Straight Shooters

The trio, who cite Aaron McGruder, Looney Tunes cartoons, The Simpsons, Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Martin Scorsese and Robert Townsend among their heroes, use hip-hop as both business model and bottomless fount for their cultural references. In their short The Corporate Negro, hip-hop — its rhythms and vernacular — is the steady hum running through the film. Dre plays the title character, pumping rap in his convertible Benz on his way to work, Ebonically macking female passersby like a pimp, and then slipping into crisp professional inflections when paged by his secretary. Turning to the camera and curling his lip, he delivers the following soliloquy as the appropriate images flash onscreen:

“They don’t know me, mayne. I’m the corporate Negro. I have the job, the house . . . the car. I’ve got my heart [CUT TO: thin, long-haired, café-au-lait beauty], my ho for my debauchery [CUT TO: darker-skinned, thicker sister wailing in the throes of sexual ecstasy], and y’all know we get an honorary white girl with this package [CUT TO: bored white woman lying beneath a thrusting Dre]. And I have authority over white Ivy Leaguers who make six-figure salaries.”

Clad in a tailored business suit, he glares at the camera to emphasize his point. From there, the audience is volleyed riffs on interracial office politics, relationships between Negroes perched on various rungs of the corporate food chain, and the many roles that black folk play on a daily, if not hourly, basis, with the shifting and changing of masks being reflexive. It’s a satiric look at bicultural schizophrenia, at the tensions, contradictions and similarities between the demands of corporate poses and nigger realities. “Corporate Negro was something we came up with,” adds Dre, “because in the media, cats are either Carlton [the whitewashed cousin from television’s Fresh Prince of Bel Air] or they’re Jay-Z. I’m not either one of them.”

“With Corporate,” continues Jason, “we wanted to make a corporate dude whose lifestyle was as sexy as a rapper’s. That’s why he’s bragging about all the material things that his lifestyle affords him. And then, it takes a twist. The ending came about when we were still shooting. We were like, wouldn’t it be fucked up if we just ended it with, ‘At the end of the day, despite all your accomplishments, you still a nigga.’”

“What’s interesting to me,” says Dre, “is that I’ve played the film for people in my office, and a white gay colleague came up to me and said, ‘I completely relate to that story.’ An Asian dude in the office said, ‘It’s the same for us.’ I think that being very specific with the story actually opens the door for lots of different people to see their story or situation as well.”

The name PSTOLA, a variation on the Spanish word for pistol, flows into the group’s tag line: The Sure Shot Guerrilla Film Co. The outfit formed in late 1999, shooting its first film, Profile of a Jank, in 2000. Jason and Dre both grew up in Oakland, becoming friends in high school, but their parents broke up their clique after what Jason refers to as the group’s “nonstop fucking up in school.” Dre was sent to private school. Jason was shipped to his father in Inglewood, where he befriended Deon. After his father died a few years ago, Jason used the money he inherited to buy filmmaking equipment, taking the first steps toward realizing his childhood dream of making movies.

“By that point,” he says, “digital technology had advanced to the point where the consumer could own the means of production, so it became affordable. I took the money and copped the XL-1 and the G4. Then we acquired some software and were in the game.”

The game includes bringing childhood and neighborhood friends along for the ride, which is only fitting since their lives and antics are the inspiration for much of PSTOLA’s work. There’s Ben Watkins, whose paradoxical good looks encompass both pretty boy and nerd and who wrote and directed Quest To Ref, about an inner-city sports geek who takes it upon himself to referee playground pick-up games (“Six hundred and seven games that I’ve refed — only one fatality. That’s a record that I’m proud of . . .”), which PSTOLA produced (and which played Sundance). Watkins also stars in the trio’s The Adventures of Aaron Willows in Cyberspace, about a Negro simp who tries to get his freak on through Internet hookups. The ghetto hookup also extends to include Terry Boyce (the outfit’s Dirt McGirt/Big Baby Jesus/Ol’ Dirty Bastard), who wrote, directed and plays all three roles — the mama, the good son and the titular bad seed — in the droll, painstakingly detailed J.R.

“Our ideas come when we sit around like we’re sitting right now,” says Jason. “A lot of our friends are natural comedians and storytellers — like Terry, who did J.R. He would come in this room and entertain us with that story, actually acting out all the parts — the mother, the brother and himself. We were like, ‘Hell, we can shoot that. You’re acting, bruh. That’s a short story.’ And that’s how we approach it.”