Tag: Craig Brewer

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

Roedipus Rex

If you’re not reading every review of Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, you’re missing out on an incredible cultural moment. No matter what you think about the film, the collected reviews say a lot about how the rest of the world views our little corner of dystopia. Take Rex Reed’s hazel-eyed hatchet job, for example.

“These are illiterate, joint-rollin’, snuff-spittin’, fly-swattin’, time-wastin’ hillbillies from Tobacco Road,” Reed says of writer/director Craig Brewer’s characters. “Ms. Ricci is Rae, the skanky town slut … [and] Lazarus [is] played like Uncle Remus by the traditionally militant Samuel L. Jackson.”

The Texas-born gossip and former Gong Show regular further complains that Brewer never “bothers to examine the scars from abuse that turn burned-out losers into born-dead boll weevils so early in life” and that the film is set in “a Hollywood movie’s idea of the kind of back-of-the-swamp hick town in Tennessee that nobody in Tennessee has ever seen or heard of.”

All this harsh commentary raises two serious questions: What in the world does “born-dead boll weevil” mean, and has Rex Reed ever been to Eads?

Big Time

Memphis is famous for many things: blues, barbecue, rock-and-roll, etc. Now the Bluff City is on the cusp of being famous for something else: fatties.

Yes, fatties.

Producers of the hit reality show Supernanny have been been in Memphis casting a new show for ABC that’s all about finding the fattest fatties in fat town and making them a little less fat.

Why are they casting in Memphis? Because we’ve got back. Casting producer Johnnie Raines told The Commercial Appeal that key markets were chosen based on what “we heard about heaviness in the city.” Phat.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Come Together

When you make a movie about a white “nymphomaniac” chained to the radiator of a black bluesman’s farmhouse, suffuse it with humor, and pitch it as a straightforward entertainment set in a world that sometimes feels as slightly exaggerated as a live-action Disney feature, perhaps you should expect critics to get a little discombobulated.

And so it has been with Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, a bold, brash follow-up to his career-making pimp parable Hustle & Flow.

Early reviews have been as pulpy as the movie itself. The Hollywood Reporter deemed it “so jaw-dropping awful that it might just become a hit.” LA Weekly‘s Scott Foundas was colorfully conflicted: “Few detested Hustle & Flow, with its white-boy fetishization of pimp culture, more than I did, and though I can’t deem Black Snake Moan an advance … it does offer ample proof of Brewer’s facility with the camera, his understanding of Southern culture, and — once you cut through all the bondage and anal penetration — a sweet-natured temperament.”

Most perceptive, though, was an overheated rave from Film Comment‘s Nathan Lee, who dubbed Black Snake Moan “a hardcore exploitation flick that also happens to be the most impassioned spiritual parable in recent memory.” I think that’s about half right, and though Lee gets a little drunk on a Yankee fascination with Southern culture, he’s perceptive in pegging Brewer as making a different kind of movie.

Black Snake Moan is the story of three damaged souls who collide in an evocative rural Mississippi setting: Rae (Christina Ricci) is a young woman whose sexual compulsion is rooted in a history of abuse. Her gentle lamb of a boyfriend, Ronnie (Justin Timberlake), is heading off for National Guard duty but is beset with crippling panic attacks. Farmer and retired bluesman Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) has suffered the indignity of watching his wife run off with his brother.

At some point in the movie, as everyone who’s seen a trailer or poster (which means everyone in Memphis) knows, Rae ends up at Lazarus’ house, barely clothed and chained to the radiator.

Samuel L. Jackson’s Lazarus is a chain wielding Good Samaritan out to ‘cure’ a troubled woman of her ‘wickedness.’

But if this conceit, as well as the film’s deliciously garish marketing, fits the “hardcore exploitation” description Lee provides, the movie itself doesn’t. It’s a bit of a fake-out on Brewer’s part, provoking a set of expectations based on the racial and sexual baggage we all carry with us and then delivering something different. And this intentional disconnect extends to the film’s title, which comes from a blues song Lazarus sings during a crucial scene. The words “Black Snake Moan” sound erotic and dangerous, but the phrase is really a metaphor for the internal demons that haunt all three of the film’s principal characters.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of critics seem to be writing from their expectations rather than from the movie itself. Unless I’m misreading a vigorous sex scene between Ricci and rapper David Banner (as small-time hustler Tehronne), there is no “anal penetration” in this movie, as Foundas claims. Nor is Rae a “crack whore” (per Lee) or Lazarus a “sharecropper” (per a positive review on Salon.com).

That doesn’t mean Black Snake Moan isn’t without its titillation. Ricci spends most of the movie in daisy dukes and a T-shirt cut off just below her nipples. By the time she ends up with Lazarus, the daisy dukes have given way to a pair of well-worn white panties, and, in an erotic fever, she wraps the chain around her bare body like a python. Earlier, Rae and a couple of buddies (Memphis actresses Amy LaVere and Clare Grant) play strip football in a pill-induced haze.

But while Brewer never pretends this outré material isn’t meant to be arousing, it also ups the ante on the “impassioned spiritual parable” that Lee correctly identifies. What Black Snake Moan‘s exploitation trappings conceal is essentially a bravely sincere version of the New Testament’s Good Samaritan parable. Lazarus walks out of his house one morning, finds a battered Rae on the road — half-naked, three-quarters wasted, completely alone — and brings her inside for succor. The situation that emerges is absurd, and the film recognizes this, teases out delirious humor, but also stays committed to these characters’ reality. Brewer makes the latent spiritualism of the story explicit in a simple theological discussion between Rae and Lazarus’ friend Reverend R.L. (veteran TV actor John Cothran). If Luis Buñuel had been an iconoclastic Christian rather than an atheist, this is a movie he might have come up with.

Once the chain comes out, some viewers may struggle to take this scenario as seriously as Brewer, especially since he so readily allows his audience to laugh at what’s happening on-screen. But Brewer, as Lee suggests, is making a new kind of movie, one that borrows from the established templates of contemporary Hollywood popcorn movies, regional indie cinema, and the retro-exploitation style of Quentin Tarantino and his imitators, but it also departs from each in crucial ways.

Black Snake Moan, like Hustle & Flow before it, shares the pulpiness and movie-madness of the Tarantino school but has more sincerity, less ironic distance. It shares the crowd-pleasing instincts of a mass-marketed studio movie but with a storytelling integrity those movies now tend to lack. The modest budget and regional specificity is in line with “indie” cinema, but Brewer’s insistence on imbuing his ostensibly “gritty” situations with a movie-movie vibrancy flaunts convention.

Craig Brewer

Instead, these movies echo the under-rated “working-class cinema” (in Brewer’s view) of ’80s movies such as Purple Rain or Footloose — working class not just in terms of what the movies are about but how the movies connect, which is directly.

The accessibility of Brewer’s movies stems in part from his fluency with actors, and he gets engaging, convincing performances here from all three leads. I couldn’t quite buy Rae’s erotic fits — writhing in the grass, uncontrollable, insatiable — but this is otherwise a fearless, compelling performance from Ricci, probably the best of her career. As Lazarus, Jackson delivers a few of the charismatic, crowd-pleasing line readings that are his trademark, but he also gets to act. Drawing on area blues icons such as Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, and Big Jack Johnson to construct his look — graying, unkempt, with an inelegant, hunched-over gait — Jackson disappears into the role as fully as he has since maybe Jungle Fever. And Timberlake is completely stripped of his pop-star magnetism as Ronnie, reduced, effectively, to the boyishness at the core of his persona.

Around this nucleus, Brewer builds a rich cosmology of supporting characters, from such deeply likable normals as Reverend R.L. and pharmacist Angela (Law & Order‘s S. Epatha Merkerson) to colorful locals such as Claude Phillips (as juke-joint proprietor Bojo), who, following his scene-stealing bit as a tweaker Casio salesman in Hustle & Flow, is looking like the kind of classic bit player that populated the movies of directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges.

Even if you buy into Brewer’s vision, Black Snake Moan isn’t without its flaws. Some non-actors deliver awkward line readings (particularly Banner), and the movie doesn’t sweep you up moment by moment the way Hustle & Flow did during its terrific recording sequences, though there are times when it comes close, such as Jackson performing “Stagger Lee” at a packed juke joint. And Brewer struggles to visualize the past abuse at the root of Rae’s sexual compulsion, coming up with a blurry, nightmarish fever dream that literalizes her fears in an overly familiar way.

But, ultimately, Black Snake Moan is the better film — not necessarily more personal (because Hustle & Flow was plenty personal), but more intimate and more deeply felt. This gets back to the spiritual parable at the movie’s core. The exploitation iconography isn’t the only intentionally misleading aspect to Black Snake Moan. Not only is Lazarus not chaining Rae to his radiator for sex, as the marketing teases. He’s also not about to “heal” her, as he initially believes.

With Bible in hand, Lazarus tells Rae that he aims to “cure” her of her “wickedness,” but, crucially, Black Snake Moan never quite endorses this goal, and Laz abandons it, realizing it’s not his place to “judge” or “cure” but merely to care.

Despite its surfaces, Black Snake Moan is suffused with tenderness. Its finest moment is the juxtaposition of a sweetly sung hymn and a desperate confrontation. It is book-ended by trembling embraces. The first is all bare skin and sunlight. In a movie where most sexual activity is destructive, Brewer opens with as healthy and righteous and erotic a sex scene as you’ll see on the big screen this year. The last is even more intimate and suggests there is no “healed” in this movie’s universe. Pain and temptation and need are ever-present, but people can cling to each other to get through.

Black Snake Moan

Opening Friday, March 2nd

Multiple locations

Categories
News The Fly-By

Q&A: Neimus Williams, Lincoln in “Black Snake Moan”

Overton High School junior Neimus Williams was a lanky, basketball-loving 15-year-old when he went down to Beale Street to audition for Craig Brewer’s film Black Snake Moan.

“There were too many people to count and they all had resumes,” Williams says, admitting that the odds of being cast in a speaking role seemed awfully small. But Brewer was smitten with Williams’ reading and cast him in the pivotal role of Lincoln, the young man Christina Ricci’s Rae surprises in a big, big way. — by Chris Davis

Flyer: Three weeks passed between the time you auditioned and the time you were offered the role. Had you given up hope?

Neimus Williams: I never gave up hope. I was at home when they called because I’d fractured my wrist. I was going to sleep when the phone started ringing. I looked over and saw [the caller I.D.] said “Paramount Pictures,” and I lit up like a Christmas tree. When I answered the phone, the person asked if they could speak to a parent or guardian. I told them nobody was here and that’s when they said they wanted me to play the part. Then I really lit up like a Christmas tree.

Did your friends treat you different when they found out you were in a movie?

No. But some of them wouldn’t believe it. They’d say, “You ain’t in no movie.”

In your very first film, you’ve got a big scene with Samuel L. Jackson. That’s not bad work.

The first time I met Sam he scared me. We were shooting in Mississippi and I was with Craig going over lines when I looked over and saw him. I asked, “Is that Samuel L. Jackson over there?” and Craig said, “Yeah, go meet him.” So I said, “Hi, I’m Neimus,” and I guess I was looking away because [Sam] said, “Don’t look over there, look at me!” And he had this tone in his voice. It scared me.

Did Christina Ricci scare you?

I guess it was the fourth or fifth day when I first met Christina. We were shooting the scene where I go to Lazarus’ house with the basket. You know, where she jumps on me. And Craig had been teasing me all day, saying, “Oooh, Neimus, you’re going to be kissed a lot.” But she started out working at a young age, too, so it was really good working with her and seeing how she’d handled it.

Did you hang out with Justin Timberlake?

Yeah, we’d meet up between scenes or in the makeup trailer. That was the first time I’d ever met a superstar before. And there was this girl who didn’t think I was in a movie. Well, I called her and put Justin on the phone. There wasn’t anything else she could say.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

Black Meme Watch

Even if you don’t like his films, you’ve got to hand it to Craig Brewer for knowing how to plant an image in the public consciousness. After the release of Hustle & Flow, it was impossible to turn on the television without hearing someone say, “It’s hard out here for a [fill in the blank].” With the opening of Black Snake Moan, watch for the emergence of a new catchphrase: “Chain [fill in the blank] to a radiator.”

It all began when the snarky entertainment and gossip Web site The Defamer suggested that Britney Spears would be back in rehab “just as soon as one of her concerned parents tranquilize her and schlep their daughter’s unconscious form back to Malibu, where she’ll be chained to a gold-plated radiator until she lasts at least two days in a treatment facility.” The Defamer followed that post up, noting that “[Kevin Federline] found the mother of his children undergoing the latest in rehabilitatory advancements, chained to a radiator in a Confederate flag cut-off.”

Trash-film guru John Waters jumped in on the action when he showed up at the independent-film Spirit Awards with a chain around his waist saying, “I wouldn’t mind if Samuel Jackson chained me to a radiator.” Finally, in a glowing review for New York magazine, critic David Edelstein asks all the Brewer-haters to search their hearts. “Wouldn’t you have chained Anna Nicole to your radiator if you could have saved her?” he writes. “Wouldn’t you chain Britney to your radiator?”

Spellcheck Moan

“Are you ready for The Sexorcist?” asks Boston Herald critic James Verniere at the top of his scathing Black Snake Moan review. Verniere says BSM is like the Erskine Caldwell novel “God’s Little Acre on Oxycontin and acid,” though his criticisms are somewhat diluted by the fact that he refers to Christina Ricci’s character Rae as Mae … five times. Somebody needs to chain that guy to a radiator.

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Company

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Craig Brewer so badly wanted Kim Richards to play Christina Ricci’s mother in Black Snake Moan, he had his people search far and wide to find the retired, relatively obscure actress who seemed to have dropped from the face of the earth. He wanted to use Richards for one reason: He’d had a terrible crush on her since 1975, when the child star played the role of Tia, a magical alien in Disney’s sophisticated kid flick Escape to Witch Mountain.

“After shooting, [Kim and I] took a walk, and while we were walking I kind of put my arm around her,” Brewer says playfully. “And I remember wishing I had some way to go back in time and find that chubby kid I used to be and tell him everything that was going to happen to him.”

Success has its privileges, and, thanks to Hustle & Flow, Brewer now has the ability to indulge his inner child a bit as well as the clout to recruit A-list actors such as Ricci and Samuel L. Jackson. But after three feature-length films showcasing the work of Memphis actors, artists, and musicians, there’s still nothing that revs him up like talking about his adopted hometown and the underappreciated talent it attracts.

“Whenever I come home after working on a project, I can’t help feeling this sense of look at what we made together,” he says. “I get completely giddy with this feeling that [Memphis artists] are finally leaking out.”

Though set in rural northern Mississippi, the faces in Black Snake Moan look an awful lot like Midtown. Veteran stage actresses Kim Justis and Jo Lynne Palmer take a pair of delightful turns as an easily shocked waitress and an impeccably coiffed Southern matron. Fifteen-year-old Overton High School student Neimus K. Williams plays the pleasantly surprised victim of Ricci’s amorous advances like an old pro, while Brewer alums John Malloy and T.C. Sharpe say more with a stupefied look than most actors can accomplish with a monologue. John Still, the seedy chop-shop boss from The Poor & Hungry, plays a drunk and disgruntled ex-Marine. Jeff Pope, a horny trick from Hustle & Flow, pops up in Black Snake Moan as a suburban drug dealer, while Claude Phillips, Hustle‘s memorable junkie, makes an equally memorable impression as the owner of a stripped-down Mississippi juke joint.

Set to gritty blues riffs arranged by Memphis musician Scott Bomar and recorded by artists such as Jim, Luther, and Cody Dickinson, Charlie Musselwhite, Roy Brewer, Kenny Brown, Jason Freeman, and Alvin Youngblood Hart, all these contributions make up a part of the bigger picture. Like the stock players assembled by directors such as John Ford and Preston Sturges, Brewer’s local talent brings an abundance of quirkiness, color, and authenticity.

“It reminds me of my ancestors,” Brewer says of his local human resources. “Some of them sold eggs. Some of them got into milking cows. All the way back to the Civil War, they were always looking for something different. I can imagine them saying something like, ‘Well, it looks like ol’ Craig’s on to a new cash crop.’ Conversely, as Brewer takes long walks with his childhood fantasy and imagines Memphis culture as an exportable commodity, his actors refuse to become starstruck.

“I would really just like to be a steadily working character actor,” says musician and occasional stage performer Jeff Pope, whose character supplies the drugs that send Ricci’s already out-of-control character into a three-day blackout. “I remember when Craig invited us all up on stage at Sundance,” he says. “I felt overwhelmed, because I didn’t think I’d really done anything special.”

“I’m going to the Black Snake Moan premiere, and I’m going to wear a pair of zebra-striped shoes when I walk the red carpet,” says Amy LaVere, the throaty singer whose resemblance to rockabilly sex symbol Wanda Jackson landed her a role in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. “I’m wearing them in honor of Jim Dickinson’s Zebra Ranch,” she asserts. Like Pope, LaVere has always wanted to act but found music to be a more accessible mode of expression. Even now, recording and touring come first.

“I’m just not in a position to go to L.A. and find an agent,” she says. “I’ve got a new record coming out in May, and I have a responsibility to support that record to help recoup costs. So acting is something I can’t aggressively pursue.”

Still is an actor without an agent who refuses to attend cattle-call auditions. In the early ’90s, the voiceover artist best known for his work with WKNO-TV and radio decided to try his hand at acting and took classes so he wouldn’t sound so much like a radio announcer. Shortly thereafter, he landed a lead role in Brewer’s first completed film, The Poor & Hungry, and went on to play smaller featured roles in Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan.

“I just don’t have good audition skills,” Still says. “But Craig thinks I’m a good actor and he’s an actor’s director. He knows how to get the performance he wants from me.”

Freeman doesn’t appear on camera in Black Snake Moan, but his work is crucial to the film’s success. Freeman, a moaning roots musician who got his start busking on Beale before breaking out with his jug-grass ensemble the Bluff City Backsliders, helped to teach Jackson how to play his purple Gibson guitar.

“This isn’t the sort of thing I ever sat down and visualized myself doing,” says Freeman, who fell in love with the blues when an older brother brought home a copy of Muddy Waters’ Hard Again. “But it doesn’t completely surprise me either. I always knew I’d be — well, not famous but involved in interesting and creative things.”

“I’ll never forget when Claude Phillips first auditioned for Hustle,” Brewer says of the renovations contractor turned character actor. “I had somebody else in mind, but this guy really looked like an old sessions player for Stax. I felt his desperation when he was trying to sell this keyboard [for a bag of weed], and that’s when I realized that [the lead character] DJay could be staring straight at his own fate. Even if he had success as a rapper, he could hit the juice or smoke too much weed and end up in the same position. So I cast Claude … and everybody from Chris Rock to Spike Lee has asked me about him.”

“One time when we were shooting, Craig just hollered out, ‘I love seeing Memphis people in my movies!'” Phillips recalls. “And let me tell you, that was a real turn-on.”

Categories
Cover Feature News

Second Act

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

California to Memphis is an unconventional move for a trained theater director and aspiring filmmaker, but, in 1994, Craig Brewer, in town for the funeral of his maternal grandfather, ex-big-league ballplayer Marv Throneberry, decided to make it.

Brewer says he found his artistic voice in Memphis, especially in the region’s rich music culture. “It’s Memphis music that’s rescued me many times,” Brewer says today, speaking of more than merely his art.

Whether moving to Memphis — the family home he visited every summer growing up — allowed Brewer’s ascent or delayed it will never be known, but a decade after his relocation, in January 2005, Brewer found himself at the epicenter of the film world when his second feature, the Memphis-rap-themed Hustle & Flow, set off a bidding competition among Hollywood studios and won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival.

With a long-sought, hard-won shot at a viable big-time film career before him, with his options seemingly limitless, what would Brewer’s next step be? Helming a potential commercial franchise? How about cashing in with a director-for-hire project attached to a big star? For Brewer, the answer turned out to be Black Snake Moan, a pulpy Southern Gothic tale in which a white “nymphomaniac” spends much of the movie chained to the radiator of a black blues singer’s farmhouse.

The rollout for Brewer’s unavoidably controversial and sneakily personal second act started with a triumphant return to Sundance in January and continued this week with a New York premiere Monday, February 19th, and a homecoming premiere at downtown’s Muvico Peabody Place Theatre Thursday, February 22nd. Black Snake Moan will open around the country Friday, March 2nd. (Our review of the film will be in next week’s Flyer.)

The 35-year-old Brewer says he saw the opportunity provided by Hustle & Flow‘s Sundance moment not as a chance to play it safe but as a rare opportunity to get this risky movie made.

“I know it probably wasn’t the safest movie to do, but I thought it was the only time in my career I could get Black Snake Moan made,” Brewer says.

“After the big opening at Sundance, all the studios wanted to meet with me,” Brewer says. “But I always knew that Hustle would be a commercial for me for the rest of my career. No matter what movie I made after Hustle & Flow, I could go to a studio and say, okay, I’ll sell out. I’ll do a big movie and make it as fun and entertaining as Hustle & Flow. But I knew I would have the leverage now to do something that the studios might be fearful of doing. And the leverage I had was that the studios all passed on the script of Hustle & Flow.”

Brewer calculated that those studios wouldn’t risk making the same mistake twice and used the opportunity to make a movie Hollywood would never have considered had Brewer not proven them wrong on Hustle & Flow.

The script for Black Snake Moan was already finished by the time Brewer exploded onto the Sundance scene. (“The most important thing in Hollywood is to have a script,” Brewer says. “There are plenty of ideas and concepts and all that kind of crap, but if you have a script, that means you can have a budget. That means you can make it.”)

The story of three damaged souls — a young woman (Christina Ricci) whose sexual addiction is rooted in a history of abuse, her sensitive boyfriend (Justin Timberlake) plagued by anxiety attacks, and a blues singer (Samuel L. Jackson) whose wife has just left him — colliding in rural Mississippi, Black Snake Moan wasn’t just written in the period Brewer was struggling to get Hustle & Flow made. In many ways, that’s what it’s about.

The blues element of Black Snake Moan comes from a love of the genre and its culture Brewer has had since he bought Muddy Waters’ Hard Again at a Beale Street record store at age 14 after hearing “Mannish Boy” in the movie Risky Business. But the guts of the story are more personal.

Where Hustle & Flow was partially about the making of Brewer’s self-financed debut, The Poor & Hungry — the “demo tape” he used to get noticed — Black Snake Moan was partly inspired by the years-long process of getting Hustle & Flow made, a period marked by what Brewer calls “crippling anxiety attacks” and, he admits, marital difficulties.

The end result is a movie that’s deeper, more intimate, and more sincere than the film’s gonzo exploitation-style marketing suggests.

Brewer, a Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor fan who embraces the pulpy aspect of his film (the notorious Elia Kazan/Williams collaboration Baby Doll was a key influence), not only approves of the flamboyant marketing, he pushed for it.

“This is not a movie that’s without its titillation and taboo,” Brewer says, “and I didn’t want to wear my heart on my sleeve in the poster. So I told [the marketing department] to go Conan the Barbarian on this. I told the studio, please give people permission to enjoy the movie. The studio asked, How do we sell this? And I said, We sell the camp.”

The camp is there, but Brewer roots his vibrant central conceit in an otherwise normal world, which gives the audience entrée to a setting they might otherwise be reluctant to enter.

“[Supporting characters] Reverend R.L. (John Cothran Jr.) and Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson) are people who recognize the absurdity of what’s happening,” Brewer says, “and we are thankful that they’re there to help us recognize the absurdity. But it’s important that those characters make a step toward the absurdity.” And bring the audience along with them.

Justin Fox Burks

Craig Brewer and his Memphis character actors Jeff Pope, Jason Freeman, Amy LaVere, and John Still

“I really like being in movies where people react and laugh, and they are being played to,” Brewer says. “I’m hitting beats, and if I hit those beats, I can take my story in any direction I want. And because there is a continuity and a context to those emotional beats, people find that they will accept it, they’ll go the extra distance with it.”

Brewer’s films seem to occupy space at the intersection of art house and exploitation, but, at heart, they are mainstream entertainments. That Brewer unleashes his crowd-pleasing instincts within the realm of relatively low-budget films about “gritty” subjects seems to feel untrustworthy to his critical detractors.

“There are times that I feel like a bat, like I’m neither bird nor beast. Hollywood thinks that I’m way too out there sometimes. I’m the crazy guy from Memphis who makes the movies about pimps and whores and nymphomaniacs and bluesmen. And yet, here at home, I’m kind of a Hollywood sellout,” Brewer muses.

“And when I go to Sundance, the critical line is: ‘How could people call this independent cinema? How can people call this an entertaining movie that encourages us to laugh and suspend some elements of belief — how can we call this real?’ And I guess I just don’t think about it much.”

Black Snake Moan has been written about recently in the context of ’60s and ’70s exploitation movies, but spend a little time with Brewer and you pick up on a different model for his past two films: the perhaps underrated commercial “B” movies of the 1980s.

Talking to Brewer at the South Main offices of his Southern Cross the Dog production company last weekend, the director says that his three “formative cultural moments” were Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” video, Michael Jackson’s moonwalk on the Motown 25 television special, and the revelation of Apollonia Kotero’s ample bosom in Purple Rain. And, instantly, the conversation spurs Brewer to pop a DVD of Purple Rain into the player, dim the office lights, and play the movie’s opening credits for the visiting writer and photographer. Brewer stands up the whole time, playing air-guitar, dancing, and excitedly commenting on the opening sequence as it plays — teasing out and making obvious the artistry in a piece of filmmaking not usually taken so seriously. You get a sense of how energetic Brewer’s studio pitch meetings must be.

And references to other modest but mainstream ’80s flicks emerge in casual conversation with the director: Norma Rae, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Urban Cowboy, Footloose, Flashdance.

What’s refreshing is that Brewer appreciates these movies not as kitsch or nostalgia but for the underrated entertainments — and, yes, works of art — that they are, and the more you absorb his enthusiasm, the more you see the connection to the kind of movies he’s made. There’s a storytelling integrity and pulpy excitement that Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan have in common with those ’80s films that contemporary Hollywood equivalents don’t share.

“The thing about all those [films] is that they’re truly working-class movies,” Brewer says later. “The objective in An Officer and a Gentleman is not to shoot down MiGs. It was for him to graduate. The objective of Flashdance, another very important movie to me, is not to dance in the big show and make everybody stand up and applaud. It was to get into the school. Footloose was about a high school dance. They’re simple objectives, and you might think, well, anybody can do that. But they’re not simple objectives. That’s why it’s very important to me and why I always take exception when people say, oh well, [Hustle & Flow protagonist] DJay turned into a star. And I say, no, no, no. The only goal was to get something in the hands of somebody. But really the victory in Hustle & Flow is getting this song played on the radio. Once.”

That Brewer identifies with these underdog stories doesn’t seem at odds with his recent success. Brewer moved from California to Memphis to forge a film career, and, now that he’s got one, he’s remained in Memphis. Brewer now has an apartment in L.A. overlooking the Hollywood hills for when he has to be on the West Coast, but he insisted on having his production office in Memphis instead of on the Paramount lot and lives in a modest Midtown home with his wife Jodi and 5-year-old son Graham.

The Brewers did splurge on new rides when the Hustle & Flow check finally came in. Jodi got what Brewer calls a “souped-up Audi.” (“She drives a spaceship,” he says, though the amenities he describes — seat-warmers, satellite radio — are fairly common these days.) Brewer drives a GTO he bought slightly used. It’s white with a red double stripe up the hood, red licorice-like interior, and plenty of horsepower. Stepping down hard on the gas heading down Union Avenue, Brewer cautions: “Don’t drive one of these. You’ll buy it.”

But when asked how his life has changed in the two years since Hustle & Flow, Brewer focuses on what he can do, not what he can get.

“It’s nice to have financial stability. It’s nice to have health insurance finally,” Brewer says. “But I think the thing that I dig the most is the support and freedom to explore projects. People will listen to me. I can get anybody in Hollywood on the phone, and they want to hear what I have to say. As much as that can give someone goose bumps, with that comes a tremendous responsibility: Don’t waste their time. Don’t go down a path that you’re not willing to go all the way. The one thing I’m concerned about is getting involved with things that I’m not truly passionate about. Because it’s a war to get a movie made. It’s a two-year chunk out of your life.”

It’s a process Brewer is itching to start again for his next film, the country-music themed Maggie Lynn, which Brewer hopes to begin filming in East Tennessee later this year.

“The hardest thing about this past year is that I’m trying to get into Maggie Lynn,” Brewer says. “I’ve got a whole other girl I’ve got to fall in love with.”

Brewer’s production office is littered with hints about Maggie Lynn, and Brewer seems cheerfully unaware that the local hipster and hip-hop cultures he typically celebrates are about the last places that would appreciate the merits of such mainstream country performers as Gretchen Wilson, Kenny Chesney, and Miranda Lambert, whose magazine cutouts clutter one bulletin board as potential models for characters in the movie.

When the subject of Maggie Lynn comes up, Brewer fires up the song “The Mountain,” from local rock band Lucero, on his laptop and acts out the potential opening sequence, which culminates in Maggie dancing along to the band in concert at a dirt-bike race.

Who knows if that vision will make the big screen, but it’s typical of Brewer, whose devotion to Memphis culture is never far from his mind. He ticks off local musicians such as Lucero, Jack Yarber, Harlan T. Bobo, Amy LaVere, and Al Kapone as people he thinks deserve stardom and speaks as excitedly about War Bride, a new collaboration with longtime friend and fellow Memphis filmmaker Mike McCarthy, as he does about Maggie Lynn. (Brewer hopes to produce the film, with McCarthy directing. They’re both working on the screenplay of what Brewer dubs a “female Rambo.”)

“That’s the entrepreneur in me,” Brewer says. “I want to figure out a way to use artists in town and be successful. Yes, I want to make money, but every time I make money, my friends make money. I’ve made money for Memphis. Since my movies have been here, I think I’ve contributed $3 million to $4 million to the local economy. And there isn’t anybody in Hollywood asking how they can make movies in Memphis or in the state of Tennessee.”