Filmmaker Matty Rich was a 19-year-old kid from the Red Hook Houses when Straight Out of Brooklyn won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991. Without Hollywood connections or rich relatives, he’d gathered enough money from donations, investments, and maxed-out credit cards to make a feature film, for which he served as writer, director, producer, and actor.
Rich had grown up in a crime-plagued era in Red Hook, and with Straight Out of Brooklyn, he told the story of three young friends who would do anything to get out of the neighborhood. On May 12, the Brooklyn Academy of Music screened a 35-millimeter print of the half-forgotten indie sensation as part of its weeks-long “Black ‘90s” revival series, which happened to coincide with the death of director John Singleton.
Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood – similar to Rich’s work but bigger and more detailed – also came out in 1991. Both movies took their titles, in modified form, from NWA songs. The surge of inner-city crime dramas at the time (including Juice and Menace II Society) seems, at least in retrospect, to have emerged partly for the purpose of contextualizing and humanizing the increasingly popular but still fearsome new musical genres of hardcore hip-hop and gangsta rap. Most were coming-of-age stories centered on tough but sympathetic young men pulled into violence by social forces.
Accordingly, perhaps, Straight Out of Brooklyn – rough around the edges (especially the sound) but still fully watchable – bears not so much the unbridled energy of Rich’s raw youth but a slightly stodgy, schematic quality: it intends to lay out an argument. In this endeavor, it has a certain structural soundness and even some nuance. In its opening scene, the main character’s father has come home drunk and beats up the mother while the teenage children huddle silently in their bedroom. The next morning, they clean up the rubble of their household possessions, which the father has trashed yet again.
Rich makes the audience understand that a lifetime of social and economic humiliation, in the form of minimum-wage servitude, has stifled and broken the father, once a kind and bright man, whose frustration erupts upon his wife at night. Cursed to empathize with her abuser, she struggles to find a job with bruises on her face. (The makeup artist lays them on a bit thick.)
For the protagonist, Dennis, home life is unbearable, which is why he’s looking for a shortcut out of the projects while his responsible girlfriend waits tables and prepares for college. His friends Larry (played by Rich) and Kevin aren’t quite as hungry as he is: Kevin mentions that his uncle can get them jobs at a local gas station – the same work performed by Dennis’s dad. Dennis persuades them to take part in a heist instead. Once a week, as they know, a bigshot gangster sends a henchman to collect money from his drug dealers in the Red Hook Houses; Dennis, Kevin, and Larry will wait until the henchman’s briefcase is filled and then will rob him.
The simplicity of this plan may owe the movie’s origins as a short film, which Rich subsequently expanded; the deed doesn’t equal the scope of Dennis’s ambitions, which involve buying a condo in Manhattan and permanently saving his family from poverty, but the one-off crime allows the film’s plot to hinge cleanly upon a single, significant action. This leaves space in the 91-minute running time for some scenes of the friends goofing off, which have real charm and humor. The other scenes feature a lot of shouting to amp up the drama, even when there isn’t much to shout about.
In 1988, LIFE Magazine ran a cover story on Red Hook, the “crack capital of America.” Three years later, Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City dramatized the epidemic in Harlem in comic-book style. By contrast, Straight Out of Brooklyn lacks a ripped-from-the-headlines pertinence that would place it more firmly within its epoch. It isn’t just that, in its (quite beautiful) exterior shots, the Red Hook Houses of course look exactly the same as they do now. Its setting is not a time period but a genre, and the genre, surprisingly, is a cruder iteration of Lorraine Hansberry’s. A primarily domestic melodrama on timeless social themes, it doesn’t contain much action, and no one talks about crack specifically.
A more elaborate script might have chronicled a longer-term criminal involvement instead of focusing on just one robbery executed by a good kid pushed too far. In depicting a more realistic and complex response to the same set of circumstances faced by Dennis, it would’ve likely generated a broader social canvas with at least a degree of journalistic interest.
Still, despite a dysfunctional ending, Straight Out of Brooklyn did enough to impress critics, including Roger Ebert. But it wasn’t so much the filmmaking itself as the fact of the film’s existence that garnered attention. The latter owed partly to a precocious artistic talent but even more to a precocious gift for fundraising, logistics, and management. How did a teenager come to hire crew of technicians and supervise them competently in the task of producing a professional-quality feature film?
Straight Out of Brooklyn cost $450,000 – extremely cheap by Hollywood standards, but for comparison, Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi (1992) cost $7,000. In most scenes, Rich doesn’t do much with the camera, but his movie looks like a real movie, and it even has an original score. The performances mostly are good: the lead, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., moved on to a long career in TV shows like The Wire and The Walking Dead.
With a larger budget at his disposal, Rich went on to direct a second, unsuccessful movie, The Inkwell, and then jumped ship to the video game industry. In a 1999 interview, Spike Lee expressed disappointment: “It’s unfortunate because when he came out he got bad advice. He was like ‘I’ve never read a film book, I don’t go to movies, I don’t know how to use a camera, I’m from the streets!’ And eventually that was reflected in his filmmaking. He knew nothing about film.”
Rich hasn’t made a feature since 1994. In April 2019, Hollywood news sources claimed that he would finally return to the big screen with a self-penned script, Caller 100, which hasn’t yet started production but will reportedly star the rapper T.I. Even so, maybe movies were never the point: Rich made it out of Brooklyn.
