Reality, Cinema Meet With a Metaphorical ‘Slam’

Two hours before they won the Sundance Film Festival’s coveted Grand Jury Prize in January, the cast of “Slam” burst through the door of their condominium, showering snow on the floor. Director Marc Levin, playing the role of Dad, listened with amusement as they talked about Bonz Malone, a former convict and one of the group’s authorities on prison life, who hit three trees on his snowmobile--while wearing an impeccable suit.

“Runs into trees and doesn’t get a wrinkle,” Saul Williams, the dreadlocked star of “Slam,” said admiringly.

The ski slopes and trendy shops of Park City, Utah, are a world away from the milieu of “Slam,” which is set in a housing project in Washington, D.C., and a D.C. prison. (The film opens today; see the review on F5.)

The story follows Ray (Williams), a small-time pot dealer who composes spoken-word poetry known as “slamming,” a sort of cousin to rap, tightly structured and heavily metaphorical. Ray’s busted after a shooting and sent to prison, where his poetic gifts astound gang leaders and attract the interest of a volunteer writing teacher, Lauren (Sonja Sohn).

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Bailed out by one of the leaders (Malone), Ray gets together with Lauren and has to mend fences between warring gangs and decide whether to skip out. Throughout the film, audiences are treated to Ray’s dazzling spoken-word performances, sometimes done at poetry contests known as slams.

Not that it should make any difference, but Williams, Malone and the rest of the cast is black and Levin is white. The director had to convince his cast that he was the right man for the job; some had to overcome their own preconceptions.

“You can tell when someone is being honest,” Williams said. “And of course I have ancestors talking to me like, ‘Watch out, you don’t want to be Bessie Smith, an artist who doesn’t get the proper appreciation financially,’ whatever. But a lot of the time when you have issues, it’s you and not what you put them on. I did a lot of internal growth where I learned to trust a bit more and realize that people live up to your expectations.”

Levin, 47, can also say that the film grew out of his own experiences. As a documentary filmmaker, he’s spent time with street gangs (both black and white) and in prisons (including death row), making such films as HBO’s “Gang War: Bangin’ in Little Rock.”

It was while filming a documentary that he met Malone, who was in Rikers Island, a New York City jail, on a vandalism (graffiti) charge. They kicked around the idea of doing a fictional film based on Malone’s life, but when Levin finally got around to it, Malone, who has since become a columnist for Vibe magazine, was back in jail. That’s when Williams was brought in.

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Levin had attended a poetry slam and thought Malone’s story could be told through a poet. The project became a collaboration involving Levin, Malone (who was released from Rikers Island in time to act in the film), Williams (who wrote the poetry that his character speaks), Sohn (who also composed her own poetry) and co-producer Richard Stratton (who served eight years in prison for drug smuggling).

The film also features other assorted cons and ex-cons, including the kid who freestyles, or improvises, with Ray from an adjacent prison cell. At the time of filming, the inmate was up on a murder charge and facing 50 to 75 years in prison. Ray’s prosecutor is played by a guy who was in prison for 20 years before being pardoned by then-President Gerald Ford. And, in a piece of casting that drew some boos from Sundance audiences, Washington Mayor Marion Berry, himself an ex-con, presides over Ray’s preliminary hearing.

With all these experts vetting the film, there is still at least one scene that viewers might not believe; in it Ray defuses a prison-yard gang fight with a rapid-fire spoken-word performance. It was Stratton, who had a large part in developing the project, who pressed for the scene.

The filmmakers decided to see if the idea would really work by sneaking Williams into a prison as a production assistant on a documentary Levin was shooting. “All these kids. . . . They were serving murder-one charges,” recalled Williams. “So they were freestyling, rhyming, and Marc looks at me, I look at him and we’re like, OK, this is the testing ground.

“So I get into the cipher. The cipher is the circle where people freestyle. When someone stopped rhymin’, I came in. The cool thing about it is when I was done, they were like, ‘Southside!’ ”

In other words, Williams was so good that the young prisoners claimed him as one of their own, from southeast D.C. Actually, Williams, 26, is from Newburgh, N.Y., the son of a pastor and a schoolteacher. He is anything but a street hood, having received a master of fine arts degree in drama from New York University and having been awarded the Grand Slam championship at New York’s Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe. (After one Sundance screening, Williams performed and brought down the house.)

“My poems are my mantras,” he said. “I’m reciting poetry in my head right now. I’m always writing. I remember while we were snowmobiling today, all the different things going through my head, and I was trying to see what the snowmobile was a metaphor for. The way that I ride the snowmobile is the way that I deal with women. I’m thinking: Wow, that’s deep.”

Levin had to trim his and Sohn’s spoken-word performances, which at first angered Williams, though he says he’s now satisfied with the cut. And there were other, more thematic issues that had to be addressed.

For example, Levin says, there was debate about whether Ray should be busted for dealing marijuana or crack. They chose the former in part because 75% of the cases in a local court were pot-related. As the film makes clear, Levin and his collaborators believe that this punitive approach to minor drug offenses misses the point.

“When you go into these jails and these prisons, they’re filled with people who are small-time dealers who are basically supporting their habit and their life. Rarely do you meet the big-time heavyweight,” Levin said.

“But we just wanted to make the character sympathetic. We didn’t want to get into the polemics of the drug war. We wanted people to feel, Hey, there are people who maybe are guilty of a small crime, but what are we doing?

“As Ray says, ‘Yeah, OK, I did it, but what are they doing to me? Which is the greater evil?’ ”