She’s Gotta Have It : Armed with her own script, supportive friends and equipment on loan, ‘Moesha’s’ Sheryl Lee Ralph is making a movie--sometimes just 10 minutes at a time.

For much of the morning, Sheryl Lee Ralph has had a determined, don’t-talk-to-me-unless-you-have-something-important-to-say look on her face. But this moment is different. Right now, Ralph is loose and smiling. “Everybody stop what you’re doing for a sec and come close,” Ralph says. “Y’all got to come close, you know I need that vibe.”

Ralph and her crew are about to begin filming a 10-minute scene from “Secrets,” a movie she wrote and is directing, producing and co-starring in under her Island Girl production banner. Taping was supposed to have started a few weeks ago, but a nearby bomb scare wiped out production for that day. Now, with a lot of rescheduling, the filmmakers are about to spend another Saturday trying again, at the Sunset Gower sound stages in West Hollywood.

“My hat--my whole head--is off to you,” Ralph says. After giving a few words of inspiration, Ralph thanks the cast and crew repeatedly for their help. As she finishes, Ralph gets those clustered around--50 or so people--to stretch their hands toward her.

“Hands in, nails in,” says Ralph, who has been at the set since 7 a.m. helping with makeup, camera blocking and rehearsing. Together, the circle yells, “One, two, three . . . ‘Secrets’!”

Suddenly, the once businesslike atmosphere of the set becomes more like that of the home crowd at a sporting event: The feeling of camaraderie is palpable.

A number of forces drive the people behind “Secrets,” the story of several African American female friends with echoes of “Waiting to Exhale”: friendship, a sense of working together for a common good. One force that is noticeably absent, though, is money.

Only 10 minutes of “Secrets” is being filmed on this day because that’s all that Ralph and friends can afford. “Secrets” does not have the backing of a studio, so there is little money to work with.

Luckily, this scene doesn’t need much funding. All of the actresses--Tina Lifford, Robin Givens, Victoria Rowell, LaTonya Richardson and Alfre Woodard, as well as Ralph--are donating their time. Much of the crew is working free. The equipment, as well as the sound stage and set, are all on loan from people associated with “Moesha,” the show on which Ralph plays mom Dee Mitchell.

Rather than simply submit her script about a group of African American female friends to Hollywood, Ralph decided to try something else: In the spirit of African American filmmakers like Spike Lee and Robert Townsend, she would provide prospective studio backers with not only a script but also with the proof, in the form of a short tape, that the film could be made, and made well.

“There was just one too many articles about how rough it is for the black actress out there,” Ralph says. “It got to the point where I said, ‘Hold up. Put your money where your mouth is, girl, and go for it.’

“I’m sure the more conventional thing is to first of all hope and pray that you can get an agent, hope and pray you can get somebody to read [your script], hope and pray it won’t end up at the bottom of somebody’s stack,” Ralph says. Instead, she said to herself, “Let me pull together some of the best actresses I can think of, let me get this set, let me get some of the best crew and friends and folks that I know. Let me show [Hollywood] this is possible.”

After Ralph wrote “Secrets,” she phoned friends Givens, Rowell and Woodard. Woodard suggested she speak to Richardson and another friend said she should talk to Lifford.

“I was touched that she wanted me to read it and give my critique,” Rowell says. “I told her it was wonderful and it was a poignant idea. . . . I was interested in it not only on a personal level but on a professional level as well.”

Ralph then spoke to members of the “Moesha” crew. “Henry Chan, who directs most of ‘Moesha,’ said, ‘I’m going to be your creative backup. I’ll be there for you.’ Our director of photography said to me, ‘Hey, we’re there for you. Just don’t be afraid. If you get stuck yell, ‘cause we’ve got your back.’ ”

“You have to be radical sometimes just so it gets done,” Richardson says. “This is pretty major that all these people are here doing all of this and have combined their efforts in such a professional way.”

Givens says she was attracted to “Secrets” not only because of her friendship with Ralph but because of the film’s story line: It wasn’t just another African American movie dealing with “hip-hop issues.”

In “Secrets,” six best friends come together when one of them is about to get married. The evening before the wedding, Ralph’s character reveals that her husband has left her for another man. The characters deal with issues like AIDS and homosexuality, among others.

“It’s an intelligent script,” Givens says. “It’s contemporary. And I think you really see black people in a different way and in a different light. A lot of times [in Hollywood] you only see black people portrayed in one particular way. Movies like ‘Booty Call’ and ‘Don’t Be a Menace to Society’ don’t get to the real-life issues that all people are going through.”

The problem, Ralph says, is not just with the lack of quality scripts for African Americans but with scripts for black women. “There are too few good films, too few good roles, and there’s not a lot of a chance to step to the forefront,” Ralph says. “You are usually the girlfriend, the mistress, the one in the background. You’re not the one to shine. Well, now is the time to shine.”

“It’s hard to get a film made about black people and certainly about black women,” Rowell says. “It’s really a homogenized industry. And it doesn’t really depict what we’re about here in this country. ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ I think, was a fluke.”

When Ralph set out to start the project, she thought back to some advice that Robert De Niro (to whom she also sent the script) had given her when they worked together on the 1992 film “Mistress.”

“I remember once Robert said, ‘Sheryl, you’ve got to do it all, girl. You’ve got to climb that mountain, wave the red flag and let them know you’re there.’ And you know, I just put it in the back of my mind.” With De Niro’s help, Ralph was recently able to meet with Tribeca Films head Jane Rosenthal about “Secrets.” The studio is one of the first that will see the completed scene, in a few weeks.

Says Woodard: “[Ralph] is the kind of person that you know will always find a way for whatever it is. I was listening to her give her pep talk and I was just thinking, ‘This girl could make an army move.’ Because here we are: We’re tired. . . . I’ve worked all week. And suddenly she said that little speech and I was like, ‘All right, yeah! I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world.’ ”