Not Just One of The Boyz

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.