Can He Leave This Behind?

Physics don’t apply, or at least not any physics from around here. People float, dance on walls, and have this habit of skittering back and forth through time like errant record needles. Everything looks distorted too, in a fish-eyed, funhouse way, and colors jump at your eye like spray-painted zoo animals. The music never stops playing, and, always, always, always the women are really hot.

Welcome to the head of Harold Williams--dare you to change the channel. The man they call Hype is the Fellini of ghetto fabulous, the music video director who defined the modern visuals of hip-hop and, in doing so, became the most famous rap star who doesn’t rap.

He has worked with everybody who is anybody and typically made their most famous video. And while the list is rap-heavy, it veers across the pop landscape: 2Pac, Jay-Z, the Notorious B.I.G., Janet Jackson, Busta Rhymes, TLC, Missy Elliott, Nas, R. Kelly, Will Smith, No Doubt, Babyface, Shelby Lynne, Nelly Furtado, and on and on.

“Hype is certainly the watermark for all other video directors,” says Tom Calderone, MTV’s senior vice president of music and talent. “He took the rap video form and made it into art. Most of the rap videos are pretty much guys on the street and a couple of cameras. He brought it to a whole new level. He made the hip-hop stars into video stars, and made hip-hop and rap a bigger part of pop culture by getting it in front of a lot more people.”

An accomplishment made more interesting by the fact that Williams wants to walk away from all of it. He is chasing a desperate desire to direct pieces that show in actual movie theaters, not just on MTV. So far, his Hollywood trip has been a bumpy ride, his lone film, the urban crime tale “Belly,” leaving a bad taste in his mouth. “I don’t even like to talk about it,” he says with a deep sigh, “but I learned a lot, so that’s a positive.”

Williams, described as a short-fuse perfectionist on the set, had an especially difficult, frustrating shoot and then was wounded by controversy over the film’s violence. There were more than a few gut-punch reviews too, criticizing the acting skills of the actors, many of them rappers trying a new gig.

Now Williams is working on a sophomore effort, but it’s still a year off and most every day the cell phone rings with another plea from old friends: Hype, come home, make more music videos. But Williams shakes his head. He’s already done enough to fill up that small screen.

“No other music video director is solely responsible for a genre,” he says with the casual certainty of someone glancing at his watch and telling you the time of day. “All of rap video at one point came just from how I saw it. I had a part in rap becoming a part of global culture, and what more could I ask for?”

Just because they call him Hype, don’t doubt for a moment that he is exactly right.

With singular video images--take Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Mase launched into space, 2Pac and Dr. Dre playing Mad Max beyond funk-dome, Missy Elliot in that inflatable rubber suit or dozens of others--Williams achieved an unheard-of name recognition with fans. Like Alfred Hitchcock among thriller film directors, Williams was the creator who broke from the faceless ranks to become a brand with audiences.

Three years ago, MTV and TV Guide tallied the best music videos ever and Williams finished with four in the top 25. The Source magazine routinely puts Williams in its ranking of hip-hop power players, one year as high as No. 4, putting him ahead of many of the platinum-selling superstars in his videos. Williams even took to flashing “Hype Williams Presents” across the screen at the start of his videos, a peacock credit no other director has gotten away with on MTV or any other major video outlet. This month, he breaks more new ground with “Hype Williams: The Videos,” the first of a DVD series surveying his career. This release has 10 of his mini-movies, including “No Scrubs” by TLC, “Big Pimpin’” by Jay-Z and “Can It All Be So Simple” by the Wu-Tang Clan. Williams is certainly not the only celebrated video director. David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Paul Hunter and Dave Myers are notable and noticed, but as the less-than-humble Williams points out, they don’t have DVDs of their videos coming out.

“Spike Jonze is not responsible for a genre,” Williams says as he plops back on an overstuffed couch in his Beverly Hills office. “And I might be the only one in my genre that has a real identity. People identify my body of work as an experience. Not everybody that has done a load of videos can have a DVD that is worth someone actually buying. I don’t know why. It just so happens that my name has that ability.”

Somehow, Williams says all this and seems assured, not simply arrogant.

His friends and co-creators describe the 32-year-old as affable but focused. The “Hype,” by the way, came from childhood, not Hollywood. Growing up in Queens in New York, Harold Williams was the kind of kid who couldn’t sit still unless he was perched in front of the TV or a new stack of comic books. His nickname was short for “hyperactive.”

Flipping through the channels, young Williams was mesmerized by films (the camera shots and isolation themes in R. Kelly’s “Half on a Baby” video were a Williams shout-out to “Citizen Kane”), and loved the energy of the new music video age. He wondered, though, why the music he loved, hip-hop, was either absent or presented in an amateurish way compared to pop and rock videos.

“I was the guy that was sitting around watching the TV and fell in love with it like the rest of the generation, but the difference was I come from the street,” Williams says.

“The music that I loved wasn’t represented on early MTV and VH1. It wasn’t well respected,” he continues. “I loved it so much I wanted to see the artists and music that I loved have imagery as impactful as David Bowie or Madonna or Billy Idol.”

Hip-hop was the home team for Williams. In Hollis, Queens, he went to the same Catholic school that counted members of Run-DMC and LL Cool J as alumni. The sidewalks were alive with the sound that was on a path from neighborhood corners to pop world center stage.

Rap joined Williams’ passions for film and comic books. He watched “The Godfather” over and over, and studied the frenetic panels of “The Dark Knight Returns.”

He flirted with the idea of becoming a painter, but the energy of film was too strong a tonic to resist. Williams learned the ropes by toiling as a gofer on sets and soaking in the scene around him. His big break came when Lyor Cohen of Def Jam Recordings gave the 20-year-old a chance to direct a video, which Williams now recalls as “a disaster.”

As a director, Williams is famous for his devotion to the wide-angle lens. The fish-eyed images in his videos with the cartoonish Busta Rhymes, for example, seem to give the viewer a peephole into a surreal world. He also shoots up, the camera low to the ground. “The stars are giants to me,” Williams says, “so I want them to look like giants.”

Bold lighting and splashy special effects give Williams’ videos their polish, but their most innovative (and widely copied) trademark might be the way every image is beholden to the beat and texture of the music--everything on the screen will seize up, slow down, speed up or reverse in sync with the music, creating a, well, hyperreality. Williams’ music videos may be famous for glitzy trappings and big budgets, but their true power and glory is the visual breakbeat.

“In the early days of rap video, the people that were responsible for the production weren’t from the genre. The people making the imagery were filmmakers and artists and directors who didn’t have investment in the culture,” he says. “That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any creativity or good things--it just wasn’t communicative of the culture.

“That’s where I came in. I was the one kid that was from that generation and that culture that could make a statement much like one of the artists. In a sense I was a rap artist.”

But what made Williams a star in videos makes him a question mark in film. When people say a movie has an “MTV generation sensibility,” they often don’t mean it as a compliment.

“Belly,” his 1998 debut film, was dismissed by some as eye candy without the nutrition of good storytelling. The film starred DMX, Nas and Method Man. With Williams writing, directing, co-producing and editing, it seemed like a hip-hop dream team. The story was billed as a gritty morality tale, a “Mean Streets” for the hip-hop generation, but gained more notoriety from the refusal of the Magic Johnson Theatres chain to show it because of the “overwhelmingly negative and violent depiction of African Americans.”

Now Williams says that if he was flipping through channels and saw “Belly,” he would keep going. “A political operation,” he says. “Making a film is like painting a portrait with 50 or 60 people holding the brush for you, and you can’t communicate those strokes.”

Williams is now going in a decidedly different direction for a follow-up: “Speed Racer,” Warner Bros.’ live-action revival of the 1960s animated Japanese TV series about a young hero with a gadget-laden race car and a family mystery to sort out. Film “is everything, a way to create images that last lifetimes,” Williams says, but he does seem wistful recounting his favorite music video exploits.

The most decadent memory was the seafaring shoot for “Big Pimpin’,” filmed aboard a stunning yacht in Trinidad. “I’ve never had such a good time. I don’t think I’ll ever have that good a time again, either.”

Other videos reached the public with unintended subtexts because of real-life circumstances. Williams was filming “Rock the Boat” with R&B; singer Aaliyah just before her death in a plane crash in the Bahamas last year, and now the video’s island setting has an unsettling grimness to it. Williams has far sunnier memories about other videos. He recalled, for instance, awaiting 2Pac’s helicopter on location in the barren desert near El Mirage for “California Love.” The 1996 video with a post-apocalyptic theme captured a performance by 2Pac and Dr. Dre at a special time in rap.

“It’s not easy to get a bunch of guys like that into furry costumes and to spend four days in the middle of the desert, you know what I’m saying?” Williams says. “But they trusted me enough to communicate things that were far-fetched but yet still very pure and connected to street level. Death Row Records was famous then for all this crazy insanity, but the music and creativity was amazing too.”

If that was a high point, the location of today’s music video scene is harder to pinpoint. Costs continue to rise, with some of the big stars spending $2 million to $3 million on the short films, which are not guaranteed any lasting life on video channels.

MTV, the most coveted forum, plays relatively few videos, and record executives fume that they are throwing promotional resources at videos that often become vanity projects for big-name artists who demand top directors and increasingly expensive special effects.

“The movies kind of dictate the direction that videos go in,” says Kedar Massenburg, president and CEO of Motown Records. “Now that you have ‘Spider-Man,’ there’s not too far you can go. With the technology, these get very, very expensive.”

Massenburg, whose company has used videos to fashion the careers of artists such as Erykah Badu and India.Arie, says he expects more story lines to be used in videos. But to him and others, the artistry has sagged. “The directors copy each other,” Massenburg says. “And they copy a lot from Hype.”

Williams keeps tabs on the new generation of video makers, and what he sees leaves him dejected even as he ambles off to Hollywood.

“I see its decline. It’s not done with same amount of emotional and artistic content,” he says. “When I started, it was nowhere. What I was able to do with these amazing, talented artists and record labels was to take rap videos and make it important enough that people even know who I am, not just the artist. From there, it’s gone nowhere and I resent that fact as someone who loves the music. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just getting older.”

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Geoff Boucher is a Times staff writer.