Neighborly ‘Hood

The San Fernando Valley isn’t the first place you think of as a base for African American filmmakers, but that’s where 24-year-old Anita Cal lives.

When the young filmmaker set out to script her first feature, she knew all the stereotypes, and she wanted to avoid them.

“People think we all live in the ‘hood, that we’re all on drugs, that we’re all uneducated--and that’s not true,” Cal said.

“Basically, what I wanted to do was to give a more well-rounded picture of what black families are like.”

The result is “Parental Guidance,” a feature film that Cal describes as “a black ‘Parenthood,’ seen through the eyes of the kids.” About 85% completed, the comedy-drama is set in South Central L.A. But, in contrast to many black-themed films, it features a family with both parents in residence. There are no drive-by shootings. And, while drugs and gangs are alluded to, the film is more concerned with the universal foibles of families than with neighborhood violence.

Cal’s work is grounded in her own experience growing up in Seattle. In her view, and that of fellow producers Lisa Washington and Karl Epps II, who are also African American, Hollywood has failed to show the diversity in the black community. There are all kinds of African American families, Cal said. All three of them, for instance, are the educated children of educated parents who encouraged their children to dream big dreams and make them come true.

“Without our parents, we wouldn’t be here,” said Cal, who studied journalism and screenwriting at Cal State Northridge. “We wouldn’t be the people we are. We wouldn’t be strong enough to face the adversity and fight through it.”

The film is the trio’s first feature and the biggest project any had ever undertaken. Besides producing, Cal wrote the script, her first to be filmed. Washington, 34, who lives next door to Cal in Sherman Oaks, raised most of the money and is executive producer. She also has a music production company that will do the soundtrack. Coproducer Epps, 30, who lives in Culver City, directed.

The trio did their own casting, coped when their male lead backed out the day before shooting began, cadged money to feed the cast and crew and occasionally did the cooking. Currently, they are taking meetings with studio executives, trying to get money to complete the film and to get a distributor.

Getting “Parental Guidance” to near-completion has been an education, they said. It has also been exhilarating, exhausting and left them, according to Epps, “broke as a joke.” The three, who call their production company Pen & Paper FilmWorks, decline to say just how much they have sunk into the movie. Potential distributors tend to pigeonhole a film according to its budget, Washington explained. But they are looking for another $150,000 to $200,000 to make the movie theater-ready.

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Washington, who owned record stores in her native Richmond, Va., and had experience as a concert promoter, put together an investment proposal and approached people who had invested in her music projects in Richmond. The rest of the investors, Cal said, “were the moms, the dads, the grandmas and a couple of attorneys.” Then the filmmakers got out their credit cards. Cal said she put $15,000 on her cards alone (“Don’t tell Visa”). At one point, Cal was so broke she found herself a dime short for a 69-cent taco at what had become her usual place to dine. “Believe me,” she said, “the people at the Taco Bells know me.”

“Parental Guidance” is the story of young Sean Green, who is reluctant to bring his aristocratic girlfriend home to South Central for Christmas because he’s embarrassed by his family. Sean has not yet learned that the term dysfunctional family is redundant and that virtually everyone has relatives as flawed as his foulmouthed and extremely fertile sister, Nikki, and his older brother, Raymond, a banker. The latter is described in the synopsis as a man “who thinks he’s Wally Cleaver and is married to a stuck-up woman who thinks she’s a black Princess Di.”

The filmmakers are thrilled with the quality of their cast. As Epps pointed out, the group was aware that a good cast would make or break the film and devoted three months to casting. “We waited for the right people to come through the door,” said Epps, who learned his craft in television and made the movie on a waiver from the Directors Guild of America, allowing him to work for less than scale.

Maia Campbell, who played Debbie Allen’s daughter on “In the House,” the NBC sitcom that starred LL Cool J, signed on to play Sean’s girlfriend. Washington recalled that Campbell was so down to Earth, despite her TV success and a burgeoning singing career, that she was willing to come to Washington’s apartment to audition. “In Living Color” veteran Casey Lee was cast as Sean. The company also had a waiver from the Screen Actors Guild.

Everything that could go wrong did, according to Cal. On the first day of shooting on a downtown sound stage, a $5,000 lens broke. “The first day our film was over budget,” Cal recalled with a laugh. One time, when the hair and makeup person failed to show up on time, the actors made themselves up, sharing their supplies. Each time a problem developed, the producers would repair to the parking lot or even form a huddle in the street so the cast and crew couldn’t overhear their sometimes contentious brainstorming.

“It was guerrilla movie-making,” said Cal. For all the problems, the trio also had some breaks. The grandmother of one of the actors allowed her house to be used as a location. The sound-stage management felt so sorry for the group, what with the broken lens and the actor who backed out, that they gave the filmmakers three extra days for free.

In recent weeks, until the Cannes Film Festival emptied the Hollywood studios, the three have been shopping their film around. Their rule is that they will offer their work-in-progress only to studios that are willing to meet with them in person. So far, those have included Orion, New Line and 20th Century Fox.

African American executives seem to be especially responsive to the team’s more upbeat view of life in the ‘hood. “I admire what they’ve done,” said Martin Jones, an executive vice president of production at United Image Entertainment, a studio that specializes in black-themed material. Despite the filmmakers’ lack of previous experience, he said, “they’ve brought it into the homestretch. Now they need that final bit of adrenaline and cash.” Jones said he was so impressed with Lee’s work in the film that he is considering him for a spring-break movie the studio is about to announce.

Making the movie was tough, but well worth it, the team said.

“I’d go through the good, the bad and the ugly again,” said Washington. “You learn from the negative and grow from the positive.”

Washington said she has come to view the making of “Parental Guidance” as an act of faith. “That’s basically what it is--believing in God, believing in yourself and believing in the project.”