Hollywood Rap

“We’re in a new age of filmmaking,” adds Presha. “There were times when I was driving the Suburban and Courtney was in the passenger’s seat editing on a Powerbook.”

It was that sort of seat-of-your-pants feel that attracted Winkler to the project. “It’s the only work I’ve ever done where the catering consisted of a bag of chips,” says the actor. “I was at a birthday party, and I met Courtney, who was there with Alex [Desert]. They said, ‘You know, we’re making a movie, and we have a part for you.’ We never spoke about the film. I didn’t know what I was getting into. They said that I would be the head of urban development. I was also told there would be a bag of Fritos. I just went with that flow. It just seemed like, yeah, I should be here, I should do this.”

Danson, too, got the bug. “The spirit of those guys actually rubbed off on me,” he says. “I did not want to do this film — I was doing it as a favor to Alex. The last thing I wanted to do was wake up early on my day off and shoot this film. But I really ended up enjoying it — it reminded me of why I first got into [acting].”

With the Fronterz screeners out to distribution companies, the filmmakers hope to get picked up for a 2004 release, and then to keep the spirit going. “This project started with a bunch of people who wanted to do it together with no egos,” says Wilson. “Maybe we’ll all trip out and act like idiots once this film comes out — but I doubt it.”

“We keep each other grounded,” adds Jones, “because we know the work we do is important, but the family is more important. We have other people who weren’t able to work on this movie for whatever reason, and we want to bring them in. There’s no reason we can’t.

“One of the many lessons we learned making Fronterz,” he continues, “is that people make moviemaking hard. They make it hard. It’s egos. I mean, movies are hard in that it’s a lot of work. But that’s not hard.”