BEHIND A MASK : ‘Homeboys’ Movie Offers Gritty View of Fear, Emptiness of Gang Culture

At 14, Eddie’s daily routine starts with two hours of primping and pressing perfect creases in his trousers and T-shirts, and even more hours of “kicking back” in empty lots near his South Los Angeles home with other wanna-be gang members who rarely go to school.

His mother leaves home for work at a minimum-wage job in the garment district at daybreak and does not return until after dark, so for most of the day Eddie is on his own.

Eddie is a junior high school student whom film maker Judy Hecht Dumontet featured in a documentary called “Homeboys,” which offers a rare close look at boys trying to find identity, direction and a sense of belonging in an inner-city gang called Florencia-13.

In the film, Eddie is asked what he wants to be when he grows up.

“I want a job with action,” he says. “I’ll probably be a cop. If I don’t get to be a cop, I’ll be a fireman. If I can’t be none of those, I’ll make my own action--buy a gun and start killing people.”

Real World Victim

On July 3, two months after filming was completed, Eddie was on the receiving end of a shotgun blast fired at close range by a gang member. He is currently in Mexico, at the home of a relative, recovering from shotgun wounds in the stomach.

“They are trying on a mask; it’s how they cope with fear and the emptiness in their lives,” said Dumontet, 28, in an interview at the USC School of Cinema, where she is a student. “Some wear the mask so well and for so long it becomes their face and they become murderers.”

The 30-minute film, most of which chronicles Eddie’s life on 64th Street near Central Avenue, was shown Wednesday to Los Angeles school staff members who work with troubled youths. The staff members decided immediately to use the film to help train teachers and parents to recognize “high-risk behavior” among youths on the precipice of hard-core gang activity.

“We watched the film and there are now loads of teachers who want to start using it at parent meetings,” said Lee Saltz, who is in charge of drug intervention programs for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “For teachers who do not understand the gang problem it was a real eye opener. For staff who see it (the effects of the gangs) on a day-to-day basis it reaffirmed the need for some kind of specific action.”

With Dumontet’s camera rolling, Eddie reveals that he and his friends were born to immigrant parents who speak only Spanish and either don’t work, or work such long hours that they don’t even know what their children wear to school each day. All of them live in the cultural isolation of a ghetto characterized by crumbling stucco homes, grimy shops and junkyards.

In the film’s most provocative scenes, a 14-year-old nicknamed “Bullet” is beaten and kicked in a brutal initiation ritual called a “court-in.” Boys not even old enough to shave brag of being ready to die in defense of their turf. One mother weeps over the memory of two sons killed by their own homeboys, a street-slang term for friend.

Eddie’s mother cries because “I work all day, and when I come home my son is drunk and smoking with friends.”

“These kids are living in a vacuum and can’t see the relevance of going to school or the possibilities of life,” Dumontet said. “At the same time, their parents are being sucked into the mire of the whole gang and drug thing. Even good parents are up against the whole neighborhood, and the neighborhood usually wins.”

At Turning Point

Dumontet said she “deliberately chose to focus on a junior high school student in order to catch a kid at the turning point, before he becomes a hardened gang member.”

“Kids like Eddie are not monsters yet; they are monsters in training,” she said.

The film, which was funded with $10,000 from the Los Angeles school district and $45,000 from the Documentary Film Program at USC, was a six-month work of devotion for Dumontet, a corporate attorney turned film maker who speaks five languages--English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Hungarian--and has lived in countries around the world.

The film will be screened publicly in early November at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, along with other films produced by USC students.

Juana Velazquez Webman, a prosecutor with the Los Angeles city attorney’s anti-gang unit, who has seen a rough cut of the film, praised Dumontet’s film for capturing the overwhelming sense of emptiness in the lives of the youths.

“Judy caught the nuances, exchanges and problems which are the basis of what goes on out there,” Webman said. “She doesn’t moralize or sympathize with their behavior. She does, however, sympathize with the causes of their behavior.”

The petite, smartly dressed Westwood woman hardly seems the type of person who could win the trust and confidence of street toughs. But Dumontet spent months getting to know the youths by taking them on trips to the beach, to the movies and even to her husband’s law office at Tri-Star Pictures in Century City.

Lost Three ‘Stars’

She lost three of her prospective “stars” during that period. One was shot, another was stabbed, but both survived. A third was arrested and taken to Juvenile Hall.

Eddie managed to stay out of trouble, at least for a while.

“Eddie is smart. His mom is a good religious mom trying hard to raise him right,” said Dumontet, who acknowledged developing a big-sister feeling for the boy. “But there’s almost no way she can win over the power of the street.”

Still, Dumontet is convinced that there is hope.

“The key to saving these kids is getting to them while they are still young,” Dumontet said, “and giving them something to get interested in, something to fill the emptiness.

“Right now, Eddie and his friends are being told to ‘just say no to gangs and drugs,’ but it is not as easy as that. We have to give them something other than gangs to say yes to.”