‘Basketball’ Director Now Shoots to Score Off the Court

If we were talking about a movie, the scenario would look something like this: Basketball champ chokes during big game. Suffers crisis of confidence. Rallies. Gets back on the court. Saves the day. Wins the game.

Except life never quite works out that way. Which means that when basketball champ Gina Prince-Bythewood flubs the big game, she never rallies. Never goes back to save the day. Avoids basketball.

Instead, she studies film and wins a contract with a Hollywood studio--to make a movie about basketball.

“Love and Basketball,” written and directed by Prince-Bythewood, produced by Spike Lee and starring Sanaa Lathan, Omar Epps, Alfre Woodard and Debbi Morgan, opened Friday and grossed $8.1 million--a pretty good showing for the low-budget film, estimated to cost $10 million to $15 million to make.

Prince-Bythewood would love to be out doing publicity for the film, but she’s got a movie to make for HBO: Terry McMillan’s “Disappearing Acts,” with Lathan and Wesley Snipes.

So instead, Prince-Bythewood is strapped into the back of a truck one chilly April day, bone-tired and missing her husband, staring into a monitor and muttering into a walkie-talkie as the truck drives back and forth, back and forth across the Brooklyn Bridge. The cameras roll while actress Lathan looks out the window and silently emotes. Making movies is like this. Stop. Start. Stop. Start. Hold up traffic. Look at your watch and freak because it’s 2:40 and you don’t quite have the shot and you’ve got to be off the bridge by 3.

But making movies doesn’t usually feature a director who’s young (30), black, female, baby-faced and sporting pigtails, who giggles with her star between takes.

“We’re good friends,” Prince-Bythewood says of Lathan. But getting there took some doing.

Admits the director: “I basically had to put her through hell. There were days she hated me and I hated her.”

Prince-Bythewood needed a strong actor to play Monica, the heroine of “Basketball,” a love story about two talented jocks who love each other but don’t know how to put aside the competition. And that actor had to look as if she was playing WNBA-quality ball.

Lathan, last seen in Malcolm Lee’s “The Best Man,” didn’t know the first thing about dribbling.

Lathan hired a coach to teach her the game and practiced daily for hours. But Prince-Bythewood wouldn’t give her the role until she was convinced that she could shoot some hoops. And for a long time, she wasn’t convinced.

You try playing ball in front of a woman who knows how to play and is still mad at herself because she isn’t playing.

“I knew I was right for the part. But it got to be emotionally abusive. She was stringing me along,” says Lathan. “But I totally understand that she had to be sure. She really knew what she wanted. She had a very clear vision.”

But others questioned Prince-Bythewood’s vision.

“People would come on the set and say, ‘Who’s that little girl?’ ” Lathan says. “It was a lot of older white men, questioning her.”

One particular executive gave her a hard time, questioning her camera angles, needling her. Says Prince-Bythewood: “You wonder, ‘Is it because I’m a first-time filmmaker--or a black woman?’ ”

Sometimes, you’ve got to get mad. Prince-Bythewood put aside her normally laid-back demeanor and expressed herself.

After that, she says, she got respect.

“I’m really lucky, lucky, lucky,” she says. “As hard as it gets, if you’re making a movie, know how lucky you are.”

As a Girl, She Escaped Into Movies, TV

Growing up, Prince-Bythewood got hooked on afternoon soaps, watching as many as five a day. It was a way to blank out the real-life drama playing at home. Far better to be hooked on “All My Children” than on drugs, as a family member was.

“Growing up and being unhappy, you can watch movies or TV and everything always turns out great,” she says. “It’s pure escapism. You just disappear for a couple of hours. I love that. I love creating these different lives. I love doing that for people.”

She also loves her adoptive family: her parents, two older sisters and younger brother (also adopted and African American). But it wasn’t easy, growing up black and adopted in a white family in an all-white neighborhood in Pacific Grove, Calif. She was a black woman who had never tasted collard greens or watched “Roots” or danced to the Jackson 5. Who never had anyone tell her the right thing to do when you’re called a racial epithet. Going to UCLA was a culture shock, the first time she’d been around so many other African Americans. She felt as though she’d missed something: didn’t know the inside jokes, couldn’t do the dance steps. Running track helped: She met Bill Cosby at a track meet. He liked her, took her under hiswing.

Meeting Cosby opened her eyes to the entertainment world. Eventually, she ended up on the set of the television sitcom “A Different World,” where she worked on her writing skills--and met her husband, writer-director Reggie Rock Bythewood. She eventually wrote for “Sweet Justice,” “Felicity” and “South Central.” She wrote and directed a CBS Schoolbreak Special, the teen melodrama “What About Your Friends,” which earned an Emmy nomination.

When it came to filming “Love and Basketball,” it was difficult staying on the sidelines, Prince-Bythewood says. “It was so hard during shooting, watching them play.”

But now Prince-Bythewood is back in the game, playing for an amateur women’s basketball league. She gets to face down the time she flubbed her high school championship, when the coach pulled her out of the game--and when she got back in, she was too scared to do anything.

Second chances. As a college sophomore, she applied to UCLA’s prestigious film school. Only 20 students, chosen from 699 applicants, got in. Prince-Bythewood, despite her 3.8 average and a number of film courses under her belt, wasn’t among them.

The rejection sent her into a funk.

But this time she rallied and wrote to the head of the film department, explaining exactly why her rejection was a terrible mistake.

“I told them that there are so few black filmmakers out there,” Prince-Bythewood recalls. “I’m trying to learn, I’m trying to make a difference. And there really was absolutely nothing else I wanted to do.”

She got in.