One day while I was shooting in the projects, a fire broke out on the 11th Floor of Half’s building. Suddenly, black and white firemen, cops, ambulances and EMS workers, infiltrated this all black neighborhood. They worked for hours, as smoke, flames and water ravaged this woman’s apartment. When the fire was extinguished, and it was determined that no one was hurt, all those middle and working class faces left, leaving the building occupants to clean up the remainder of this domestic tragedy. I remember the sound of this old woman sweeping the water down the steps from floor to floor.
The timing was odd. because just a few days before, Half had told me the story of a gas leak that had happened a few years earlier in a neighboring building, and how furniture and people were flying out of the building and dying. He said it didn’t get a single line in the paper. I was asking the guys about that story as we were sitting outside the building after the fire. They were talking about how crazy it was, when Big Spank, Half’s security, piped up saying the fire that day happened simply because the woman who lived in the apartment was a rug muncher.

Well, of course that sort of stopped me in my tracks. I asked Spank did he actually believe that this woman’s lesbianism had caused an electrical fire? He was adamant that was true. This goofball conversation somehow led to Spank pontificating on women in general. He informed me that 87% of all women were greezies. What’s a greezie? I asked. A greezie is a woman who you don’t really want to touch but you, but will fuck. he replied. Half’s crew is nodding in agreement. My heart dropped. So, you mean the 13% that aren’t greezie’s are probably your mothers, right? Right.

Well, let me be very clear here. Even though I’m a (feminist) filmmaker making a movie, I really liked these guys and wanted them to like me too, and it really hurt my feelings to realize that I was just another greezie. I knew this world was rife with sexism and misogyny, but we were friends. I thought that made a difference. Well, of course it makes a difference. This is an old repetitious story. Sexism, like racism (and most other ism’s) is usually a fear-based issue that is culturally condoned and gets acted out in different ways, but given an opportunity real life often interferes and confuses these misconceptions.

So I kept shooting my guys, and on any given day, from behind the camera, I’d ask Half or one of his boys, What kind of greezie am I? Am I a white greezie? And older greezie? A filmmaker greezie? And every time I asked, they’d laugh, shift about uncomfortably and say, Oh Maggie, you’re not a greezie. Not you. But I know that I am to them. And so what? That’s only a small part of the story. I’m also the woman that blew into their lives and advocated for them, even as they blew into my hearts, and just as this greezie loves them, I believe they love me too.

I’d been shooting Half for a couple of weeks when I first met Blood Sport. We were shooting in a radio station in Crown Heights with DJ Extra Strength, when this guy walked in and my heart jump with confusion and fear. He was in his early twenties, medium brown, wearing a waist length black mink coat, tight black leather pants, with red beads swinging well below his crotch and a black scull cap which highlighted the four inch scar that ran from his eye to just above his jaw line. I asked Spank, Half’s security, who the hell that guy was, and when he responded Blood Sport. I said, Well, if his name is Blood Sport, my name is Chicken Shit. And I meant it. I thought if he had a name like Blood Sport that meant he liked to kill people. Little did I know that in the world of Ebonics and the Hip Hop vernacular, almost every expression has it’s origin in popular culture and in Sport’s case, he’d taken the name from the Claude Van Damme martial arts movie, Bloodsport. That was a huge relief to me, but none-the-less I withheld judgment regarding if he’d ever killed anyone.

I was also puzzled at that first meeting by how a thug could get away with the kind of outfit he was wearing, it was not only expensive-thus stealable, there was also this kind of girlie-man feeling to everything, between the mink coat and the beads. Personally, I found him attractive and scary. And then we talked and I realized he was actually very sweet and crazy flirtatious. Thankfully by this point, I was smart enough to assume he was far more complicated then he felt in those early days. And of course as time passed, I learned a great deal more about him. Sport had been jailed many times, usually for theft, drugs or gang related activities. And the red beads that he wore so proudly were actually a symbol of power.

Sport is an Original Gangster in the Brooklyn Bloods. He’s one of the people who started the Crown Heights Chapter of the Brooklyn Bloods and because Half was affiliated, but not a member, Half had the benefit of protection from a lot of these guys. I’d never know an OG so it was hard to separate Sport from that title. And the Sport I knew, I grew to love. He was the only guy who was publicly madly in love with one woman (not that he was faithful mind you). Sport called them Bonnie and Clyde. He was also the most emotionally vulnerable, at least to me, and that really touched my heart. I constantly saw his soft side, and I trusted him to tell me the best truth he could in any given circumstance. When I asked him about being an OG, he told me that he’d started the chapter not long after his mom was raped, murdered, and then thrown off the roof of a building in his neighborhood. That story was corroborated many times over.

For me it was heartbreaking to hear, but I also knew that it made a kind of perfect sense. Lose your family. Make a family. That’s how most of us create our delusions of safety. I don’t think Sport has ever been safe, particularly because of where he grew up, and like all of his homies, he’d experienced endless tragedies, losses and traumas. And then, as well as now, I believe that fabulous vulnerability that he was so willing to share with me, was an enormous gangsta gift.

Check out a PSA I produced with Rose Viggiano, with Sport as the star.

Read I’m a Greezie

Half is a talented rapper, and the plan was that his first album was going to be the vehicle that took him and his crew out of poverty. They didn’t necessarily all want out of the projects, because this is where they “kept it real” and if you lose the streets, you lose your credibility. But the whole crew for sure wanted to blow up and get rich. At one point in the Stairwell Interview, I asked Half what he was going to do if he got rich. He said that he would be responsible, invest his money so he’s make even more, and then he might go out and buy himself an ocean, and then he laughed. I loved that.

It would never occur to me to buy an ocean, even as a joke, because I’m a middle class white chick so I think more of the middle ground, like owning a house, but Half grew up sharing a spoon with seven other people, and standing in the cheese line for his grandmother trying to pretend like they really weren’t that poor, so buying an ocean makes a lot of sense to me because it is the vastness, or endlessness of a particular kind of wealth that I believe he was dreaming of.

When you go into the pj’s like I did with a rose colored middle class activist perspective, even though you say it ain’t so, you sort of think you know what’s going on, particularly if you have a film crew with you. But just like with Louie and James, I was perpetually surprised by what was going on in Half’s neighborhood and what was happening to me. I really liked Half. I thought he was smart, articulate and attractive and wanted him to like me back. Not in a romantic way, but he was compelling and interesting and just a little bit distant, plus he gave me respect.

Half’s respect came with a lot of waiting. He was on hip hop time and I was on we got five hours to get what we need and the get the hell out of here and get back to my safe little haven time. So in the interim, I got to know his crew, who was often hanging around the corner store, across from his building in Crown Heights. And just like with Half, I started to really like most of them. Even Dooliani, Half’s hype man.

Dooliani always had his face in the camera. He was belligerent. Usually drunk or stoned. Very dark skinned. With gold teeth. At first I sort of thought of him as middle class white America’s worst nightmare. He was so volatile and couldn’t string a sentence together coherently between the constant weed and the alcohol consumption. But something happened over a pretty short period of time, and I could see Dooliani’s vulnerability, his loyalty and his voracious need for attention, and despite his aggression, I gave up trying to get away from him and went with his wildness. And before I knew it, I began to feel enormously fond of him.

And of course Shelby was always with me, watching my back, making me laugh, and carrying a gun in case anyone got out of hand. I had the delusion of safety, even though I knew it wasn’t really true. I can’t tell you when it happened, but at some point along the way, after spending so much time with Half, Doo, Blood Sport, Spank, Unique, Troop and the rest of the guys, I realized that I didn’t just like them, I actually loved them. Individually and collectively. Shelby too. I think it was how open they were with me—a white chick almost 20 years older than some of them. They let me into their soft parts, their hilarious parts and their broken hearts. I could feel the vastness of their hurt, most of them were fatherless and had grown up watching people they loved die, and although it wasn’t my experience, I identified with their pain. And their wonderfulness.

And if I had I the resources, I would have buy them all an ocean.  For real.

Read Gangsta Gift

For me, bringing my white chick feminist self into the projects was really an act of faith in the Universe, in Half and in racism. I assumed that by virtue of my skin color, my gender and the fact that I was a filmmaker, that I was somewhat less likely to be shot at than the guys I was working with. And that assumption had been somewhat confirmed when we were robbed in Brownsville and my white cinematographer survived the 9mm pressed to his temple.

Half had juice in the Albany Housing Projects, so we hoped we’d be safer. Everyone knew him. Most people thought he was special, from what I could tell. It was understood he was a good rapper with a record deal. He had respect. He also lived in an area where there were a lot of Bloods that were watching his back—so they watched mine too. Not that that was enough for me in terms of safety, it truly wasn’t. I took seriously Pikasoe’s statement that it was his responsibility to carry a gun. And mine too.

I didn’t own a gun or even know how to shoot one, but felt I needed someone with me who had one, while we were in this dangerous neighborhood. The first person I brought in with a gun was the cinematographer who shot the Stairwell Interview. After that was completed, which took a couple of days, I ended up getting real security to be with me for the duration of the film. Shelby Oliver. My good friend. He was a licensed bounty hunter, bouncer and freelance security guard, and invariably he had an employee working with him. Sometimes it was E, Trent, Keith or Chief Hall, but every time we went in to follow Half through his daily life, I felt a little bit safer.

That is until the morning Shelby called to say he couldn’t come get me because he was on his way to the hospital to see his closest friend T, who’d been car jacked. I’d been having weird feelings all morning, and my crew was at my house ready to roll into Brooklyn and I got scared. I kept thinking, it didn’t make sense to go to Albany without security, so I rethought my plan, called Shelby back, and me and my crew headed to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, where we smuggled our equipment into the hospital to interview T.

Shelby went into the intensive care unit first to make sure it was ok with T if I interviewed him. We were told he’d been shot five times, and he might not make it. Now I don’t know about anyone else, but if the roles were reversed and a black man wanted to interview me when I was possibly dying, not looking my best and having never met the person, I’d say Hell NO! But for whatever reason, T’d heard a lot about me and wanted to do it. So we creeped in, pulled the camera just barely out of it’s bag and started shooting, while he wheezed his story out through a breathing tube, with the heart monitor alarm intermittently issuing a high pitched beep. I was in terror that our camera or sound package was going to interfere with his life support equipment. Needless to say, it was a short interview, between my fear of killing him and having never seen anyone who’d been shot before, I really wanted out of there.

T’d been followed from Brooklyn to Manhattan by three young black men in their late teens, who he’d never seen before, but apparently wanted his jeep at any cost. The first shot was in his face, when he accidentally spun his car all the way around after he realized he was about to be car jacked. Another shot went through his body and out his arm, and he just kept driving and spinning thinking his teeth had been shot out of his head. Next thing he knew he was on his back looking up and there were cops and EMT’s all over the place. Thank God the kids had followed him to Manhattan, or he might not have survived the shooting.

But he did survive, and felt no animosity for the shooter or his friends. He said he could see the innocence in the boys face right before he shot him the first time, and that he understands where they’re coming from. Probably not having anything from the time they were very young, but he’s sad about young black men killing other black men. Or at least trying to. I’m sad about it too.

Shelby was less forgiving, but said he hadn’t been shot yet, so didn’t know how he would react. As far as I know, T healed up pretty well and is leading a normal life in Brooklyn today.

Read Buy Me an Ocean

We set up my first interview with Half in the stairwell of his building in the Albany Projects, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. This interview became the backbone of the film. While I was interviewing Half, was smoking weed and drinking the entire five hours, his crew was in the hall, doing the same, with the exception of his security that sat above and behind him at all times. At one point, my female PA got smart ass with one of the guys in the hall and I had to remind her that we were in a circumstance where she could get her butt shot off because she had attitude.

The next time she poked her head into the stairwell to tell me something, I could see she was scared. That actually relieved me, because I believed it meant she was keeping her wits about her. And truthfully, I was scared too, because I wanted to know so much, and for me and Half, we were at the real beginning of our working relationship and I had NO IDEA what was going to happen, not only in the interview, at any given moment, or in the process of making the movie. And little did I know that I would grow to love this man.

What follows is a short excerpt from transcripts of the early part of the Stairwell Interview with Half.

Maggie: What was it like for you growing up in the projects?

Half: Growing up in the projects is like trying to find a road, but trying to find the right road, but there’s a million roads. It’s difficult to choose one. You’re around so many people who do so many different things. Some good, some bad. When you’re living in a building it’s a lot different from living in a house, cause when you live in a house you may see your neighbors once in a while. Some people live in houses don’t even know their neighbors, may see them once in a while, “How you doing?”…but in a complex like this, you have maybe 300 people living in this building. And you got ten buildings. So you have mixed ideas, mixed feelings. It’s like you all living in one house.

…You see people everyday. You’re little brother might come home, say the guy on the sixth floor slapped me, so you gotta go knock on the guy’s door. It’s like relationships. Everybody gets to know each other. You’re gonna wanta get to know your neighbor. That just makes you feel more comfortable. And you got all kinds of influences…

You may have somebody on the first floor that goes to Manhattan and snatches chains and pocketbooks. And gets money doing it. And you may have somebody on the second floor dealing drugs. Or you may have somebody on the third floor who wants to go to the library. You have different kinds of people doing different types of things. And then you may be the kind of person who influences people.

… A person can influence you to do something, and you be doing that for the rest of your life. People get caught of in a lot of things. This whole complex is like a different kind of life. It’s like a hustle. Everything is a hustle.

M: Pikasoe said that growing up in the projects was exciting and dangerous. Was it that way for you?

H: Yeah. When you’re young it’s all good, all exciting, it’s the hype. Doing stickups, getting money, rolling a dice game. You feel you have money, you feel you have respect. Walking around, feeling fly, going in the store, boosting. Getting clothes, doing things that make you think you like a gangster, or makes you think you’re a bad man.

There’s an expression, “I ain’t no joke.” Everybody wants that sense of respect, that sense of control… Being a male, you’re taught to be aggressive. Being a male means a person that breaks people up. You’re strong, boxing, a karate man, a soldier. So you’re born with that nature. As you get older, people know you have that in you, so they try to direct it in you…

Read: Car Jacked!!! (DVD Extra)… (line from film)

Definition: Player Hating- Someone else is about to shine, and you’ll do anything to keep that bastard from getting his cheese — it can be as subtle as negative flow (lyrics) or as extreme as trying to clap (shoot) him. – Trent Bond, Half’s Manager and former NYPD Detective.

After we were robbed in Brownsville, I didn’t know where to turn to find a main character for my film. But eventually I heard about a kid from Albany Projects in Crown Heights Brooklyn, named Half-a-Mill, and a meeting was set up at a production company in Manhattan. To my absolute surprise, the kid not only showed up—he was smart, thoughtful, handsome and talented. I knew he was the character I’d been looking for.

I introduced my idea to Half, which was to follow him and his crew around while they launched his first album, and see what kind of player hating was going to surface. I wanted him to know that although I wasn’t from the projects, I knew there was shit going down there that was important, and wrong, and I was willing to be his voice. I warned him that for sure I would make mistakes, but if he was willing to give me complete access to all aspects of his life, I promised I would always tell the truth, both to him and in the film. Half is smart, he knew that even if there was no money, a movie about him was a winning proposition. So he signed a contract.

The next time I saw Half was when I called a pre-production meeting in my apartment in the East Village in Manhattan. I was there with my female production assistant when Half arrived an hour late with about six to eight mostly black men. His crew. The Godfia Criminals. East Village apartments are notoriously small and mine was 450 square feet, and with ten people in it, it becomes very, very cosy. More black people kept arriving over the course of the next hour or so, and I was shitting bricks because I thought it would never end. And I knew from experience that a good portion of these guys had weapons on them, and they were all talking and laughing, having a good time, paying NO attention to me. The director. They used my phone to order food and I could feel my racist fears rising to the surface. “They took up so much room. They had guns. They were eating barbeque. Ribs, even! Maybe they were calling long distance! Holy shit, what was I doing?” But they were already there, and I couldn’t ask them to leave, so I inhaled deeply, took a giant leap of faith, made a mental note not to have production meetings in my home again, and did my best to relax in order to plan for the first day of shooting.

Our first shoot was in the stairwell of the Albany Projects. The floor Half had grown up on. For me, it was frightening and thrilling because in this five-hour interview I got to ask a black man every question I ever wanted to ask. The good, the bad and the stupid…

Read: Life in the PJ’s… (line from film)

For years after James’s death, my hearing was heightened about what was happening in poor black neighborhoods in New York. I’d hear stories in the news, and it was as if I could smell the racism that was inherent in the style in which they were relayed to the viewing public. And because I’d gotten a sense of what life was like in the projects, the news felt like peoples lives were being misrepresented, maligned and then negated when it came to death. The media’s thirst for violent crime, based on what I believe is a misguided sense of what audiences want to see and hear, seemed insatiable.

At the same time, I started to really listen to the lyrics of hip hop music and I realized that the stories were just like the stories that I’d heard from Kevin and Louie, and I knew I had to get out of my comfort zone and get into the projects. And finally one day, smack in the middle of the whole East Coast West Coast Hip Hop battle that eventually ended in the deaths of Biggie and Tupac, I realized that if I found a young hip hop artist from the projects, who’d been signed by a record label, that I would have a story. Player Hating was born, and I went looking for an artist.

I won’t go through the whole litany of artists I approached as main characters, but suffice to say one couldn’t sign a contract, one went to jail, and the rest couldn’t show up for meetings. But finally, one day I had a character. A nineteen-year-old kid by the name of Pikasoe who’d been signed by Flavor Unit. So I headed into the Brownsville Housing Projects, with a four person (only slightly) racially mixed crew, to interview Pikasoe for the first time. I had two shooters with me. Eileen Schreiber and Steve MacCauley, both white, like me.

Brownsville Housing Projects is humungous. And for my first foray into the projects it was really overwhelming. Not a white face for miles. I was way out of my element. I set up the interview in the interior hall of Pikasoes building. He casually leaned against the wall answering my questions. He told me about his music, and that he was a part of a gang call ABG, sort of an I don’t want to be a Blood or a Crip but need protection in numbers gang. I asked what ABG stood for. Any Body can Get it, he replied. That took me back a bit, so I asked if he carried a gun, and he responded in this very serious tone, Of course I carry a gun. It’s my responsibility to carry a gun. And I thought Wow, that is totally weird.

Thirty minutes later, Pikasoe, my film crew and about thirty of his friends were all sitting out in the courtyard wrapping up for the day, when three kids on bikes came riding through the courtyard, and all the sudden I heard a woman screaming, Their gonna kill the nigger! My instinct was to run, but I turned and saw this kid on a bike with one hand trying to wrestle Steve’s camera from him, and in the other a 9mm he was pushing into Steve’s face. I thought, Holy shit they’re gonna blow his brains out. Thankfully, Steve dropped the camera and the kids rode off with two of our camera’s and our PA’s bag.

Well, white chick that I am, I thought Pikasoe and his crew were going to come over make sure we were ok, maybe express concerned about the loaned equipment, empathize with the robbery, but that isn’t how it went down. They wanted to know if the film was in the camera and if the releases were taken. There was no concern about us. At first I was pissed off and then I realized, that we would walk away and this is where they lived, and that whatever gang theses kids were with, they now had access to all this information. The releases included the names of at least forty people we had shot, their addresses, phone numbers, etc.

That was the end of shooting with Pikasoe, and I’d have to find another character for my film. Now I can’t know anything for sure, but I believe Pikasoe bowed out because we put him on the hot seat and he wanted to live. And part of the reason Steve is alive today is because he’s white. Those kids were maybe fourteen at best, but they wanted it to be perfectly clear that they were the shit, not Pikasoe, and not his crew. They were player hating. And you know what? I totally got it. If you wanted to live in this world, you better carry a gun, because everyone had one, and anybody can get it…

Read: The Mother Fucking Saga Continues… (line from film)

After James died, I spent a lot of time in the mailroom talking to Kevin and Louie. It was really the only place that I could talk about James that felt safe and empathetic. My office administration had moved away from the death pretty quickly and had rejected my idea to hang a picture of James in the office.

My feeling was that the idea of memorializing a black man who’d been murdered didn’t reflect well on the company. And maybe that’s so, but for me we had lost a well-loved office colleague to a tragedy that he had very little to do with.

What was left of James’s family picked up and moved back to North Carolina, where they were originally from. Kevin told me one day that James’s three-year-old son was having problems. He kept jumping into ditches and lying down because he wanted to be with his mommy and daddy.

At some point in our grieving process, Louie asked me out on a date. I was totally flattered that this cute Latino, hipster kid from Harlem would ask me, an older white woman, out on a date. I agreed and one night after work, we went out to a Chinese restaurant in the East Village where I lived. When we sat down and the waitress came over to our table, Louie jumped right in and ordered his dinner of fried rice. I was a bit taken aback since I hadn’t even been given a menu and he seemed oblivious of the kind of dating protocol I was accustomed to.

His food arrived before mine and Louie began to eat straight away—directly off the serving platter. I remember thinking, What are you doing out with this guy, we are from two totally different worlds?! But I hung in there because I knew Louie was a good guy, and eventually I had food too, and as we ate, Louie told me about his life in the Lehman Projects. With no drama, he told me about how his sister died in their family apartment, from an asthmatic attack, because the paramedics took too long to get to her. He told me about the building jumpers that couldn’t take the stress anymore, and how one of his close friends head was cracked open by man wielding a baseball bat and Louie held his scull together as he was taken to the hospital. As I was sitting there listening, I thought, Holy shit, just put all of your bullshit and judgments aside, because this man has a lot to teach me. And I did. I put my white middle class judgments down and as I did, I could feel my center moving from my head to my heart, and I became still and acutely attentive as Louie shared his life experiences with me.

We went out for about six months, and eventually it became clear that our interests were too varied to sustain a meaningful relationship. Louie wanted to be an elevator operator or a bounty hunter and I was on my way to graduate school in art. We really were from two different worlds, but the glimpse into life in the projects that I gained through James, Louie and Kevin never left me, and I knew that somehow, someday, I was going to find my way into that world because I couldn’t ignore what I’d learned…

Read: Day 1 of Shooting

Some people might wonder why a white, “feminist” filmmaker would even consider making a movie about a bunch of young thugs from Brooklyn. So I thought it might be interesting to share the beginning of what I think of as me pulling my head and heart out of acculturated, racist fear, and getting real. With real people.

 It truly began in my family, but for the purposes of this story, I’ll begin in 1989 when I was working in the art department of the American Booksellers Association in Manhattan. There was a wonderful guy who worked there in the mailroom.

His name was James I. Salley. He was my good work friend. James was 24-years-old, very tall, maybe 6’2’’ or something. Cute as pie. Big gorgeous smile. Always ready to laugh, and he worked in the mailroom with two of his closest friends, Louie and Kevin.

At that time, ABA put on the biggest booksellers convention in the country and everyone that worked for ABA also had jobs working on the convention site. So at the time, 90% of the office had left to go to DC to set up for the convention and the only departments left in our office were the art department and the mailroom. The day before the rest of us were supposed to leave for the convention, I arrived at work to the shocking news that James was dead. He had been murdered. Execution style in his apartment in the Lehman Housing Projects in Harlem. Dead along with three other family members. One of which was his wife and the mother of his 3 year old son.

They were tied up, told to lie down on the floor and shot in the back of their heads. The next day another brother was killed–also execution style–on the roof of a building in Harlem. Overnight James went from being this beautiful, bright, soon to be entering the police academy, charming guy, to just another drug dealing black guy. Now I don’t know if James or someone else in this family apartment were dealing drugs or not, but that was the speculation regarding the murders. What I do know, is that there seemed to me to be a collective misremembering of who he was at work, as well as a disregard for his humanity and the relationships he actually had in our office.

Because the convention had to go on in another city, not a single face from ABA showed up at James’s funeral. Including my own. And although that is something that I am ashamed of, I’ve also never forgotten him. As far as I know, the murders were never solved. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that I continued to work with Kevin and Louie, I would never have even have begun to understand the world from which James came…

*(Odd aside: At the time, I was working with Director David O. Russell at what was to become both of our last straight jobs.)
Read: Way Back Story (continued)