Capturing the art of the street deal

Capturing the art of the street deal
Filmmaker turns corporate tables in ‘Business Is War’

By Liza Weisstuch, Globe Correspondent | October 25, 2009

Business, it’s been said, is business. Whether it’s a deal gone down in the shadows of a street lamp or a merger finalized across a mahogany table, universal principles apply. Plenty of films have depicted the art of the hustle, and movies set against a corporate backdrop are in no short supply, but few have juxtaposed the two realms as candidly as “Business Is War.’’

In his debut feature, which has two screenings on Friday at Hibernian Hall, writer-director and Dorchester native Kemal Gordon tells a very modern Horatio Alger story.

Gordon, 29, an Emerson graduate, lives with his wife, Jamilyn, who is also his assistant, in the basement of his parents’ Uphams Corner home. It’s there that he was reared on a diet of Oliver Stone and Spike Lee movies, hip-hop videos, and comic books. But it wasn’t until he happened to catch Tom Cruise’s “Risky Business’’ playing in a cafe that his feature-film idea took form.

“I got to thinking about refreshing that story about a squeaky-clean suburban kid who lands in the dark, seedy underground of the streets, and thought, what if I put a kid from the seedy streets in a squeaky-clean corporate world which isn’t actually that squeaky-clean?’’ Gordon recalled.

On this drizzly afternoon he’s in his parents’ living room, which is furnished with freshly upholstered antique sofas and chairs and crammed with wooden African sculptures and vivid paintings.

The latest additions to the room are Gordon’s framed prizes from the Roxbury Film Festival and Atlanta’s Peachtree Village International Film Festival. At the Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival, he was a finalist in the HBO Feature Film competition. Next month the film will be screened at the South Africa International Film Festival.

The movie was financed by Gordon’s father, Kenneth, a retired teacher who is credited as the producer; the director hopes that festival appearances will lead to distribution.

Set and shot in Boston, “Business Is War’’ tells the story of Dennis “Dutty’’ Sykes. Raised by a single welfare mother, he discovers his entrepreneurial savoir-faire early and becomes a kingpin wheeler and dealer. One of his many connections scores him an internship at a Fortune 500 company, and he climbs up through the ranks.

The more Gordon worked on the script, the more he came to view it as a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps American dream story. The details were informed by his experience teaching a film class at New Mission High School in Roxbury.

“There were kids who were selling drugs on the street, and some of them were good business thinkers,’’ he explained. “That got me thinking: How many good businessmen were out there on that corner? There’s a whole other corporate system that exists in any other major city. Those people’s stories go untold because their business is illegitimate, but that minimizes how good their business acumen is.’’

Over time he noticed other clever capitalistic instincts in action. Working in a chain drugstore while taking film classes after graduating from Emerson, he watched a group of kids who bought candy bars they planned to sell in school for a profit. “Snickers bars in school are like cigarettes in jail,’’ he said.

“It was the story line that grabbed me,’’ said Lisa Simmons, the founder of Color of Film, which co-produces the Roxbury Film Festival. She described “Business Is War’’ as “a really well-done piece with an important message, which is that you fight with the struggles of your surroundings and who you’re supposed to be.’’

Living in Roxbury, she said, “I see kids struggle all the time.’’

Simmons predicted that the film’s flashy visual style would attract a young audience. Gordon, who counts video director Hype Williams as a major influence, cut his teeth filming music videos for local hip-hop groups when he started his production company, Media Push Films. That sensibility is evident in the filmmaking, full of frequent cuts, prolonged musical sequences, and dynamic camera angles.

Gordon handpicked Christopher Bennett to play Dutty when he saw Bennett in a fashion show Push Media was hired to shoot. Bennett, a Roxbury native, said he was struck by the script because it challenged stereotypes and brought rarely seen corners of Boston to the screen.

“The fact that it’s about a place I know made it feel comfortable to work on,’’ he said. “Kemal made sure to include every piece of the puzzle to tell the story. It’s a portrait of the city and a character in his surroundings. And by beautiful, that includes all reality - the good, bad, and ugly. There’s no censorship.’’

Rare is the indie film that makes it to the screen without its share of hurdles. Gordon’s main one was personal. In 2002, he was diagnosed with lupus and spent six months on dialysis as preparation for a kidney transplant. His mother was the donor. But when that kidney started to fail, he went back on dialysis. The four-and-a-half-hour treatments three times a week became his time to focus on the film.

“The first time I was on dialysis, I told myself, you’ll have a kidney in six months and you’ll be straight, but when I went back on it after the transplant, it was just ad infinitum, so writing the script became a way to cope.’’

“He was even doing storyboards during treatments,’’ added his wife. “He always used it as creative time.’’

“Business Is War’’ screens at Hibernian Hall, 184 Dudley St., Oct. 30 at 3 and 8 p.m. For tickets ($7), visit www.actroxbury.org.

http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2009/10/25/dorchester_writer_director_brings_new_angle_to_business_is_war/

PHOTO: Emerson graduate and Dorchester native Kemal Gordon built his film around a streetwise kid who makes his way up the ladder in the business world. Christopher Bennett plays the lead role of Dennis “Dutty’’ Sykes. (Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff