getting known as an idea man.

David Friendly, who produced “Big Momma’s House,” said Quarles (who received story credit and co-writing credit for the film, with Don Rhymer) “has unbelievable ideas. He knows how to recognize a strong concept that will attract a movie star, and that’s a valuable, valuable asset. I keep very close tabs on what Darryl’s doing because his projects become movies.”

When told that Quarles had accused him of stealing the spotlight (at one point claiming that Friendly “really didn’t have anything to do with the entire process” of getting the movie made), Friendly was diplomatic.

“Darryl Quarles came to us with a very good idea. He wrote the first draft of the screenplay and did a fine job,” Friendly said, adding that Rhymer was brought in for a rewrite after Fox bought the script. “The movie was a collaborative effort, as all movies are. But he was the one who came up with the idea.”

How he did so, Quarles says, was pretty simple.

“I was lying in bed and I happened to glance back on ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ Then I thought about my own grandmother, who we all called Big Momma. And I thought, geez, wouldn’t it be funny if you could get some man to dress up as somebody’s grandmother?” he said. “Then I thought, Martin would be great doing that. That’s how the seed of the idea came about.”

Quarles grew up in Compton and South-Central. The closest movie house was the Southside Theater on Imperial and Western, which was miles away from 126th Street and Figueroa, where his family lived. He rode his bike or walked there every weekend, he said, “watching all the ‘Gidget’ movies and ‘Beach Blanket Bingo.’ I loved that stuff.”

Every summer, the family would pack up in a old Chevrolet station wagon and drive to Atlanta to see Big Momma. “My Big Momma was a hell of a woman. She was sweet as could be, but when it came time to let the hammer down, she could do that,” he recalled.

Just how long Quarles practiced law is unclear (he says he worked at a big firm in New York City, but declined to give the name because it ended badly). But he says he moved to Los Angeles and, at the prompting of a friend in 1985, entered a Writers Guild contest for first-time writers.

“My friend said you should enter, but the only thing is, the deadline is tomorrow,” Quarles said, recalling that he went to UCLA’s Theater Arts Library, checked out the screenplay to “Gone With the Wind” to learn the format, and typed an 80-page script overnight. “It was a comedy, ‘Making Ends Meet,’ about five brothers living in South-Central who have to prove they can take care of one mentally unbalanced brother or the state will take him away. I turned it in, typos and all, and got a call later saying I won. It was one of those things--like it was meant to be.”

(The Writers Guild keeps no records of such contests.)

From there, Quarles says he got an internship at Castle Rock Television and then worked on TV series such as “Amen,” “Family Ties,” “Growing Pains” and “Fresh Prince.” He said a “scarcity of jobs for black writers” prompted him to write his first feature: “Soldier Boyz,” a modern-day version of “The Dirty Dozen” that was released by New Line Cinema in 1995.

He sold a script called “Rat Race” to Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer that never went anywhere. But Quarles was undeterred.

“A lot of writers write one script and they’ll kick that dead horse for five years. Write something else!” he said. “You’ve got to have more product. It’s like door-to-door salesmen. If you don’t like the first vacuum, they’ve got more in the trunk. You’ve just got to keep coming at them.”

And that’s the way he plans to approach directing, too--by coming up with ideas so irresistible that studios will agree to take a chance on a first-timer. He said Tucker, Lawrence, Smith and Cube “strongly believe in me. Hopefully, with their ability to go to bat for me and say, ‘Hey, look, we trust him enough to do this picture. Let’s give him a shot’--hopefully that’s the way it’ll work.”