The Poetry of the Streets

About 20 years ago, screenwriter and director Leon Ichaso was getting high with an actor friend in New York’s Central Park when a man emerged from the bushes explaining that he had fallen asleep the night before on a large anthill.

Ichaso’s friend greeted the man warmly, offered him some pot and asked about his life. Ichaso waited until the stranger walked away before he asked who it was.

“That,” his friend said, “is Miguel Pinero.”

Poet, playwright, street hustler, thief and drug addict, Pinero made art out of his stormy life. Now Ichaso has turned the story of the Puerto Rican-born New York writer into a film that opens Thursday in Los Angeles and New York. The Miramax film “Pinero” stars Benjamin Bratt in a role that forces audiences to forget his cover-boy good looks and see him as a strung-out genius who poisoned himself with booze and drugs until his death from cirrhosis of the liver at age 41 in 1988.

Though the film’s budget is small ($1.2 million), it’s still a risky project for Miramax and for Bratt, who hopes the role breaks him out of the “man in uniform” kind of parts he’s best known for. It took about five years for the film to be made, and the result is an examination of an artist so troubled that John Leguizamo, who originally was to play the part, walked away from the role after learning more details about Pinero’s private life.

“He was a freak. His was a life of crime and hustling,” said Bratt over breakfast in Beverly Hills last week. “[Pinero] was far too troubling and complicated to be a true hero, but there’s still a reason to tell his story, and that reason is the legacy he left behind--his poems and his plays and the presence of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe for artists of color.”

Pinero learned how to write when he was incarcerated in Sing Sing prison. His 1974 off-Broadway play “Short Eyes,” about the brutality of that world, earned him the New York Drama Critics Award for best American play of the season. When he and friends opened the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the East Side that year, Pinero’s world brushed up against those of the New York literati who were regular customers. He got roles in TV and film playing characters from the kind of gritty, urban world he came from in New York, including parts in “Kojak” and “Miami Vice,” and in the 1981 movie “Fort Apache, the Bronx.”

Bratt, 37, said he jumped at the chance to play the deeply flawed Pinero, remembering his reaction as a teenager when he watched the 1977 movie version of “Short Eyes” on cable TV. After watching the film again five times, Bratt said he was both terrified by and drawn to the subject matter.

“It was the most frightening depiction of prison life and human beings in general,” Bratt said. “My main hesitation [in taking the part] was a professional level of fear. I’m a well-trained actor. Once you put it on film, though, you have to live with it forever. To make a mistake on this level would devastate a career.”

Miramax executives admit that the commercial success of the raw, experimental-style film rests almost entirely on good buzz about Bratt’s performance. His physical transformation and immersion in the role could attract the kind of critical attention that has lagged far behind his sex symbol status.

In preparation for last fall’s shoot, Bratt let his hair grow. He stopped shaving. He lost about 13 pounds on his already lean 6-foot-2 frame. And he temporarily became a smoker, puffing his way through packs of American Spirit cigarettes.

Noted Ichaso: “He turned into a beautiful monster.”

Bratt, who played a police officer for four seasons on the NBC drama “Law & Order” and co-starred as an FBI agent with Sandra Bullock in last year’s hit comedy “Miss Congeniality,” said he hopes this role demonstrates his range as an actor. But it’s an opportunity that almost didn’t happen.

The role was slated to go to Leguizamo, who, through his production company, Lower East Side Films, had developed the biopic for about 18 months. Leguizamo considered Pinero one of the most influential writers in his life, and he was thrilled when he got to play his son in a 1984 episode of “Miami Vice.” More than two years ago, Leguizamo brought the project to GreeneStreet Films, which produced the film.

But then, Leguizamo said, he discovered something that repulsed him. Pinero was never accused publicly or in court of child molestation, but many friends were forthright about his sexual relationships with older teenage boys. In the film, one of his companions, Reinaldo Povod, appears to be about 16 or 17 years old when they first meet. At the time, Pinero was in his 20s.

“I had a hard time with that,” Leguizamo said by phone from New York, where he’s performing his one-man show “Sexaholix” on Broadway. “I didn’t want to portray him as a child molester, because we have so few Latino heroes. Before I knew all that, he was a huge inspiration to me, but when I found out about it, his image was tarnished. That said, I can’t forget how important he was--the building blocks of my writing. He made street talk legit. He put it in print.” (Leguizamo stayed with the project and is the film’s co-executive producer.)

Miguel Algarin, who helped found the Nuyorican Poets Cafe with Pinero, said Leguizamo “missed a chance” to portray the artist. Algarin took issue with Leguizamo’s judgment of Pinero’s personal life.

“The Greeks, the Romans have all practiced the contact between adults and children. It’s a social reality that doesn’t get talked about,” Algarin said. “Any child that came into contact with Mikey had a wonderful shock in living. I’m not going to talk about who they are. Mikey was a great playwright, a great poet. He was the philosopher of the criminal’s mind. You deal with the ethics of that.”

But other than the youngish-looking character of Povod, it is not at all clear in the film that Pinero’s experiences with sexual molestation extended beyond his own victimized childhood. What is clear, however, is Pinero’s penchant for drugs and alcohol and his criminal past. In one scene, Pinero pleads for a new liver--one that would replace his diseased one. Later in the movie, Pinero and a friend do drugs and then jump two women in full-length fur coats so they have something sharp to wear to a theater premiere.

Pinero’s fire and his misadventures come at the audience from all angles, and the movie scrolls out in a jerky series of flashbacks, using scenes shot in both color and black and white. Ichaso, whose most famous Spanish-language films include “Bitter Sugar” (1996) and “The Super” (1979), said he tried to capture the fast-break rhythm of Pinero’s life and art, but it made the editing challenging.

One character who is set apart from the frenzy is Pinero’s mother, played by Rita Moreno. At one point, she visits her son in Sing Sing and calmly tells him she is tired of seeing him in prison, although she admits that his confinement provides them with time to talk.

“These were the days of disco and Barry White and coke spoons around the neck, and he was doing spoken-word and street poetry,” Ichaso said. “He was living theater, and maybe some of his best stuff was lost in bars and shooting galleries.”

To be sure, it’s not a film that is easily accessible or simple in its message, but the film’s producers are hoping it could reach out to a younger art-house audience.

“Leon Ichaso had a way of describing his poetry and charisma that made us feel confident about risking money on [this],” said GreeneStreet President John Penotti. “We couch [Pinero] as someone who was the precursor to rap and hip-hop, and audiences feel like they’re discovering someone.”

Mark Gill, president of Miramax L.A., said the studio is “relying on good reviews for Ben’s performance and the movie, as well. Without that, it will be very, very tough.”