Hollywood Rap

Like Hollywood Shuffle — and Swingers, and Spinal Tap, and so many shoestring comedies that get their subcultural nuances just right — Fronterz is the kind of film that could only have been an indie. “You don’t have people from the studio telling you how they think the black thing should be,” says Presha. Without making a fuss about it, the film attempts to counter stereotypes with characters who are educated and middle-class, who have wide musical tastes and literate vocabs. “A lot of people don’t realize that there are brothers out there that just hang back and kick it with their friends and don’t talk about killing other people.”

“We’re trying to go against every Hollywood stereotype for black movies in every way,” Jones adds. “There’s not a single curse word in this movie, even though the guys are rapping. There’s no violence, there’s no nudity, there’s no drug use. None of us are eating fried chicken and watermelon and drinking Kool-Aid.”

If it seems amazing that these stereotypes are still up for discussion, maybe it’s because these guys have grown up facing them in some form or another. Pressey, Jones points out, grew up in the projects, but he was a rocker in the projects.

“Yeah, the Police, David Bowie, Billy Idol — that’s what I liked,” says Pressey. “Kids were like, ‘What’s that?’ I grew up in the projects — raw-dog East New York, but I went to the High School of the Performing Arts and became a classically trained actor. Other friends of mine are in jail for 35 years.”

“And I grew up more like the Cosbys than Good Times,” says Jones. “There is so much diversity within the black community, and we only get to see it from one perspective — what mainstream white Hollywood proper tends to put out.”

A middle-class kid from Diamond Bar, Jones has made a living as a gaffer and key grip for years but always wanted to direct features. He’d met co-star Reno Wilson in the late ’90s on a movie shoot, but the two had lost touch in recent years. Just before Fronterz came together, they reconnected. “I was getting ready to do a commercial in Utah, and one night I just sort of put it out there in the universe that I wanted to hear from Reno. A few days later in Utah, I was sitting on the crapper in my hotel checking my messages, and there was one from him.”

Wilson, like many people involved with Fronterz, grew up in New York and attended the High School of the Performing Arts in the 1980s. (Besides Pressey, executive ‰ producer Richard Leacock also attended, as did Chastity Bono, who has a small part, and Alex Desert, one of the film’s executive producers and a regular on Becker.) The son of an opera singer and jazz musician (his father died onstage), Wilson got his start on Cosby and has worked steadily in film and TV — but never had the chance to really show the range of his talents until Fronterz.

His classmate Belcon was a working child actor but had an epiphany at 15 that changed his course. “At that point I was a pretty boy,” Belcon says, “but I didn’t like how my manager was treating me. I felt like a piece of meat. It came to me that in some sense, to these people, that’s all you really are. Then I started thinking about [Diff’rent Strokes star] Todd Bridges. No one gave a shit about him — meanwhile, a few years ago everyone wanted a piece of him. I was really afraid of being put in these roles and then being dropped like yesterday’s hot commodity.”

Instead, Belcon majored in stage management and production in high school and at CalArts — and ended up touring extensively with schoolmate Danny Hoch’s one-man shows. The two started writing together, and eventually made two films: 1999’s Whiteboyz, about small-town wiggers, and 2001’s Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop (soon to be released on video by Russell Simmons). One thing Belcon learned along the way was that he loved to write — and that writers have no clout in Hollywood. “It sounds crass, but it’s a good thing to have some power. I learned I really needed to get to the point where I call the shots, because if I can do that, then my words will stand.”

That’s partly why Fronterz is special for Belcon: “On this film I’ve done everything I set out to do a while ago: I wrote it, I was a producer, and I kept a promise to myself that I would get back in front of the camera.”

Ultimately, the making of Fronterz was dependent on that camera. The film is one of the first features to be shot on a new breed of digital video camera that records at 24 frames per second, the same speed as film. Jones, the film’s director, sounds like a salesman when he talks about it: “The Panasonic DVX100 will literally change the face of independent filmmaking. People look at this footage and go, ‘That’s 16mm film, right?’ No, not even close. DV, baby.”