The Judge Hands Down His Sentence: Laugh

A comedy about the controversial “three strikes” law? First-time director DJ Pooh thinks it’s an arresting idea.

“I’m trying to clown the law and bring attention to it at the same time,” Pooh, a screenwriter, actor and hip-hop music producer, says of “3 Strikes,” his new film about the California law that locks criminals away for life after a third felony conviction.

“If I would have done just a straightforward, serious thing about how I felt, I don’t think it would have been as entertaining. At the same time, I don’t think I would have had the opportunity to make the movie.”

In the MGM film, which opens Wednesday, Rob Douglas (Brian Hooks) is a convicted felon with two strikes who ends up in a number of disastrous situations as he attempts to avoid his third strike.

Right after being picked up from prison by Tone (Faizon Love), Douglas finds himself on the run when he and Tone are pulled over and Tone starts a shootout with police officers. While on the run, Douglas is confronted by his domineering girlfriend (N’Bushe Wright), his worried parents (George Wallace, Starletta Dupois) and a number of onetime friends who feel he betrayed Tone by fleeing the scene of their altercation with the police. Fortunately for Douglas, a team of police officers that makes the Three Stooges look slick, led by Jenkins (David Alan Grier), is on his trail and manages to fumble a number of opportunities to capture him.

“The three strikes issue is a serious issue, but you’ll watch the movie and laugh because there’s funny stuff going on in the movie,” Hooks says. “I think people will watch it and see the situations that my character are in are funny, but if you want to get down to it, there’s not a lot funny about the three strikes law.

“His [Pooh’s] comedy is so classic because it’s real-life humor as opposed to far-out stuff that wouldn’t happen. People can say, ‘Yeah, I went through that,’ and that’s real cool.”

Indeed, one of Pooh’s avowed goals with the low-budget (under $6 million, according to the filmmakers) movie was to show that good people can get caught up in situations beyond their control. “You see that he really hasn’t done anything wrong and that he’s really an all-right cat,” Pooh, 32, says of the Douglas character. “But, at the same time, if you were a cop, it would look like he’s done a lot and that he’s just another criminal. It’s a fine line, so I wanted to play around with that.”

Pooh is in good spirits as he talks about making “3 Strikes,” but his mood shifts abruptly when he’s asked about not working on “Next Friday,” the sequel to the 1995 cult hit “Friday” that Pooh and Ice Cube co-wrote and starred in. (“Next Friday,” which opened last month, has made more than $52 million so far and was the No. 1 movie in the country for two consecutive weeks.)

“I guess things didn’t work out the same to where he [Cube] thought he needed me to do his thing with ‘Next Friday.’ I guess that’s how he feels, and I can’t make anybody do business a certain way,” Pooh says. (Ice Cube could not be reached for comment.)

“If we were able to go back and do it again,” he adds, “I would appreciate being able to work on the sequel as opposed to being distant from the situation.”

In “Friday,” Cube played Craig Jones, a young man who loses his job, lives with his parents and seemingly always finds himself in troubling situations. Pooh portrayed Red, an acquaintance of Jones’, who was the neighborhood punching bag.

In addition to earning nearly seven times its $4-million budget and selling an estimated 600,000 home videos, “Friday” launched the career of Chris Tucker (“Rush Hour”), solidified Ice Cube as a crossover box office draw, and established Cube and Pooh as a hot script-writing combo.

“Ice Cube and DJ Pooh had a movie that was so real that everybody around the whole world could understand it and relate to it,” says rapper Snoop Dogg, a self-professed “Friday” fanatic.

As he did with “Friday,” Pooh interjects humor throughout “3 Strikes,” even as he deals with serious subject matter.

“He brings a real, raw knowledge to his work,” F. Gary Gray, the director of “Friday,” says of Pooh. “There’s a difference between a comedian who will have you laughing for days and the comedian who will wear off after a day or two. There’s a texture that he brings that’s rarely seen on screen. He has the natural ability to tap into things that the average person isn’t able to.”

“Everybody nowadays wants to play so tough,” Pooh himself says, “but I just like to bring fun to what people see. I’ve been through the streets, so I have an idea what that’s about. But I want to lighten the situation because it’s not all negative.

“That’s what people tend to look at it like. They tend to think that in order to be true, you’ve got to beat somebody up, steal something or kill somebody.”

Sitting in the courtyard of his recording studio in the San Fernando Valley, Pooh (born Mark Jordan) wears a UCLA sweatshirt, jeans, tennis shoes and a baseball cap, which attest to his casual style and hint at his hip-hop roots.

Tall and lanky, he uses self-deprecating humor to his advantage in person as well as on screen. (Like many other writer-directors, Pooh takes a small role in “3 Strikes” as a news anchor who never focuses on the news.)

Born and raised in Inglewood, Pooh attended Washington High School. He was the fourth of five brothers and the only one drawn to music. And, like a lot of kids, he got into his share of mischief.

“I was always the kind of guy that would burst out with something and get in trouble, get sent to the office,” Pooh says.

When he wasn’t making his friends laugh, Pooh was establishing himself as a premier local hip-hop DJ. He hooked up with pioneering Compton rapper King Tee at a clothing shop and went on to record some of Southern California’s better early rap songs.

Pooh went on to produce such prominent rappers as LL Cool J, Ice Cube, 2Pac and Tha Dogg Pound. Despite working with such high-profile acts, it was Pooh’s comic performances in a string of Ice Cube videos that made him a star of sorts. It was also where he got the idea to pursue filmmaking. The two had discussed story ideas while filming music videos and decided to try writing a script. While Ice Cube was on tour promoting his albums and Pooh was working on various projects in Los Angeles, they would fax each other drafts of what eventually became “Friday.”

“We got a chance to be way out, like a cartoon,” Pooh says. “All sorts of crazy things were happening in the script.”

Pooh parlayed his “Friday” experience into an expanded role in the development of “3 Strikes.” The executive producer of the film’s soundtrack, which features Snoop Dogg, Silkk the Shocker, C-Murder and others, he also produced several songs on the collection, including cuts from Liquid Crew, Solo & Kam and Niomesha.

Pooh has just finished writing another film, “Don’t Get It Twisted,” a comedy, and is developing a cartoon called “Hood Rats”.

For now though, Pooh is living his dream as an actor-writer-director-producer. “I always wanted to be in front of the camera doing crazy stuff,” he says. “Let me get people’s attention. I did that in school and got in trouble all through school. Now, I’m doing it and it’s cool.”