| Joseph Kahn's filmmaking dreams died in 1991. A year before, he'd been in Greenwich Village, attending NYU, hoping to be the next Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese—alums who'd made the big time. But then money ran out, and Kahn was back home in Houston, picking up popcorn for a living in a theater that played films directed by others around his age, like John Singleton or the Hughes Brothers. Kahn wasn't white. His parents weren't rich. He didn't live in L. A. How was he ever going to make movies ? How was he going to catch a break? He wouldn't have to. Hip hop would do it for him. "The only reason I exist today is because gangsta rappers let me shoot their videos for $5,000 to $10,000," says Kahn, now 30. "I did 30 in a year for Rap-A-Lot." He's come a long way; he just wrapped Torque, his $50 million motorcycle flick starring Ice Cube, which opens in October. "The thing that made me today," says Kahn, who has directed clips for everyone from Janet Jackson to DMX, "isn't the million-dollar videos. |
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| It's the $5,000 videos shot in Houston's Fifth Ward." Kahn's story isn't unique—it's now commonplace. People who 10 years ago would have been locked out are now changing the way movies are made, as well as who gets to make them. "We had been doing things that no one else had been doing," says Marcus Raboy, 37, who shot Naughty By Nature's "O.P.P." and Carl Thomas's "I Wish" before Hollywood picked up on his skills. Video directors have long been the purveyors of cool, but translating that cool to feature-film respect was a huge challenge. Thanks to MTV and BET, many music-video directors are better known to their public than their feature counterparts. In some cases, they had hundreds of works on their resumes but were still treated like complete novices by major film producers. |
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