Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/032392/0323520.000

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                                                                                PROFILE, Page 60

Not Just One of The Boyz


Whoever takes the Oscar for Best Director, JOHN SINGLETON, the
first black and the youngest person ever nominated, is already
a winner

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


    The Today show calls to schedule an interview. The White
House phones about its invitation to dinner. Director Francis
Ford Coppola's office rings to discuss a date for a visit to
his Napa Valley ranch.

    In the movie business, they say the calls you receive are
a barometer of your importance. If so, it would probably be
wise to declare a storm watch around John Singleton. What's
keeping his phone line sizzling is the phenomenal success of his
debut feature film, Boyz N the Hood. When it opened last July,
Boyz's commercial survival seemed threatened by sporadic
violence at theaters across the country. But ultimately the
film's own passionate condemnation of violence won out. Made for
a modest $6 million, it has grossed more than $57 million
domestically, making it the most profitable movie of 1991.

    Boyz is a poignant, semiautobiographical story of young
men coming of age in the mean streets of South Central Los
Angeles. It is also one of 19 movies released by black
filmmakers last year, many of them dealing with similar themes.
But Singleton's film rose above the competition by presenting
vividly individual characters instead of stereotypes, dialogue
that hummed with the rhythms of the way people really talk, a
powerful story and the reassuring message that parental love and
guidance can still rescue black youths from drugs, gangs and the
despair of the inner city. Last month the filmmaker received
Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best
Director. He is the first African American and the youngest
person ever nominated for an Oscar in the directors' category.

    The exhilarating whoosh of success has left Singleton
racing to catch up with himself. At times he keeps pace,
knowingly talking shop with Coppola, Spike Lee and Steven
Spielberg, once childhood idols, now professional confidants;
or he adopts a man-of-the-world tone as he kindly reassures
auditioning actresses that none of the women in his new script
are "prostitutes, maids or welfare mothers," the demeaning roles
that black women are usually required to play in films.

    At other times he falls behind and is just a kid who pulls
out a comic book to read or a portable video game to play when
he grows bored during meetings with studio executives or
interviews with journalists. One is reminded that, though he may
be successful and street-smart, he is hardly sophisticated: his
appearance at last year's Cannes Film Festival was the first
time in his life he had been outside the U.S.

    A short (5-ft. 6-in.), wiry figure, Singleton dresses and
talks like any casual, bright 24-year-old. He peppers his
conversation with an abrupt, exclamatory laugh and punctuates
almost every sentence with the rhetorical question "You know
what I'm saying?" In meetings he is usually the youngest person
present, but he is often the most decisive.

    Even before the Oscar nominations were announced,
Singleton had begun sampling the heady rewards of having a
big-time hit. He moved into a spacious six-bedroom house in the
southern part of Los Angeles, which he shares with two cats,
White Boy and Mulatto, and three people: his fiance and, at
least temporarily, the production manager for his new film and
a childhood friend who was recently discharged from the Army.
He treated himself to a Pathfinder, three personal computers and
thousands of dollars' worth of videodiscs ("the best way to see
movies at home," he insists).

    But, keeping his head, Singleton reminds himself that the
movie industry is notorious for plumping up its young with
praise and then turning around and eating them. He is convinced
that the only way he will survive in the business is on his
terms. "My attitude is that this can all go in a day," he says
of his success. "But I'm still going to be me."

    Singleton comes by this determined sense of self -- which
sometimes borders on cockiness -- naturally. "The confidence is
in the genes," declares his father Danny Singleton, the model
for the compassionate father in Boyz. Says his mother Sheila
Ward: "John takes pride in who he is."

    Like Tre, the lead character in the film, Singleton is the
child of teenage parents who never married and who took turns
raising their son in separate households. He moved in with his
father just before his 12th birthday. Both parents eventually
put themselves through college. Ward, now 42, is a sales
representative for a pharmaceutical company; Singleton, 41, is
a real estate broker.

    Both parents worried about the temptations of the street
when young John was growing up. But Singleton, bolstered by the
companionship of the two friends who would serve as models for
the characters Doughboy and Ricky in the film, steered clear of
gangs. Acquaintances of his were hurt in gang fights, and one
was killed in an alley near his house, but the closest Singleton
ever came to committing a violent act was in seventh grade, when
a bully tried to take his money. He took a box cutter to school
and threatened to cut the boy's throat if the harassment didn't
stop. "He never tried to ask for money again," Singleton says
proudly.

    A shy, precocious child, young John learned to read during
the long weekends he spent at the library with his mother as
she studied for a medical-technology degree. Quickly graduating
from picture books to adult books, he whipped through The
Autobiography of Malcolm X and Anne Moody's Coming of Age in
Mississippi while still in elementary school.

    When he was nine, his father took him to see Star Wars.
Like many thousands of youngsters, he went back as often as he
could scrape up the money for another ticket. But while other
kids fantasized about becoming Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia,
Singleton's hero was director George Lucas. He soon began
drawing scenes on sheets of paper and flipping the pages to
create crudely animated "movies." During his senior year in high
school, inspired by an English teacher with a passion for good
writing, he decided on an alternate route to filmmaking:
screenwriting. He enrolled in the Filmic Writing Program at the
University of Southern California. "Any fool can figure where
to point the camera," he says. "But you have to have a story to
tell."

    His condescending attitude didn't make Singleton popular
with his fellow film students, many of whom found him
"arrogant" and "too intense." His professors, however, were won
over by his determination to master the elements of structure,
dialogue and character development that go into the craft of a
good screenplay. "In his freshman year I wouldn't have predicted
his success, but John used this program," says Margaret Mehring,
who recently retired as head of the writing program. "He was
driven to communicate certain ideas, and he was not about to
take no for an answer." By the time he graduated in 1990,
Singleton had twice won the school's prestigious Jack Nicholson
award for best feature-length screenplay and had been signed up
by the powerful Creative Arts Agency.

    He had been out of school just a month when Columbia
Pictures made a bid to buy Boyz N the Hood. Instead of
gratefully accepting the offer, Singleton insisted that he be
allowed to direct the film. His entire directorial experience
at that point consisted of a few homework assignments with an
8-mm camera. "So many bad films had been made about black
people, and most of them had been done by people who weren't
African American," he says. "I wasn't going to let some fool
from Idaho or Encino direct a movie about living in my
neighborhood. If they didn't want to do the movie with me
directing, they didn't want to do the movie." Impressed by the
young man's moxie, Frank Price, then head of the studio, gave
him the go-ahead. Says Price: "The last time I saw someone with
that kind of confidence, it was Steve Spielberg when he was
about that age."

    Price's huge risk paid off handsomely, but it still
exacted a price: expectations for Singleton's future projects
will be even higher. So far, Singleton seems to be handling the
pressure nicely. Earlier this year, he directed Michael Jackson,
Eddie Murphy and Iman in the lavish music video Remember the
Time. The director gave himself a cameo role as a camel driver.
Next month Singleton will get down to more serious business
when he begins shooting his original screenplay Poetic Justice,
a lyrical look at relationships between black men and women.

    Friends and relatives say he seems more relaxed than he
did when filming began on his first feature. "He knows what
he's doing now," says his mother. "People got his ideas the
first time, and now he's refining his presentation."

    Singleton has found encouragement in the experiences of
other onetime wunderkinds who have weathered the vicissitudes
of a Hollywood career. He recalls that when he first met
Coppola, the older director was screening Jean Cocteau's Orpheus
in an attempt to learn how filmmakers achieved special effects
in the days before high-tech computer graphics. "What real
filmmakers do is they study films, they study their craft,"
Singleton observes. "No matter how much success they encounter,
they are always in the process of studying." Singleton himself
watches at least one film a day, a practice he equates with
taking vitamins. "Nobody is an expert at filmmaking," he says.
"Anyone who tells you he is, is lying. I'm still a student."
Yes, but for the moment at the head of his class.