Hanging Out With ‘The Homeboys’ : Movies: In the flood of films detailing the down side of the minority experience, Joe Vasquez has documented a less deadly and rarely acknowledged aspect of ghetto life.

“Hangin’ With the Homeboys” opens with three menacing hoodlums--two Puerto Rican, one black--loudly and aggressively picking a fight with another young black man on a New York subway. As the brawl escalates, the white passengers hug their purses, hide their jewelry and cower in the corner of the train. After a few seconds of smashing each other on the floor, the thugs leap laughing to their feet and thank their terrified audience for attending another performance of “ghetto theater.”

“That is something that me and my friends used to do,” said Joe Vasquez, the film’s writer and director, who based the story on his own youthful escapades with his South Bronx buddies. “But besides that, I put it at the beginning because this is what people expect from a movie called ‘Hanging with the Homeboys’ about two black guys and two Puerto Ricans. They expect them to smoke crack. They expect them to fight. So to start it out with this gag is to say, ‘Look. This is what you want. But it really isn’t like that.’ ”

In this year of the African-American director, where stories of gangs, racism and drug abuse in such movies as “Straight Out of Brooklyn,” “Jungle Fever,” “New Jack City” and “Boyz N the Hood” essentially have been all the black urban experience Hollywood has cared or dared to portray, Vasquez’s film stands out for documenting a less deadly and rarely acknowledged side of ghetto living.

Not that “Hanging With the Homeboys,” opening Friday, is some Pollyanna portrait of racial harmony and the easy life. Poverty reigns, racism thrives and drug dealers slither on the periphery. But within the framework that other films and media reports have dubbed as the ghetto experience, individuals muddle through the day; four friends come of age as a result of a unifying experience just as their white counterparts do in “Stand By Me” or “Diner.”

“That dangerous element is there, but it’s a matter of whether you get involved in it or not,” Vasquez said. “I came from this wild neighborhood but I turned out OK. People think that everything is black and white. It’s all bad, all gangs and drugs. It’s not.”

(Ironically, Vasquez, 29, was the victim of a gruesome knife attack while riding the subway to the set of the nonviolent “Homeboys.” What he called a “cracked out homeless guy” tried to rob him, and when he resisted, Vasquez said, his attacker pulled out a knife and slashed him from his forehead to the bottom of his nose. He points out, however, that in all his years living in the supposedly violent South Bronx, he was never assaulted. “This happened in Manhattan,” Vasquez said, bitterly pointing to the scars on his face.)

In 1989, Vasquez himself tackled violence head on, directing an unreleased film, “Bronx War,” about the drug violence between blacks and Puerto Rican gangs. Janet Grillo, executive producer of “Homeboys” and an executive at New Line Cinema, said that even in “Bronx War,” which she described as a “straight to video action exploitation film,” Vasquez distinguished himself as a “raw, compelling and original voice.” New Line promptly put up $2 million for “Homeboys.”

“Homeboys” originally was scheduled to open earlier this summer, but was pushed back, Grillo acknowledged, in part over New Line’s fear that the media reports of violence at theaters showing “Boyz N the Hood” might scare audiences from this film as well. The film did open for a short run in New York, mistakenly marketed, Grillo said, as another “House Party,” which lured many young adolescents who went away disappointed by the film’s lack of rap music and silly party humor.

The son of a black mother and Puerto Rican father who was raised by his Puerto Rican grandparents, Vasquez admits that one of the biggest problems his new film faces is that it bucks convention, eschewing big social dilemmas and the howls for peace and against drugs that come at the end of many black films. Sara Risher, New Line’s president of production, acknowledged that the media hype and the grand themes of such movies as “Boyz N the Hood” and “Do the Right Thing” make many white filmgoers feel obligated to see them. A film about minority characters like “Homeboys”-- which tackles more personal themes like friendship, fears, self-esteem, rage and girl troubles as it chronicles a madcap night out “with the fellas”--doesn’t evoke the same “must see” obligation.

Risher contended, however, that it is just as vital for audiences of any color “to see that black and Hispanic kids lead all sorts of lifestyles. In this film they confront racism every day, both from each other and from the white world, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to violence and the extreme lives we see in some of these other films . . . (Lacking controversy), we’re counting on the heart and humor of this film to bring people to it.”

“This is an authentic, truthful story that allows me, a white girl from New Jersey, a chance to spend a night out with guys I would never know,” Grillo argued. “We all ride the subways together and we might rub elbows down at the corner market, but we don’t really know each other. And to tell the truth, the one thing I seek when I chose a movie is the opportunity to go somewhere I can’t go on my own.”

Vasquez, who won an award for the screenplay at the Sundance Film Festival and has garnered major honors this summer at festivals in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Deauville, France, said he wanted to explore racial issues without banging his audience over the head with self-righteousness. One of his black characters rants incessantly that he is broke because society oppresses the black man. He even accuses other blacks of holding him down. While his shtick is funny, his friends soon come to realize that he is a victim of nothing except his own fear and laziness.

“But I think what I most want people to see, especially the white audience, is that if you saw these four guys walking toward you on the street, you’d probably be terrified and run the other way,” Vasquez said. “But as you get to know them in the film, even though they might talk like, ‘yo man what’s up with that,’ you see that there is nothing to be terrified about. They are just regular guys.”

Vasquez got hooked on film at 12 when a cousin gave him an 8mm movie camera. That camera soon consumed his life. “My family would say, ‘Man, for a guy from a poor family, you sure picked the wrong profession’ because I was always begging for money to shoot. My brothers needed money for shoes, and I’d say, ‘Forget the shoes, I want to shoot.’ I’d write these little stories. I’d go see ‘Shaft’ and I’d make my own ‘Shaft.’ Then I’d see ‘Superfly’ and I’d make ‘Shaft meets Superfly.’ Then I’d see ‘The Exorcist’ and I’d make ‘Shaft and Superfly Meet the Exorcist.’ ”

Vasquez attended film school at Harlem’s City College of New York, and then self-financed a $30,000 film called “Street Story” about two Puerto Rican brothers and their black best friends. He also worked as a commercial editor before making “Bronx War.”

Currently, Vasquez said he is awaiting a green light on several projects, including two scripts of his own. The major Hollywood studios, awash in their recent embrace of black stories--but, Vasquez said, not Hispanic ones--also have been sending him scripts. Vasquez said that he hopes to explore further his own biracial heritage and experiences, but he is wary of being pigeonholed as a “street” director. Holding up a Hollywood script he’d just read, he said: “This one is titled ‘Street Racer.’ I have another called ‘Street Food’ and another called ‘Street something else.’ It gets pathetic.”

* A HELPING HAND

Warner Bros. gives $100,000 to the New York-based Black Filmmaker Foundation to help the organization expand its activities to Los Angeles. F7