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.