Reflecting Reality Behind the Wheel

Already suffering from a bad hip and a bad knee, actor Danny Glover is receiving a tongue-lashing from Pam Grier--over and over again, in close-up, in wide angle, in reverse angle. Glover has a weary, beset air, although he looks great: straw hat, maroon shirt, checked pants, penny loafers.

There’s something old-school about him, which is appropriate, because in this movie, “3 A.M.,” he plays a New York City cab driver. (Grier, a waitress, is his love interest.) The location is a diner at 11th Avenue and 37th Street, a neighborhood of garages, warehouses and prostitutes. Hack heaven.

“I thought that the relationships and the interplay between the characters [were] very dynamic, very strong, very nice,” Glover says, talking about why he took the project, which was low-budget and directed by a first-timer, Lee Davis, who also wrote the script. Glover probably made as much in his last “Lethal Weapon” movie as this whole production cost (about $4 million).

“Then I get a chance to be with Pam Grier,” he continues, laughing. “Beyond that, I thought about this Scorsese film, ‘After Hours.’ There’s something that happens early in the morning that’s bizarre. There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of rationality that goes on after hours. I’ve been a cab driver after hours, and I can attest to that.”

Glover was a cabby 23 years ago in San Francisco. He’s the first to admit that driving a cab in New York now is a whole different ballgame. The city is more spread out than San Francisco, more dependent on cabs, and the business itself is more ethnically diverse and dangerous. Over the last several years, nearly a dozen cab and livery drivers have been killed. “3 A.M.” reflects these realities.

The cabbies in the film are from all over the map--India, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East--and are being stalked by a cigarette-smoking serial killer. In addition to Glover’s character, two other drivers are featured. One of them, played by Sergej Trifunovic, is a Bosnian refugee haunted by the war in the former Yugoslavia. (He’s also a terrible driver, a type New Yorkers are all too familiar with.) Another, played by Michelle Rodriguez, who made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival two years ago as the lead in “Girlfight,” is a victim of childhood prostitution. To say that she too is haunted by her past would be a gross understatement.

“She’s pretty crazy, man,” Rodriguez says. “I think she’s kooky in the head.”

On much more familiar territory for most audiences, Glover is a former basketball player who’s gun-shy, romantically speaking, because his first wife walked out on him. Grier in essence is saying to him: Get over it.

Glover seems to have fond memories of his days as a cabby. When he began driving, in 1978, he had a wife, a 2-year-old and aspirations of becoming an actor. He would drive on weekends and then fly to Los Angeles to audition for or perform on “episodics.” On driving days, he would get up at 3 a.m., pick up his cab at 4, drive until 2 p.m., come home, go to the theater (if he was performing), then do it all over again. He drove off and on for two years and can still tell you where the shortcuts and fares are.

“Behind the wheel there’s a time to think and reflect,” he says. “And since part of what I am is a daydreamer anyway--even when I had a paper route when I was a kid, part of what I loved about that was being alone and daydreaming. So cab driving was another excuse to do that.”

There is another biographical element for Glover in “3 A.M.” Some of the cabbies in the film refuse to pick up African American men, thinking they are the most likely to be the serial killer. In November 1999, Glover had his own run-in with New York cabbies who refused to pick him up or allow him to ride in the front seat. Attended by much publicity, he lodged a complaint with the Taxi and Limousine Commission, prompting the city to launch a sting operation against discriminatory cabbies. However, Glover insists that this issue was not a factor in choosing “3 A.M.”

“In fact, it may have been a deterrent to taking the film, because I felt that people might think I was trying to make a statement,” he says, adding that his agent was reluctant to show him the script for the same reason. “People may construe that I was trying to do something with the movie, which wasn’t my intention.”

For writer-director Davis, who was raised in New York, this sort of discrimination is an old story. In fact, it’s so commonplace that although his script addresses the issue, it doesn’t push it. He tells a story of a black friend who was dragged by a cab because the cabby wouldn’t take him and he refused to let go of the door. Another cabby, unwilling to drive Davis to Brooklyn, pulled over on the Brooklyn Bridge and went to the trunk, possibly to get a tire iron.

“I just wonder what kind of stupidity that is, what kind of ignorance that is, to be that frightened, to let your bias and your ignorance drive you to the point where you’re going to refuse to make money,” says Davis, who has a fashionably shaved head. “You’re driving at 2 in the morning anyway.”

But this movie is not really about that. “I interviewed a lot of cab drivers,” he continues. “And what I came to find was that some of them had college degrees, some of them used to be professors, some of them used to be soldiers, some of them used to be doctors, and here they were driving a cab. And I found that intriguing. I also found their spirit to be emblematic of the land of opportunity, where people are coming here trying to carve out a new life, $6.50, $7.50 at a time, the price of a fare.”

Davis has his own rags to riches career history. He started as a production assistant for Spike Lee and worked his way up to producing ads and music videos. He developed the “3 A.M.” script at the Sundance labs for writers and directors six years ago, sold it to Miramax, then suffered the not-uncommon indignity of seeing it put into turnaround.

He then showed it to Spike Lee, who had been tracking the project, and Lee decided to try to get it made through his company, 40 Acres & a Mule. It went through several potential casts and was almost made three years ago. The filmmakers finally found a financier in Showtime, which readily agreed to allow them to shop the project around to theatrical distributors once the film was made rather than air it on cable first.

To Showtime programming President Jerry Offsay, this was a simple business decision aimed at attracting talent. (It turned out that after premiering at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, the film wasn’t picked up.) The real sticking point between Showtime and the filmmakers was where they were going to shoot the film, which would have a major effect on how much it would cost.

The site du jour is Toronto, where labor and the Canadian dollar are cheap. But the filmmakers had a problem with that.

“I don’t think anyplace looks like New York City,” Davis says. “It’s a character in the film. You make a New York City film with New York City actors and a New York City crew and New York City locations for a tighter schedule and less money or you make it somewhere else and make believe it’s New York for more money, but at the end of the day you’re not feeling happier about the film you’re making.”

According to Offsay, they were several hundred thousand dollars over the price Showtime was willing to pay, so everybody took less money to make the movie in New York: Glover, the director, the producers and the unions, which usually charge a premium for a night shoot (which this production primarily was, filming from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.). Showtime also kicked in a little, in what Offsay describes as a goodwill gesture. (Offsay says that “$4 million is a good ballpark to be in.”)

The shoot itself was scheduled for a mere 24 days. Obviously, they were cutting corners as they went along, a process that had everyone scrambling. In one instance, crew members shaved the labels off bottles of Coors rather than mess around with product placement negotiations. Davis himself reset Grier’s wristwatch so that it matched the clocks in the diner.

The time constraint and attention to detail clearly took its toll on him, however. Seemingly soft-spoken, Davis flew into an expletive-filled rage when he found his trailer being occupied by a reporter and 40 Acres & a Mule production President Sam Kitt. To Davis’ credit, he later consented to an interview with the same reporter at the scene of the crime.

“I need my privacy,” he says, calmly explaining the outburst. “It’s just a blip,” Kitt says. They might have added that bizarre things happen at night--in cabs, and on film sets.

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* “3 A.M.” can be seen Sunday night at 8. The network has rated it TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 17).