Ellen Fox reports.
It's the last Sunday of September and about thirty people are crowded into The Head Rest II, a second-story barbershop at State and Adams. Sitting in swiveling barber chairs or on couches, they fix their attention on Ameer Muhammad, a clean-cut 29-year-old standing comfortably in a plaid shirt and jeans, next to a large-screen TV. "We want to involve at least 2,000 Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, Stones, Latin Kings and what have you in the whole movie project. It's going to hit the entire Midwest like a bomb. People, when they do see it, they're going to be like 'Damn, what the hell is this?'
"Throughout this country, nobody's ever done it like this. Bloods and Crips did another documentary, and it looked like a straight-up gang promotion," he continues. "The good thing about Chicago is that Chicago street organizations are more political, they're more mature in a sense."
That maturity, he figures, will enable those involved in his project to "convey that one solid message: That we're going to take care of this business, we're trying to survive, we're trying to come up."
Muhammad has just finished showing those assembled some twenty minutes of video highlights from his first documentary, "Ghetto Ambition." The project-in-process includes rap performances by and interviews with members of some of the largest gangs in Chicago, and many of those members are here today, watching footage of themselves and of rival gang members'as they sit side by side.
While Chicago's seen its share of efforts to reach out to and unify gangbangers -- remember 1992 election season's 21st Century V.O.T.E., which mobilized gangs to get out the vote? -- the prospect of filmmaking is the latest venture to strike a chord, or at least command respect, in ways that community organizations perhaps haven't been able to. "They do plays where gangbangers shoot fake guns -- real guns, fake bullets. They do scenes and skits and stuff," says 24-year-old Reaper, a Latin King, describing other attempts at outreach. "I don't go. If I'm going to go to church or something, I'm going to do it for God, or I go for my own reasons. I'm not going to go to sit down with the enemy and act like everything's cool when it ain't."
But this film about gang life, produced by Muhammad -- himself a former gang member -- who visits various gangs on their own turf, asks them to share their stories, and encourages aspiring rappers to contribute to the film's soundtrack seems to blend the appeal of stardom with the opportunity to take gangbangers "to the next level," without being sanctimonious.
"When I came to them and started telling them about the project and setting it up, it clicked with them because it was real," explains Muhammad, "I'm not trying to take them from what they're a part of. I would never tell a Latin King, 'Don't be a Latin King.' Or a Vice Lord 'Don't be a Vice Lord.' Or a Stone 'Don't be a Stone.'" A lot of churches and community groups, he complains, "have this one-sided view that if you want for things to change, you have to tell them to get out, leave it alone."
In just seven months, the project, which began with a handful of interviewees, has -- via word of mouth, or, more specifically, word on the street -- grown to encompass about 300 people, Muhammad says.
"We need to do more of this, to bring the street gangs in Chicago together, so that we can meet each other and greet each other," 36-year-old O.G. says before the film's screening. "Then we get a chance to know each other on an individual basis [rather] than just seeing a guy on the street and wanting to do something to him because he's from another neighborhood, or he got another color on. I think if we get to know each other personally, it may cut out a lot of this."
A Gangster Disciple since age 12, O.G., whose rap group Rebellious Life sings the film's title track, hails from 47th and Michigan, where the film began shooting. But a trip this summer down to neutral territory in Far South Suburban Midlothian for a pan-gang Father's Day picnic -- organized by Muhammad, filmed for the documentary, and attended by 300 families and friends -- has broadened his circle.
"I met some Vice Lords, some Stones. I've even met some women that are affiliated. Usually different affiliations don't have relationships with each other, but from the documentary I met someone that I'm seeing right now. "It's just about what the documentary is doing -- bringing people together, and changing them," he explains, not missing an opportunity to quote his lyrics. "'"Ghetto Ambition" has got us on a mission for business." [It's about] trying to get to other people, to tell them this gangbanging is really not where it's at. And it's going to take the older guys like me, who know better, who've been through it. Because the young ones, they really don't understand, they don't know the history of the street gangs.'"
The history of Chicago's gangs -- or, as they've come to be called, street organizations -- is actually the subject of Muhammad's Gambition MovieMakers' [endital]second[ital] documentary, and he has plans for three more. The first, the one being worked on now, says Muhammad, is about gang members "showing their willingness to make a change in the right direction, from the negative to the positive." The second will relate the early history of gangs; while the third through fifth documentaries will chart the shift from political activism in the sixties to the impact of drugs on gang structure in the seventies through the nineties.
"A lot of the black gangs and Hispanic gangs began primarily to keep the white gangs from coming into the black community. That was the first thing," Muhammad says. "The second thing was to keep the drugs out."
The project is expected to take five years, with one year spent making each installment. And that's not including the feature-length film Muhammad's written, titled "Ghetto Ambition 2G."
If Muhammad -- a management specialist at MCI Worldcom working on his bachelor's at Northwestern University -- seems almost too comfortable with his subjects' affiliations, it's because, as a former Gangster Disciple himself, he knows well the promise of identity and discipline that gangs purvey.
Born Alonzo Robinson, Muhammad grew up around 71st and Jeffery, where he remembers being fascinated, as a 10-year-old, by the sight of two rival gangs convening like marching bands down his street. "Power, it just looked like power," he says. "I was a big military buff anyway. I read everything. I knew about every bomb, I watched almost every military movie. When I looked at it, I saw structure, I saw organization."
He got his hands on some gang literature through cousins (relatives who lived on the West Side were Vice Lords, those from the South Side were Gangster Disciples), and soaked up reams of highly detailed gang protocol. "Stuff that I didn't have to memorize, I memorized. You multiply me times one hundred, you understand why [gangs are] not going anywhere." By age 11, Muhammad was a shorty -- the term for younger gang members -- with the Gangster Disciples. But by age 17, it clearly wasn't enough to satisfy. "At a certain point you get bored. I was a reader." He hooked up with Operation Push, worked to get the vote out, even going so far as to sneak aboard a press bus on its way to the 1988 Democratic Convention in New Orleans. When, lacking support from the delegates, Jesse Jackson conceded the nomination to Michael Dukakis, Muhammad, like many others, gravitated to Louis Farrakhan's side.
"Not only did he have the youth, he had a consistent, disciplined, manly image," he remembers. "Only the Nation of Islam could pull together every street gang from different areas."
Alonzo Robinson became Alonzo X. Then he joined the Army, no doubt to the shock of his brethren. "I do what I wanna do half the time," he shrugs. It was during his two-year stint at Fort Jackson, South Carolina -- where others nicknamed him "Little Farrakhan" -- that Muhammad formed his blueprint for a free, highly structured society for urban youth ages 12 to 21.
The Order of the Fraternal Scouts, he explains, will be a mixture "between the psychology of a gang, the psychology of the military, and the psychology of the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts." An eight-week crash course would train newcomers in survival skills, first aid and etiquette. That would be followed by enrollment in two-year, single-sex programs (boys in the Fraternal Order, girls in the Young Ladies Society "because, ya know, all young ladies should be young ladies"), which would train members in business skills, teach them multicultural history, steer them towards scholarships, and help them develop ways to clean up the community.
"You would drill them, you would structure them all, as if they were in a gang somewhere. If you have a hundred youth," he says, "give 'em a title! Everybody loves a title. That's what the beauty of the military is."
"I'm not saying that everyone should go into the military, but in the communities that we have, and the condition that they're in, where discipline is an issue, and where moral and ethical standards are an issue, you need to have some type of urban-based initiative that focuses on that type of training."
To hear Muhammad tell it, he's envisioning a Nation of Islam without the Islam, Girls Scouts without the cookies and green uniforms ("In a lot of these neighborhoods they don't want to join the Boys Scouts or the Girl Scouts because they sound kind of weird."), a gang without guns and drugs, a military without the threat of combat, or a Cook County boot camp without the incarceration. Something with all the cachet of a sorority or a fraternity, which will head off urban teens before they hook up with gangs and turn them into clean-cut, educated, business-minded citizens. As for filmmaking, Muhammad got the idea two years ago, when he and a friend decided to film an annual black college event in Atlanta. When they returned, Muhammad set to work writing a "what if" screenplay about how the threat of a citywide gang war culminates in a large-scale convergence, in which the aforementioned 2,000 gangbangers would serve as cast members. Those convened would listen as their leaders speak, and then, finally, one person -- Muhammad -- would deliver the wake up call.
"These little peace treaties before, they meant nothing," he'd say. "You have to do something real this time because the community is tired of hearing you say you want to have a peace treaty just because you have a problem, not because of the community."
Or something like that.
"The message is going to be dropped -- heavy," he predicts. "They're ready. If I wanted five thousand, I could get five thousand there. Two thousand is a very small number. They'll do it. Why? Because it's positive and it's productive. When you're talking about a movie, they're going to respond.
"I have people come up to me everyday when I come into the settings and they say, 'Man, when is the movie gonna be taking place, when is the movie gonna be taking place?' They're pumped up. Why? Because they trust me that I'm going to put together a product that doesn't exploit them. And they know that once they're in it, they're in it. Once I say it," he snaps his fingers, "it's done."
But while the screenplay itself is re-worked, the documentary project, which began seven months ago as a smaller-scale method of raising money and attention, is well under way. In May, Wicker Park-based documentary filmmaker Mark Siska, just back from shooting a project in the Ukraine about post-Soviet life, found Muhammad's query for a director on a Columbia College Website.
Siska's past projects followed the lives of punks working in boot factories and circus families in Poland. The prospect of shooting interviews with gang members struck him for both its political potential and for the opportunity to "go into areas that I would never be able to see unless I'm a filmmaker."
Together with co-cameraman and co-editor Ilko Davidov, their Bulletproof Films (so christened long before the two met Muhammad), has logged eighteen hours of video footage for "Ghetto Ambition" -- at sites ranging from Little Village to the Robert Taylor homes to open mic rap night at Englewood's Ebony Room.
Despite the subject matter, and the initial concern for his safety by his friends, Siska's not daunted. "Of course you're kind of nervous entering into a new environment," but, he says, "we've never had any problems with anything on this whole shoot. That's how powerful these guys are being in not letting that happen. Because they know once that happens, it's going to end the project."
(Interviewees from the ghetto, it turns out, have nothing on those from Eastern Europe: "I interviewed a skinhead in Poland, and at the end of the interview he burned his cigarette out in his face, 'This is for Hitler! Ahhh!!!!'") Thus far, the only glitch Siska can remember is the time that a Latin King wrote the words "Ghetto Ambition" on a wall for the film's opening segment. When Muhammad looked at the way the Ts were crossed, he asked him to write it again -- this time without making the T's look like pitchforks. Siska and Davidov hadn't even noticed. "We didn't see it, but within the gang subculture [others] would see it and be turned off."
Siska says their method of soliciting interviewees weeds out potential trouble. "If we run into somebody new, we're not like 'Here's our card, call us.' We say 'OK, we're shooting on this day, if you're interested, you show up.'" If they don't show up, they weed themselves out. We know immediately who is dedicated and wants a new direction." If everyone's so well-behaved on the shoot, Siska adds, it's because Muhammad takes the precaution of briefing interviewees before the camera rolls: no wearing baseball caps in ways that indicate gang affiliation, no hand signs, and don't say anything that's the least bit incriminating.
"If they incriminate themselves, then we could be responsible," he explains, even if it's something that could easily be edited out. "We can get subpoenaed by the Chicago Police Department if one of these characters does something and they find out about our project and who's involved. We don't want to jeopardize them and we don't want to jeopardize ourselves."
Machismo and sensationalism are not what the film's about anyway, adds Davidov. "We don't want to do what everyone else is doing, the 'Real TV' shock value-type stuff," says Siska. "This is all trying to talk positive and talk change and trying to give them some prospective of a future."
Despite the enthusiasm, it's hard to say how much change the project has wrought. If nothing else, it appears to have given gangbangers -- a group perhaps not readily prone to talk therapy -- a medium through which to share their stories. As Dig Deep Records owner Anthony Spann ("ten years gang-free") puts it after the screening in the barbershop: "The first step to recovery is admitting you've got a problem."
What the crowd watched today ran the gamut from frustrated descriptions of job-hunting to the visible fear of getting popped on the way home that night.
"All these years I've been doing this gangbanging, it pays off. Not, I mean, [ital] it pays off[endital], [but] I get a chance to tell somewhat of a story," Reaper says afterwards, "to leave something behind. Because you never know what's going to happen."
The highlights include a rap by Shady: "Had gang wars and slugged 'em out/and society asks me why am I so thugged out? They ain't been through the shit I've been/I spent my entire life dodging the pen. It's in the cards for our people to lose/and it's in the cards for us to break the rules and play the fools."
Other scenes show the indignation of someone who was sent to Pontiac at age 17 ("a grown man penitentiary!") and a dark, offhand comparison -- which got the room roaring -- of ghetto shootings to Columbine High School shootings: "They didn't even get no goddamn money!" And throughout the film, off camera, you hear Muhammad steering his interviewees with something like a mixture of understanding and encouragement.
For viewers unaccustomed to hearing ghetto vernacular, however, a first viewing of the film is bound to be somewhat undecipherable. (It's difficult to predict how it will play when Siska sends it to an upcoming film festival in Krakow.) There was also a conspicuous lack of input from women or female gang members, a problem Muhammad set out to solve after the screening by interviewing four young women (two rappers, one from the suburbs and one who's running for Miss Gambition) about how living with gangs has affected them.
"I grew up in the Robert Taylors and I've seen a lot of things," says Destine, a female rapper. "This project is right on time if you ask me. Because, you know, we are slippin','" she laughs sadly, "and we gotta get back on track."
More interviews are conducted after the screening -- amid the persistent ringing of Muhammad's cell phone -- including words from an older man named Musa, who tries, cryptically, to convey the spiritual purpose of a secretive founding organization called the Main 21.
Blackstones sit across from Latin Kings and discuss the consensus among most gang members that the police are the largest gang in town, talk of the deaths of friends and brothers, discover just which one of them used to be a Boy Scout ("I had all my patches, man, I was on my shit!") and finally ponder why gangs seem to cooperate better in prison than they do on the street.
Thus far, the group agrees, at least everyone's been cooperating with the project, no matter what goes on in the street. "Right here, this is working pretty good," Reaper nods.
With any luck, Muhammad says, he'll be able to sell tapes of the documentary to local video stores, and screen it at town hall meetings. But so far the subject matter -- and, perhaps the notion of community leaders listening to those they figure have shot their children, peddled drugs and terrorized their neighborhoods -- hasn't attracted any takers. The week following the barbershop screening, two interviewees were arrested.
With or without support, however, Muhammad will book the film at colleges, with one screening already scheduled at Northeastern Illinois University for November 30. As for any lasting effect the film will have on its subjects: "It's up to them how far it goes outside of the project," he explains. "The project's not a save-all, it's not meant to be a save-all. Where it takes them, it's up to them."
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.