In the World

by Richard Stratton

  Witness the recent killing of infamous government rat James Whitey Bulger, another adroitly planned and executed prison murder that could not possibly have taken place without coordination at high levels within the Federal Bureau of Prisons. I have much more to say about Whitey in a later chapter, but to illustrate my point about prison killings it’s worth noting that as a high-level informant with organized crime connections, Whitey should have been in protective custody. He should have been under a separation order to make certain he never ended up in a prison where there were known organized crime killers waiting for him. He never should have been transferred to this particular prison in the first place, and he definitely never should have been left unattended in a wheelchair where he could be attacked.

  But Whitey had an attitude, he thought he was special, and he was a pain in the ass wherever they sent him, always fucking with staff, trying to run his scams, and pissing off the administration. So the bureau saw fit to transfer the eighty-nine-year-old snitch to a prison where there had already been two recent killings; and, within hours of his arrival, guards left him alone in a wheelchair and in his diaper in an unlocked cell, where convicts using a padlock in a sock beat him to death, his eyes were gouged out, and his tongue was cut off. That’s convict-administered justice in the Big House.

  When Sheila Nevins at HBO saw the Troy Kell tape, even though she was unable to watch it all, she was sold. We used clips from the video of the Blackmon killing as the basis for Gladiator Days: Anatomy of a Prison Murder, a film that looks in depth at the issue of prison violence in America. Troy was convicted of Blackmon’s murder and sentenced to die by a firing squad. As of this writing, some twenty years later, he is still on death row.

  THUG LIFE IN DC (1998), the fourth HBO documentary in the Prison Life series, about youth gang culture and wholesale incarceration in our nation’s capital, wins the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special. During the making of the documentary, we are able to gain unprecedented access to the DC jail, primarily because the warden is so frustrated with what is going on both in the streets of our nation’s capital and in her jail that she hopes to bring public awareness to the problem.

  At the same time, I have been given an assignment to write an article for John Kennedy Junior’s short-lived George magazine about the resurrection of DC mayor Marion Barry. (George would cease publication in 2001 before the article was published.) Mayor Barry has been reelected to office after being set up by the FBI in a crack cocaine bust, completed his bid in prison, and come back to serve as perhaps America’s most infamous public officeholder, and the only other acting mayor with a felony conviction since James Michael Curley was mayor of Boston in 1947.

  While in France at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 looking for backing for MK-ULTRA, Henri Kessler, Marc Levin, and I decide the time is right for us to pool our resources and strike out on our own to make a low-budget feature film. Given our unique access to the DC city jail and the thematic resonance of a story about mass incarceration set in the capital of the free world, we settle on a fictional story about a talented young spoken-word poet from the ghetto of Washington who gets busted for possession of a small amount of pot and is locked up in the brutally overcrowded city jail. The inspiration for the film is to show how the wholesale incarceration of young African American men on minor drug charges is not only corrupting the system but also creating a whole generation of alienated youth, often talented, ambitious young men who have very few options for avoiding the trajectory former Black Panther and prisoner activist Eddie Ellis identified as “from the plantations, to the projects, to the penitentiaries.”

  We take what is at the time an innovative approach in the making of what will become Slam; it is going to be a fictional film that will have the look and feel of a documentary. There is to be no script per se. Marc and I devise scenes, and I compose a written outline. Actors are given direction and suggested lines on how to get into the scene and how to get out. What they come up with during the actual filming of the scene will result in a kind of informed improvisation. There are no retakes. Most of the roles will be played not by actors but real prisoners, real prison guards, with spoken-word poets playing our male and female leads. The primary location is to be the DC jail and the streets of Washington DC’s Anacostia neighborhood. We have just a week to shoot the DC scenes.

  Slam is shot on Super 16 film by documentary-trained, hand-held cameraman Mark Benjamin, who also shot the documentaries we made for HBO. The warden at the jail allows our crew just a few days to shoot the prison scenes. The climactic scene takes place in the prison yard, when prisoners from rival gangs face off to do battle and are then blown away by the Saul Williams character, Ray Joshua, who does a mesmerizing performance of a spoken-word poem about the journey of young black men that stymies the gang bangers and causes them to forget what they were ready to fight about. When doubts are voiced as to whether such a scene could work, we decide to try it out on the actual prisoners in the yard. After watching Saul perform his poem, the prisoners are stunned. No one speaks, and then they begin to chant, “South Side! South Side!” to claim Saul as one of their own.

  While the crew prepares for a final courtroom scene, I get a call from Marc Levin on set who tells me that we have no one to play the judge. At the time, I am sitting in Mayor Marion Barry’s office conducting the interview for George magazine. “Hold on a second,” I say to Marc.” And then, to the Mayor, “Mayor Barry, how would you like to perform a cameo role in our movie?”

  “What’s the movie about?” the mayor wants to know.

  When I tell him, Mayor Barry signs on.

  THE MAKING OF Slam combined fortuitous circumstances, raw talent, intrepid guerilla filmmaking, a timely subject matter, and high good energy, resulting in an independent film that would go on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998, the Camera d’Or at Cannes, also in 1998, and several other awards around the world. Slam won Independent Spirit Awards for the male and female leads, talented spoken-word artists Saul Williams and Sonja Sohn. It sold to a distributor after its premiere screening at the Sundance Film Festival. Henri’s investor made his money back and then some. For a brief period, we were besieged by eager agents at Hollywood agencies wanting to represent us and by producers and film company executives coming to us with scripts and deals for movies they wanted us to make. In a meeting at the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles, after a powwow with a room full of agents, I was approached by William Morris’s head TV agent, Steve Glick, who took me aside and said, “You are going to make a TV series, and I want to represent you and help you get it set up.”

  Kim and I edited a book based on Slam. The book included a script written from the finished film and the poetry featured by the artists in the movie, as well as behind-the-scenes filmmakers’ and actors’ diaries telling the story of the making of Slam from several perspectives. Grove Atlantic published the book in 1998.

  For me, a highlight of the Slam journey came when we were invited to screen the movie at the Latin American Film Festival in Havana. We flew down on the first commercial flight from the US allowed into Cuba since the embargo. They put us up in the Hotel Nacional, where I was visited by the ghosts of Charlie “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky. La Flordita, Papa’s favorite bar on Calle Obispo, evoked Hemingway’s spirit for me. While I was in Cuba, Fidel Castro delivered a four-hour speech heard over loudspeakers outside my hotel room. As I walked the streets of Havana, I was reminded of the stories Joe Stassi told me of his time in Cuba, and I wondered whatever happened to the old man.

  I would soon find out.

  Chapter Eleven

  WHITE BOYZ

  THE WEEKS AND then months following the success of Slam recalls how some of my former smuggling partners and I carried on after bringing in a huge load of weed or hash. To say that the success of the film goes to our heads only partly describes what happens; it changes our lives. Hubris rears its ugly gorgon head. H
enri in particular embarks on an empire building campaign. He leases and then builds out a vast production space in the Starrett-Lehigh Building on Twenty-Sixth Street and the West Side Highway. He christens the new company Offline Entertainment Group. He names Marc Levin head of production, I am named head of development, and he appoints himself chief executive officer. He begins a hiring spree to staff the office space with new employees. Executives Ezra Swerdlow and Alex Gibney, both established names in the business, come onboard with big-ticket salaries. Marc, Henri, and I have a meeting with Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg, and Stacy Sher at the Jersey Films offices in LA. Danny gets down on his knees before us and tells how moved he was by Slam. He offers us a deal to make a film called Knifehand, written by former Black Panther Jamal Joseph, who I actually met years previously in the bullpen at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan after the New York Panthers were arrested on the Panthers 21 case.

  In my role at Offline as head of development, I read the Knifehand script and propose to my partners that we make the film. Knifehand is budgeted and already financed at $10 million, a big step up from our low-budget first film. And it feels like a good move for us to get into business with Jersey Films. Marc is not convinced; he’s concerned that we will be seen as a one-trick pony because he feels the story is similar thematically with Slam. For his part, Henri says, “Who needs Jersey Films? We will be bigger than Jersey Films!” It is the beginning of dissension in the executive ranks at Offline Entertainment that will soon result in my leaving the company.

  But before that, we make a second feature film, White Boyz, a comedy, sort of, based on a script by performance artist Danny Hoch and his writing partner, Garth Belcon. White Boyz tells the story of three young white kids from the cornfields of Iowa who listen to nothing but black gangster rap and aspire to become drug dealers and go to jail so they can get down with the black experience. The movie stars Danny Hoch and three new young actors, Mark Webber, Dash Mihok, and Piper Perabo as Danny’s character Flip’s crew. There are cameos and music by Snoop Dogg, Fat Joe, Dead Prez, Slick Rick, and Doug E. Fresh. Funded by Fox Searchlight, White Boyz is shot on location in Iowa and in the Cabrini Green projects in Chicago. The film opens in thirty-seven theaters the week of September 11, 1999, and has dismal gross box office returns of $22,451 during its entire theatrical run. It’s a movie in search of a genre. It’s a comedy with dramatic overtones as the would-be gangsters run into trouble on their foray into the drug business in Chicago. It’s an extended rap video with a hilarious performance by Snoop Dogg as an imprisoned rapper who goes off on the staff in a prison mess hall. A failure at the box office, White Boyz has nevertheless become a cult favorite and has been broadcast many times on cable networks VH1, MTV, HBO, and the Fuse Network.

  As for white boys Stratton, Levin, and Kessler, White Boyz heralds a divergence in creative and business aspirations that compels me to leave Offline Entertainment Group and venture out on my own. My experience working on Oz has convinced me that my future lies in scripted TV series. I pitch Chris Albrecht at HBO a dramatic series about undercover DEA agents working in Mexico and along the US border in and around El Paso, Texas. Albrecht likes the concept; he hires me and Kim to write a pilot script. The project is later shelved when Albrecht decides to devote all HBO’s immediate development talent and resources to a new series they are producing called The Sopranos.

  THE WHIRLWIND SUCCESS of Slam and my foray into the movie business is playing havoc with my marriage. I’m traveling a good deal and Kim is often left home alone with two, and then three, young children. At the New York party to celebrate winning the Caméra d’Or at Cannes, Kim, well in her cups, hauls off and smacks me across the face then storms out after a young woman I hardly know stops to greet me, recalling having met me in France. Kim increasingly appears to resent my success and suspect me of infidelity. With the money I’m making writing screenplays and producing movies, the disparity in our incomes has shifted. Her second novel, Notes from the Country Club, though a critical success, does not have the commercial value of Rush. We buy an apartment on Twenty-First Street in Manhattan and divide our time between a home upstate near Woodstock and the apartment in the city. When I make a unilateral decision to take a substantial chunk of our available funds and invest it in the making of a short film that I write and direct, Kim is irate, convinced of my financial irresponsibility, and the dissolution of our marriage appears imminent.

  The gamble, however, pays off.

  Chapter Twelve

  STREET TIME

  SOON AFTER I leave Offline, I write a short script called Street Time, a drama set in the world of the Special Offenders Unit of a federal parole office. The inspiration had come to me while I sat in the Southern District of New York parole offices waiting to be called to report, and it never left. I kept thinking about the dramatic possibilities of pitting a conflicted, sympathetic parole officer with his own character flaws and issues against a conflicted, sympathetic parolee with a family, a rich criminal history, and the desire to make it in the world. I planned to play out their complicated relationship while following each character on his separate path. The parole office report room was a perfect setting for introducing new characters and new story lines while playing out the main characters’ conflict. The fact of the periodic report, and placing the two main characters face to face in a small report room on a regular basis, struck me as rich with opportunities for dramatic tension and potential for a narrative structure to develop the characters and the themes of individual freedom and government control all to be played over several seasons.

  Steve Glick, who I sign with as my agent at William Morris, sets up a pitch meeting for me with Jerry Offsay and Gary Levine at Showtime. In the meeting, Offsay wonders aloud if I can create a TV show with the same kind of documentary look and fresh narrative style as Slam. “Yes,” I say, “given the right actors who are comfortable and talented working in roles where they become actively involved in creating their characters.”

  This is what all actors do to varying degrees, but in the Slam style the actor is given much more leeway, much more creative input in determining their character’s essence and expressing who they are, even down to creating their dialogue. The words on the page of the script are just the starting point.

  When I pitch my concept for a show set in the Special Offender’s Unit of a New York federal parole office, Offsay says they don’t do cop shows. I explain that this is nothing like a typical cop show; it’s about a complicated relationship that develops between the parole officer, an authority figure, and the parolee, a person who is either trying to go straight and obey the rules of parole or who is set to revert to a life of crime and trying to get over on the authorities. The Showtime executives are interested but not convinced; they want to see a sample pilot script. I send them the short script I wrote and decide to do them one better and make the test pilot, a short version of what the series could be; direct it myself, shoot it Slam style using real parolees, former criminals, working parole officers, and set it in the actual federal parole offices in Brooklyn. I loot Kim’s and my joint business bank account, hire Mark Benjamin as my director of photography, and set out to make the test pilot for what will become Street Time.

  One of the parole officers I got to know from the Eastern District Office, Larry Goldman, signs on to help me gain access to the Eastern District Parole Office space over a weekend. Yes, we are actually shooting a movie in the space where I used to come to report to Ms. Lawless; it’s a bizarre feeling, a curious metamorphosis from parolee to director of a pilot about parolees. I cast Larry Goldman as one of the parole officers. I cast Norman Mailer in the role of Saul “Two Canes” Cahan (Norman at this point is walking with the help of two canes), an aging Jewish mobster who has a boisterous confrontation with his parole officer, played by Norman’s son, Stephen Mailer, a talented film and stage actor. The climax of the short film comes when Norman’s character is taken into custody and dragged out of the pa
role offices by two US marshals for associating with other known organized crime figures. Cahan’s parole officer has video proof—surveillance footage of the old gangster ambling along Mulberry Street in Little Italy and making contact with a known wiseguy, played by an alleged associate of the Gambino Crime Family, and the owner of a Mulberry Street café, a fiend known as Baby John, whom I met while locked up in the MCC. The finished Street Time test pilot is twenty-eight minutes long. VCR tapes are sent to out Offsay, Gary Levine, and a third Showtime executive, Pancho Mansfield. Offsay orders a pilot script.

  Here begins a classic struggle in the world of scripted TV series. There is a much-revered species of TV writer/producer known as a showrunner who bears most of the responsibility for getting a TV show made. The showrunner is the key point person who answers directly to the executives at the network and production company. Once I deliver my pilot script, the executives at Showtime, and now Sony TV, who have come on board as the production company, go back on a verbal agreement they made with me and decide that they want to bring in another writer and showrunner with experience producing a TV series. What? I thought we agreed that if there was to be a showrunner, that person would be a producer and not a writer. I am supposed to be the writer and creator of the series. Yes, that’s true; but, as I am about to learn, or not learn, over and over again, these agreements in the so-called legitimate world, unless they are in writing and unless you are willing to go to court, mean nothing. This is not the pot business where a man or woman is only as good as his or her word and handshake, where a deal is a deal or there are unfortunate consequences. In the legitimate business world, particularly in Hollywood, words mean nothing unless they are in a signed and executed contract and often not even then.