Sinning in the South, writer found salvation

THE BALTIMORE SUN

Craig Brewer, now 35, made a splash by writing and directing Hustle & Flow, in which he retold the old Hollywood story of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly putting on a musical in some farmer's yard. His version changed the idiom to rap and placed the tale in the mean streets of his ancestral home and current base, Memphis, Tenn.

The 2005 film was a do-rags-to-riches fable peopled with pimps and hookers and blessed with a killer lead character called Djay, who feels he's spinning his wheels running a stable of prostitutes. Djay experiences an epiphany when he watches a high-school buddy record gospel. By casting Terrence Howard as Djay, pimp-turned-rap artist, the moviemaker found a star with the vibrancy and expansiveness to make that revelation hit home.

Hustle & Flow won skeptics over with the genius of Howard's performance and the glittering ore in the writing, like Djay's opening riff that dogs "don't know about no birthdays, or Christmas, or that one day God gonna come callin'. So you know, people like you and me, we always guessin' -- you know -- what if?"

Brewer has answered his own "what-if?" with Black Snake Moan, a startling and elating musical movie that opened this weekend. He's the genuine article: a born moviemaker who takes his experience in bars, music clubs and life and transmutes it into cathartic art and entertainment. Black Snake Moan tells the story of a black man named Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), a former bluesman turned farmer on the rebound from a marriage gone sour. He saves the soul of an abused, alone and sexually volatile white girl, Rae (Christina Ricci), when he literally anchors her in life. He adopts an unlikely solution to her uncontrollable urges: He takes a long ugly chain and uses it to fix her to a radiator.

In this movie, Brewer is both healer and provocateur. He explores audiences' hypocrisies and confusions about Ricci's erotic presence in an era of girls going wild. And he juggles sticks of social-political dynamite.

Over the phone from a promotional stop in Washington, he acknowledges that his plot "so totally plays into the Southern iconography" of the sexually excited or frustrated farmer's daughter. "You can even look at To Kill a Mockingbird: poor Tom Robinson was just going to bust up an old chifforobe for a nickel and this white girl attacks him and misery befalls him." But Brewer throws all this obvious historical fear in the air because he ultimately wants us to be free of it.

"I wrote Black Snake Moan almost immediately after Hustle & Flow but before I made Hustle & Flow," he says. In the effort to get Hustle & Flow on-screen, "I was being flown back and forth between L.A. and Memphis over and over again."

It was precisely the sort of peripatetic existence Brewer had tried to escape when he moved to Memphis. And it fed his imaginative vision of a woman being fastened with metal links to a real home.

"My dad was part of a shipping organization," he says. "I was born in Virginia on an Army base and we moved to California and Chicago, but every single family member was and is in Tennessee. We were the satellite. My dad always said, 'Memphis looked best in my rear-view mirror.' I gave that line to Ludacris in Hustle & Flow. But when we grew older, and I lost both my grandfathers, I found I wanted to move back home."

A chubby kid who wasn't good at sports, Brewer turned to theater early. He also steeped himself in movies of all kinds thanks to the home-video revolution of the early '80s. After high school, he studied drama at the American Conservatory Theater. Susan Stauter, the Conservatory's director, taught him playwriting. She told him that in his writing, "I was running away from the South: I was always doing these epics, things that were in the contemporary world but obviously in cities, almost like Friends episodes. I was writing about yuppies, and it wasn't until I moved back home and started sinning with everybody else [that] I found salvation."

'Out-of-control life'

Potholes dotted his road to salvation. Trying to launch Hustle & Flow, both Brewer and his producer, Stephanie Allain, went through hard times. Allain had risen through the story department at Columbia Pictures and been head of Jim Henson Pictures when she decided to move into independent production. So she wouldn't be forced to take another job, she sold her own house -- and also paid Brewer's rent.

He and his wife had just had their first child. "We had gone through a crazy time when I was working at a bookstore and writing in bars, she was working as a stripper in one strip club." A lot of Hustle & Flow had come from that, but they were weary of "living an out-of-control life ... we wanted to grow up and be happy."

His wife, who'd also worked as a seamstress in a bridal shop, by then was doing advertising layout for a newspaper put out by Crittenden Publishing in Arkansas. She urged him to stay focused on the movie. But in the middle of his cross-country shuttling, "I started having these intense anxiety attacks on planes."

It wasn't fear of flying. "I think it was because my father died of a heart attack at age 49, and I had a really bad experience on a plane where I thought I was having a heart attack." His wife started having them too. "And the only way to get through them was to hold to each other. If I was away I'd call her on the phone and she'd just talk to me about what our little boy was doing. And I'd get dizzy, my breath would be so intense, my heart would feel as if it would pound right out of my chest."

They named the condition "Black Snake Moan."

It's from "a blues song about this thing that could come up and just get you at any moment. 'There's a black snake in my room, some pretty mama better come up and get this black snake soon.'"

And he began to write a script called Black Snake Moan. Like Ricci's character, "I needed to be tethered back to home. I needed to know there was something there that would never move, and that's what that radiator is."

Risky script

Producer Allain says, on the phone from Los Angeles, "It was a crazy time for us. We had this movie called Hustle & Flow, which we loved and had committed to making. But we were not getting a reaction [from Hollywood] and were beating our heads against the wall. I did sell my house because I didn't want to take another job that would pull me off track."

Allain, who'd been heralded as the African-American executive most likely to become production chief at a major studio, would bring Brewer to L.A. and make the rounds. "For me it was a mid-career crisis. I was jumping shop, leaving the stability of the studio world for the indie world. But I felt so strongly about Hustle & Flow and the message of the movie -- step into your creative shoes and the world can change, your life can change -- I didn't realize how difficult it was for him."

A key problem was that Brewer, a white man, had written a risky script about a black pimp. Studio heads and big-money producers would have been more comfortable, Allain says, if Brewer were black, too. She thought it achingly ironic because, to her, what Brewer represents in his career and in his art is "the freedom to be human."

Although they became close as friends as well as partners, Brewer kept his anxiety attacks private. But at one point, Allain told him, "Please don't call me any more; it breaks my heart to hear your voice." She explains, "We were always on the cusp and nothing ever, ever happened, and that knifepoint unnerved him -- but out of that, great art is born."

Several things bonded Allain to Brewer, with whom she shares what she jokingly calls "a second marriage." (Her real marriage is to songwriter, drummer and record producer Stephen Bray, who recently scored the hit Broadway musical The Color Purple.) She values writer-directors. She made a splash at Columbia Pictures by championing John Singleton's Boyz 'N the Hood, and, she says, "When I met Craig, it was another unique voice." (Singleton became a crucial producing partner, putting up his own money to make Hustle & Flow.)

They also felt a connection coming from two music-soaked cultures: Brewer from Memphis, Allain from New Orleans. She loved that as "a Southern white writer writing often about black experience or black characters," Brewer would "look at characters society sometimes writes off and reveal hearts and minds not that different from you and me."

And she delights in the way Brewer exults in traditional Christian themes of charity and redemption and "decriminalizes them" for youthful, liberal art house audiences suspicious of the Christian right.

Brewer himself says he has no greater thrill than hearing older audiences tell him that in Black Snake Moan he's made "a Christian film." Overriding everything is his juke-joint drive for salvation. "In the end, it just gets down to people helping each other. And I know that's a simplistic idea. But I know I needed some simplicity in my life. Cynicism wasn't getting me anywhere. That's why I still live in Memphis. I love my community. I love my family. I love my friends, and when I lose myself, they're still my radiator. No matter how long I make that chain, I'm still connected to them."

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

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