Director Charles Stone III's career trajectory has produced a trio of strikingly dissimilar works: (1) Budweiser's "Whassup?" TV commercials, (2) a feature film about the rise of three 1980s cocaine kingpins in Harlem, and now (3) a look at the flamboyant sub-subculture of college marching band drum corps.

Just shows you what can happen when your mom takes you to fencing and pottery lessons and museums, your dad quotes inspiring literature around the house and you fall in love with classic Warner Bros. animation, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Star Wars.

Stone, 36, still best known for writing, directing and acting in those "Whassup?" commercials, which thrust a slang expression into the heart of mainstream culture in 2000, enjoys his major-league taste of the cinema spotlight with Drumline, a drama of competition and redemption set at fictional Atlanta A&T;, a historically black college. (The film opened Friday.)

Stone's Bud spots, which won a slew of advertising awards, grew out of a two-minute short film called True that he made for $1,000 in a day and a half in 1998 with some old friends from Philadelphia, where he grew up. The film, which he hoped would be his ticket to feature film directing, found its humor in the unspoken bonds within the greeting "Whassup?" -- and the answer: "Just chillin'."

It played well at a short-film festival in Los Angeles, winning Stone an agent and a number of directing offers, including Paid in Full. (That film was released by Miramax's Dimension Films in only a few hundred theaters in October and quickly disappeared.)

Coincidentally, a copy of True fell into the hands of a Chicago ad agency retained by Budweiser, which signed up Stone to translate the short into a series of commercials. After auditioning scores of actors, the agency agreed to let Stone and his pals play the roles.

The spots were not only funny (in one, a patron of a Japanese restaurant orally stretches his pronunciation of the condiment "wasabi" until it is indistinguishable from "Whassup"), but also transcendent: A black catch phrase was demystified to illustrate the way friends of all cultures -- particularly male friends, and even more particularly male sports-buff friends -- are able to communicate in the simplest of expressions.

"It's two guys on the telephone who appear to be talking about nothing but, if you will, holding hands," Stone said.

The little-noticed Paid in Full, a fictional account based on the lives of three actual hustlers, is littered with nuanced moments that distinguish it from other films about the way cocaine tore apart poor communities in the '80s. Talking about the film, Stone is drawn to a scene in which one of the now-wealthy kingpins, Mitch, who is enamored of neighborhood recognition, comes home at night and meticulously folds his clothes and lays his gold jewelry across them before getting into bed, stripped of his trappings.

"That shows the character without saying a word. We need to be able to sit there and just take it in," Stone said.

There are fewer opportunities for intimacies like that in the wide-release Drumline, an energetic story of conflict between a gifted but undisciplined New York-bred freshman drummer and the Atlanta A&T; senior marching band leader determined to mold him. Stone said he was drawn to the script's emphasis on the tradition of marching band halftime shows at black Southern colleges, where the military-style flavor is replaced by a more athletic, can-you-top-this sensibility.

Within that brashness, one subtlety Stone relishes occurs when the freshman, Devon, played by Nick Cannon, is on the phone with his mother, telling her he's made first-string drum line. Their affection and the generation gap between them are illustrated simultaneously. "I just called to tell you that everything is everything," Devon says near the end of the call. The camera shows him listening, then saying: "Oh, come on now, you know what that means: 'It's all good.'"

Stone says he is sifting through scripts but has his heart set on directing a work of his own -- "creating a film from the seed of an idea and developing it into the tree. I haven't been able to do that fully yet, in the sense of really letting the dialogue be as poetic or lyrical as it is in True."

Stone, who is single, lives in a gentrified section of Brooklyn, N.Y. He has no plans to move to Hollywood; he's reluctant to give up the creative moments that come from hanging with friends or riding on subway or commuter trains. He says he is trying to slow the pace of recent years and is contemplating his future. He's sure he'll make a comedy some day. And he's sure he'll make a film "with spaceships and laser beams."

Whatever he does, he pledges, will be "the human journey whether it's the year 4028 or the football field."

Bob Baker writes for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.