COVER STORY : Lights! Camera! Access! : Film Training Program Gives Troubled Youth a 2nd Chance

Judy Brandon was controlled by drugs and alcohol. Ellis Ware was in prison for robbery and drug possession. Carlos De La Torre was gangbanging. Mortez Bradley sold rock cocaine--for every piece he sold, he’d chip off a sliver for himself.

All four are now putting in long hours as production assistants on feature films, television shows, commercials and music videos. They owe their jobs to the Hollywood-based Streetlights Production Assistant Program, which for two years has been helping troubled young people turn their lives around by training them for jobs on movie and television shoots.

Dorothy Thompson, a producer of television commercials, founded the program after the 1992 riots as a way to combat unemployment and other problems in disadvantaged areas of Los Angeles. She has run the program for two years on a shoestring budget of about $40,000 by dipping into her savings accounts and using credit cards, and through small donations from colleagues.

She said that, in the past, she had assumed that “someone” would do something to relieve the problems that ignited the riot. “Then it struck me, most of us feel that way,” Thompson said. “I would look around the commercial sets, and there were no Hispanics or blacks working as production assistants. I knew it was because they didn’t have an open door. And I thought, ‘Maybe I can be the open door.’ ”

Bradley, Brandon, De La Torre and Ware, all in their 20s or early 30s, are among the 27 people that the program has trained for careers in a business notorious for being hard to break into.

Thompson has recruited most of the trainees through social service organizations such as the Amer-I-Can jobs program, run by former football star Jim Brown, and Father Gregory Boyle’s Jobs for a Future program in East Los Angeles.

They work in entry-level jobs as production assistants, moving from set to set as employment becomes available. The jobs are not glamorous. They get coffee for producers, send faxes, photocopy scripts and sweep up, among other chores. The trainees all work on non-union productions, receiving an average of $150 per day. One Streetlights alumnus works as a second assistant director, making about $300 per day.

Every success story, Thompson says, justifies her struggle.