For Writer-Director, Film Reflects a Past Gridlock of His Own

You’d think that by now Vondie Curtis Hall has seen the inside of enough emergency rooms to last a lifetime.

On CBS’ “Chicago Hope,” the experienced character actor plays the sometimes brooding, always driven Dr. Dennis Hancock, an important member of a staff that’s prepared to deal with a host of medical emergencies at a moment’s notice. Last year, Curtis Hall earned an Emmy nomination on NBC’s “ER” for his portrayal of a suicidal transsexual.

But for “Gridlock’d,” his writing and directing debut, which opens today, he returns to familiar territory: hospital corridors. The film depicts the darkly comedic escapades of two heroin-addicted musicians, Stretch (Tim Roth) and Spoon (slain rapper Tupac Shakur), as they move from one medical waiting room to another, thwarted by red tape at every turn in their bid to detoxify.

Curtis Hall says elements of this story really happened to him--24 years ago, when he was a 16-year-old musician growing up in Detroit.

“In retrospect, it’s amazing that I’m sitting here talking to you,” he says.

The dapper actor, dressed in a casual yet elegant black sweater, sits in the immaculate surroundings of the Mondrian Hotel’s Cocopazzo restaurant, contrasting the grim details of that adolescent experience with his current plush surroundings.

“So many of my friends from back then have died,” he says, his normally cheerful demeanor turned somewhat somber. “Even my friend who I based Stretch on, he’s dead now. He OD’d on the way to California to get into rehab.”

Curtis Hall, who grew up middle class in west Detroit as the eldest son of a construction worker and a nurse, was an intelligent yet rebellious youth. Although jazz and blues reigned in his house, he found his voice as a guitarist and vocalist amid the hard-driving sound of Detroit’s punk-rock scene and was heavily influenced by the music of Iggy Pop and other hard-core acts.

He says things took an unsavory turn when members of his music scene, like many of the more famous rockers they idolized, began using hard drugs. Curtis Hall remembers being at a house party where one of his peers pulled out a bag of heroin and urged everyone to try it (an event described in the film by Shakur’s character).

“We shot up that night,” Curtis Hall says. “It was really a competitive thing we did, to be accepted. In order to compete, we thought, we figured we needed the tools to compete with others that were pushing the edge, to play faster, write better songs and sing better. That meant using smack.”

He says that he was never a heavy heroin user and had quit altogether by the time he graduated from high school in 1974, at age 17--but not without some tribulations. To clean up, Curtis Hall says he and a friend went to hospitals and other public detoxification programs and were pushed from one desk to another--a situation he plays to humorous effect in “Gridlock’d.” The hardest part, he says, was getting help, not actually quitting.

“I was living at home and I didn’t want [my parents] to know about it,” Curtis Hall says. “Because of that I had no address to list on the forms. My friend didn’t have a Social Security card. We were like these two homeless kids, running through this maze. You have a small window of time, or you’ll never kick.” (Efforts to reach Curtis Hall’s parents, who live in Detroit, were unsuccessful.)

But Curtis Hall kicked and never looked back. After graduating from high school and dissociating himself from his old crowd, he moved to New York City at 20 to enroll in Juilliard’s prestigious music program, studying voice.

He left Juilliard three years later (“After I figured out that I didn’t want to be an opera singer,” he quips), to become a Broadway singer and dancer in 1980 for “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music.”

(Around this time he began dating actress-writer Kasi Lemmons, who recently made her directing debut on “Eve’s Bayou” starring Samuel L. Jackson and Lynn Whitfield. After 15 years of courtship, they were married last year, and Lemmons recently gave birth to their first child, Henry. Curtis Hall also has a 17-year-old son, Che, from a previous relationship.)

But soon he found his true creative passion.

“Seeing Spike Lee’s ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ really inspired me to become a filmmaker,” he says.

“I was about to make a career change, because there was no money in Broadway, and there was a lull from the late ‘70s to mid-’80s in terms of opportunities for blacks behind the camera in Hollywood,” he says. “Seeing Spike’s movie made me say, ‘I want to do this, and I’ll even do it without Hollywood if I have to.’ ”

Curtis Hall later appeared in Lee’s “Crooklyn” and also appeared in the films “Heaven’s Prisoners,” “Broken Arrow” and “William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.” He also appeared in the TV series “I’ll Fly Away,” “A Man Called Hawk” and “South Central,” all the while learning more about the craft of directing and developing his own stories.

Curtis Hall wrote “Gridlock’d” in 1993 while studying with an American Film Institute workshop. He had planned to direct and star, but after his agent read it and liked it, they decided on two tried and true Hollywood rules: “Never self-finance, and cast a star.”

“I sent it to Tim Roth, who at the time was doing ‘Rob Roy,’ ” Curtis Hall says. “The day he completed filming, he read it, called me back and said, ‘I loved it.’ ”

Later, they took the project to Live Entertainment, PolyGram Films and Def Pictures, a PolyGram subsidiary.

In late 1995, after Laurence Fishburne and other actors had passed, Def Pictures President Preston Holmes brought up Shakur’s name.

“Pac had just gotten out of jail [after a 1995 sexual abuse conviction in New York] and no one wanted to touch him,” Curtis Hall says. “But Preston, who had known Tupac since he was a child, said that he was a professional, and nothing like the perception Hollywood had of him. I met him, liked him, hooked him up with Tim, and there was immediate chemistry.”

Several of Shakur’s lines in “Gridlock’d” have an eerily prophetic ring in light of his death after a Sept. 7 ambush shooting in Las Vegas.

“My luck’s runnin’ out,” he says to Roth when his character decides that the two should kick heroin together.

Shakur, whose songs often dealt with his own demise, never got to see the completed film.

“The last time I talked to him, he said to me, ‘Suge [Knight] told me the movie was great. I’m going to the MTV Music Awards, I’m going to Vegas to see Mike [Tyson] fight, and I’ll come and see it on Monday.’ He was shot on Sunday,” Curtis Hall says.

“He always thought he was going to die young; he got shot in New York five times and didn’t die, so he figured every moment could be his last. He’d always said, ‘I’m not going to be living long enough to sit around smoking a pipe, falling asleep in front of the TV.’ ”

John Singleton, who was a close friend of Shakur’s and directed the rapper-actor in 1993’s “Poetic Justice,” said he was touched both by Curtis Hall’s film and Shakur’s performance.

“Vondie turned out an excellent film,” Singleton says during a break from marketing preparations on his upcoming film “Rosewood.” “It’s really sad. When you see ‘Gridlock’d,’ you only begin to see [Shakur’s] full potential as an actor. He was still growing, and he still had a lot to offer.”

Thinking about Shakur, Curtis Hall says: “When you work on a film you become family, but when he passed, it made me suddenly realize just how much I had come to care about him. I think the performance he gave in this film leaves a great legacy. To know Tupac was to love him.”