PARK CITY REPORT : Right in the Spotlight : Movies: 19-year-old Matty Rich wrote, acted in and directed ‘Straight Out of Brooklyn,’ a film getting a lot of attention at this festival.

At the Sundance Film Festival, 19-year-old writer-director-actor Matty Rich has been delivering straight answers to the questions that erupt after each showing of his film, “Straight Out of Brooklyn.” Pint-sized and flea weight, peering out from under his red baseball cap through round-rimmed glasses, Rich looks even younger than he is, but his poise is immense.

“I don’t know the answers to the problems (raised) in my movie,” he told the audience after one screening here. “If I did, I’d be doing something about them. I’m just a filmmaker with something to say.”

The legend at the end of his film sums up what he has to say: “Traditions pass from one generation to the next. We need to change.”

What Rich, whose full name is Matthew Satisfield Richardson, wants changed is everything he grew up with in Brooklyn’s Red Hook housing project. Everything he mirrored in his awkward, truthful, agonizing feature film that he somehow got made with a combination of anger, persistence and chutzpah. The death from negligence of his closest friend, who provided the inspiration that Rich himself plays in the film. The death of an aunt and uncle--changed in his screenplay to his character’s father and mother. Rage. Hopelessness. Isolation.

At Red Hook, when he was 6 or 7, the only white family Matty Rich had ever seen was “The Brady Bunch.” Curled up on a festival conference room sofa the next day, Rich grins at the still-fresh memory of that perfect TV family.

“I loved ‘The Brady Bunch.’ Loved them,” he says, his voice warming with emotion. “If they had a problem, they’d sit down and talk it over. Dad would have that family talk with Peter ‘n’ Bobby, or Jan or Gregg.”

In the Richardson Bunch that Rich grew up with, Dad was a Vietnam veteran with re-entry problems. “He drank alcohol, but he never hit my mother like the father in my film. My mother wouldn’t stand for it.”

Still, the last memory Rich had of his father was after “the biggest and last fight they ever had.” Police, called by the neighbors, took his father away in handcuffs. Immediately afterward, his mother--head of a Head Start day care center--moved Matty and his older sister and brother away to the integrated neighborhood of Park Slope, one long bus ride away.

Rich remembers his next-door neighbors as being “very nice. It was the first time I ate at a white person’s house. Otherwise there wasn’t much to do, because nobody else wanted to talk to me. I was going through an identity crisis about just where I did belong, and I was homesick.” Soon, he began sneaking back to Red Hook, to visit his one close friend, Lamont Logan.

Then, while in junior high school, Rich saw a TV movie called “Sophisticated Gents”--about the reunion of a handful of men who’d grown up together in Harlem--and something inside him clicked. He persuaded his mother to bring him books from the library on filmmaking and after committing much of them to memory, he announced he was adding filmmaker to a list of career options that already included priest and lawyer. Since directing is a little of all three, he may have succeeded across the board.

Meanwhile, Rich and Lamont hung out together, naming themselves the “Cap Brothers,” in honor of the one gold-capped tooth in Matty’s mouth and the two in Lamont’s. Shy with everyone else, the two talked incessantly--about girls, bikes, clothes. Then, one afternoon Lamont showed up with a new Moped, and a neighborhood policeman stopped to ask him about it. Before he knew what was happening, Rich saw the Moped and Lamont disappear into a police van; the Cap Brothers never saw each other again.

Lamont called and wrote from Spotford Prison for Juveniles, but Rich never visited him there. “I was too afraid to go to a junior prison,” he says, admitting feeling both sick and guilty about not going. The guilt was multiplied later when a friend told Rich that Lamont had died in prison of kidney failure.

On the heels of that tragedy, Rich’s aunt and uncle died within hours of each other; his aunt from a heart attack, her husband shot by a robber on his way to the hospital.

“For the first time, I saw my family totally collapse, and when you’re young you run on emotions,” Rich says. “I blamed it all on the white society, they should never have put Lamont (in prison).”

It was a deeply angry Matty Rich who was graduated from high school at 16, and who went on to John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But “Straight Out of Brooklyn” was pressing to be born. He transferred to NYU’s Film School, where he left after just two months. They taught him to put his story down in script style; it was all he wanted to know.

“I told my mother I didn’t want to sit here and rot like every other black man.”

Rich began his 35-millimeter film with money he and his sister Candace drew from their credit cards, a total of $13,000. The cast came from non-professionals who responded to an ad he and his mother placed in Backstage magazine. The film was shot during evenings, after everyone finished their regular jobs, but the money quickly ran out.

At the suggestion of Allen Black, the businessman-husband of one of his actresses, Rich edited a 15-minute segment of the film and talked WLIB, New York’s black talk station, into helping him promote screenings of it. “I told them how I wanted to make a movie and better my people and they came through for me.”

Screenings of that and subsequent excerpts raised an amazing $70,000, enough to finish the filming. But they were still in need of post-production money when a veteran film director, intrigued by the sign on their door: “Straight Out of Brooklyn: What you don’t want to hear. What you don’t want to say. What you don’t want to see”--dropped in on them.

Filmmaker Jonathan Demme (“Something Wild,” “Married to the Mob”) liked what Rich had done and brought it up with Ira Deutchman’s independent production company. From there, it went to Lindsay Law and PBS’ “American Playhouse.”

“They gave me $250,000 to finish post-production, and here I am,” says Rich. “I matured a lot doing this movie. When I started it I hated everybody. Then I met good people and bad people, of every color. I decided you can’t judge people by color or class--you have to judge them individually. I’m still angry, but I’m angry with black people too, for how they treat themselves and their community.”

Anger isn’t visible when Rich faces audiences, although he may be getting just a little tired of hearing his age mentioned as part of his name.

“It’s not just because I’m 19,” he sighs. “It’s because I did a film that came from the heart and had something to say. I didn’t come here (to Sundance) to compete; I came here to have my film seen. It’s very positive and it tells you what not to do.

“I want young people--black and white--to understand, you can do it. Now! You don’t have to wait until you’re 25. What they have to have is persistence. That’s what got this film done. Persistence.”

For the next film already forming in his head, a story set in the South from the 1940s to the 1960s, a film he thinks will be the true test of his ability, Rich will have a little extra persistence on his side. Here at Sundance he’s been signed by the William Morris Agency, very persistent people indeed.