Lil P-Nut – Memphis Flyer

Benjamin Flores Jr., better known as Lil’ P-Nut, has moved up the Hollywood ladder since his days of appearing as the cute kid sidekick to Memphis car dealer Mark Goodfellow in the It’s All Good Auto Sales commercials.

These days, the 13-year-old native Memphian, who got his start as a rapper at age 4, is a budding star living with his parents in L.A. He’s starring as a rapper’s son on a new Nickelodeon show called Game Shakers that premieres on September 12th. The show is produced by fellow Memphian Dan Schneider. It’s Lil’ P-Nut’s second series for the network. Since 2013, he’s starred as a ghost on Haunted Hathaways.

Lil’ P-Nut has also appeared in the film Ride Along with Ice Cube and Kevin Hart, and he was the voice of Atticus in Happy Feet Two.

Flyer: So tell me about your new show, Game Shakers.

Lil’ P-Nut: The show is about a group of kids who come together and start making games. There are these two girls called Babe and Kenzie, and they make this game for a science project. They use this specific song in the game, and the song is from my dad [on the show] Double G, played by Kel Mitchell. He hears the song, and he flies to New York, and he tries to sue them. But I help everybody resolve the issue. I say, let’s become a team, and let’s make games together. So we travel all over the world making games. My character Triple G is a gamer. He’s a rich kid, but he likes to be around people his own age.

Are you a gamer? Were you able to draw on your own experience?

I play Sky Whale a lot. It’s the game we made on the show, and if you want to play it, you can go on the App Store and download it.

How did you get this role?

I auditioned for Haunted Hathaways. I got the role, and I did the show. And after that, Mr. Dan Schneider and his team called me and said they wanted me to do an audition for them [for Game Shakers]. They liked it, and they wanted me to be on the show.

The show’s producer, Dan Schneider, is a Memphian, too. What’s it like working with him?

Every time I get to talk to him, we always talk about how much we miss the barbecue and how much we want to come back.

Do you ever get to come home for visits?

I haven’t been back yet, but I ask my parents all the time, “Can we please go back?” I miss Memphis a lot. I still have a lot of family there. I get homesick because I miss it so much.

What do you miss the most?

I miss smoked sausages, Jungle Juice. I miss riding my bike down the street. I miss the bus picking me up with the broken leather seat. I miss my teachers. I miss friends. I miss my grandma and her eggs. I miss everything out there. I miss Southland Mall. I just miss Memphis.

Are you still filming for the show?

We’re still filming, and we have a long way to go. Acting is so fun for me. I don’t see it as a job. I see it as something I like to do. When I get up in the morning and I have to go there, it’s not like a job. I usually spend about nine hours [on set]. But they break it up into my schooling, too.

How do you balance school with acting?

You have to go to school on set. They have this classroom for you, and all the kids on the show go do their classwork. You just go to school for five hours. I’m pretty busy, but you got to keep the grades up.

Are you still rapping?

I’m so focused on acting right now. Maybe if I get the urge to rap again, I will. I still love rapping. That’s what got me here. But I like acting, and that’s where my main focus is right now. It’s hard for a kid to do two things at one time.

Weren’t you up for a Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Award earlier this year?

This was my second time being nominated. Hopefully, next time I’ll win, though.

Do you want to add anything else?

Make sure you guys watch the show on September 12th. Make sure you download the Sky Whale game. I want to give a shout-out to Memphis. And I want to give a shout-out to my cast. Peace!

It is said that all art aspires toward musicality, and no form comes closer than film. The linear flow of moving images naturally mirrors the aural motion of music. When the sound era dawned, the very first thing filmmakers did was turn their cameras on Al Jolsen and let the music do the talking.

Perhaps because of the two media’s similarities, many directors are also musicians. Such is the case with Martin Shore, a drummer from San Diego who toured with Cody Dickinson’s Hill Country Revue. Shore’s day job is as a film producer, and Take Me To The River, his directorial debut, is the latest music documentary to take on the question, “What makes Memphis music so special?” Guided by North Mississippi Allstars’ guitarist and son of legendary Memphis music producer Jim Dickinson, Shore gathers a who’s who of Memphis music legends together to make a record while the cameras roll.

The problem facing the directors of all music documentaries is how to balance the story and the music. It’s a simple problem of arithmetic: Unless you’re Martin Scorsese and HBO gives you three hours to tell George Harrison’s story, you have a limited amount of time to work with. Without the music, it’s hard to care about the story; but give the story short shrift and you lose the reason the audience is there in the first place. In Take Me To The River, Shore errs on the side of the music, and this is probably wise. The epic sweep of the Stax story has already been told in Robert Gordon’s Respect Yourself, so Shore constructs a series of vignettes from footage of the recording sessions interspersed with interviews with the musicians.

This approach makes for some magical moments. Al Kapone chats with Booker T. Jones as the legendary keyboardist drives his van around town. The Hi Records backup singers the Rhodes Sisters recall how Willie Mitchell used to exclaim “God the glory!” when they hit a note he liked. Frayser Boy, who wrote the Academy Award-winning flow for “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” admits to Skip Pitts, who played guitar on Isaac Hayes Academy Award-winning “Theme From Shaft,” that he has never recorded with a live band before. Pitts refuses to even look at a chart before launching into the Rufus Thomas song “Push And Pull.” The magnetic and eternally young Mavis Staples changes the song at the last minute, and then soothes her collaborators’ nerves with a few well-placed smiles and a stunning vocal performance. William Bell tells the story of David Porter writing “Hold On I’m Comin” while an amused Porter looks on. Narrator and Hustle and Flow star Terrence Howard becomes completely overwhelmed by emotion after recording with the Hodges brothers, including a frail looking Teenie. Bobby Blue Bland teaches Lil P-Nut to sing “I Got A Woman.” And finally, Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads produces a session with Snoop Dogg and the Stax Academy Band pulling together more than a dozen musicians to cut “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” in less than 30 minutes.

It’s fun to be a fly on the wall in these recording sessions held in historic spaces, and the camaraderie and respect between the players is evident. The talent, discipline, and instincts on display are amazing, because, as the indomitable Deanne Parker says, these musicians came of age in a time when “we didn’t have any technology to make you sound better.”

Take Me To The River never answers the question of why this city produces so much great music. But then again, no one else has ever been able to put a finger on what Charlie Musselwhite calls “that secret Memphis ingredient you can’t write in a book.”

Take Me To The River
Playing Friday, September 12th
The Paradiso