Juice stays fresh after 25 years

I waited 25 years to see Ernest R. Dickerson’s directing debut, Juice, and it wasn’t by choice.

The new 25th anniversary Blu-ray edition features commentary from Dickerson, interviews with the cast and crew and even the film’s original ending, which — in my view and Dickerson’s — is much more powerful than the one in the finished movie.

Today, the film is known for launching the acting careers of Omar Epps (Love & Basketball, House, Resurrection), hip-hop legend Tupac Skakur, Queen Latifah and Donald Faison (Scrubs).

British producer David Heyman also made his start with Juice, and his career shot into the stratosphere when he acquired the rights to a then-unpublished novel by a struggling English writer named J.K. Rowling.

Hogwarts has made him rich ever since.

Juice was a box office hit and spawned a popular soundtrack, but the theater in my neighborhood (Fair Park & Asher) at the time, the United Artists University Quartet, pulled the movie.

OFF-SCREEN VIOLENCE

According to reports in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, on opening night, Friday, Jan. 17, 1992, a fight took place in the parking lot outside the theater, and police responded to a report of gunshots.

At the Carmike 7 in North Little Rock, assailants broke the eye socket of an assistant manager who tried to beak up violence there. Vandals ripped down approximately $500 worth of red drapes. Gunshots also rang out. Police discovered two weapons in the parking lot and charged two young men for disorderly conduct. By Saturday, the film was no longer screened in the Little Rock area.

Incidents like these took place in other cities. A teenager was killed in Chicago, and an assailant shot and paralyzed an 18-year-old man in Philadelphia.

According to Matt Smith, who now runs Theater Group Inc. (Searcy Cinema 8, Silver Screen Cinema 8, Hot Springs VIP Cinema, Riverdale 10 VIP Cinema), the outbreak of gunfire and other forms of violence at a screening were unprecedented in Arkansas theaters.

“Fairly unusual? Yeah. It would have been absolutely unheard of. That would be beyond unusual. That would be like aliens landing in your front yard. Those things don’t happen in movie theaters. There are 40,000 screens in the United States. There are 7,500 cinemas in America. Something like Aurora, Colo., makes the news,” he recalls.

MISSING THE MESSAGE

At the time, Little Rock police said the uproar was “big-time gang-related,” but the irony is that Juice, which takes its title from a slang term for money, prestige and power, is unambiguously anti-violence.

The four teens depicted in the film (Epps, Shakur, Jermaine “Huggy” Hopkins and Kahlil Kaine) call themselves the “Riverside Wrecking Crew” but manage to steal little more than a few vinyl albums and suffer for their decisions to get into crime. After 25 years, it’s probably not a spoiler to reveal that two of them end up dead with nothing to show for their efforts.

Speaking from Los Angeles, Dickerson explains, “That was one of the things that drew us into wanting to make this film. We were horrified at how prevalent guns were becoming in some of the neighborhoods. That was definitely one of the themes we wanted to talk about how more guns just contribute to the violence.

“We didn’t want to let the audience off the hook at the end. The way that Bishop (Shakur) went out at the end, it added more weight to the irony of Q (Omar Epps) being offered this ‘juice,’ something that he never wanted in the first place.”

Bishop practically fetishizes his pistol and chooses it over even his closest friends. If his decisions seem irrational and dangerous, it might be because he’s got a father who’s almost a vegetable and he himself is still a teenager.

Dickerson cast Epps when the actor was 17, and the youthful cast seems less like career criminals and more like, well, kids.

“The whole point is that these are kids. These are kids that are trying to find their place in the world: Where do they have influence? Where do they have power? Where do they have juice? Unfortunately, with all of us growing up, you, me, peer pressure was a major force in a lot of the decisions we did or didn’t make,” Dickerson says.

“Peer pressure is such a potent force in young folks’ lives that sometimes it leads them to make the wrong decisions. (Q) He was trying to grow as an artist, but that group kept pulling him back.”

ONLY FLEETINGLY

In fact, grown-ups appear only fleetingly in the film. While Dickerson says his mother, who appears in the movie, helped him stay out of trouble when he grew up in Newark, N.J., he and his characters often had to fend for themselves.

“When I left the house, my mother had a lot to do with the decisions I made in my life. My father died when I was much younger, in fact, when I was 8 years old,” he recalls. “I had two different lives: I had a life at home with my mom and my family, and I had a life out on the streets with my friends. My mother never knew what kind of mischief I was getting into after I got out of the house.

“So, keeping the parent as a background figure, that was the point. In a way, it was almost like the old Peanuts cartoons show their parents. You never show their parents’ voices. It’s always ‘wah-wahwah.’ This is a whole separate world, a more youthful world.”

It’s easy to compare Juice to John Singleton’s debut Boyz n the Hood, which opened the year before, but there are important differences.

The parents in that film are more present in the young men’s lives, and unlike Juice’s Harlem, the residents of South Central Los Angeles occasionally see a glowing ball of light in the sky called the sun (Dickerson is a big fan of German expressionist films like M). In addition, when Dickerson made Juice, he was old enough to be the father of his characters. Singleton was in his mid-20s.

Dickerson remembers, “It was almost 10 years from the time that we (Dickerson and playwright Gerard Brown) wrote the script to the time that we were able to make it. A lot of the characters were based on interviews I did with my brother-in-law, who was 17 years old at the time, and his friends and just getting a handle on what their day-to-day lives were like. That helped me a lot in that, but also, just keeping current, in touch with things. At my current age (65), I try to stay relevant.”

Part of Dickerson’s efforts for making Juice relevant and fitting for the early ’90s was making Q a scratch-and-mix DJ instead of a rapper.

“I was also interested in that as a musical form, as an art form. It was quite original. It was something that was totally brand new, scratching and mixing. I was also fascinated by some of the things people were able to do with that. I thought that making Q a rapper would have been too easy. It would have been too, on-the-nose. So, scratching and mixing, I thought, made him more of a musician, that the turntables were his musical instrument,” he says.

STILL FRESH

Like others who worked on Juice, Dickerson, who started out as cinematographer for Spike Lee’s first films, has had a long and productive career. He’s an Emmy winner, and he has helmed everything from Law & Order and The Wire to The Walking Dead. He completed another feature film, Double Play, that he hopes to release soon.

Nonetheless, he’s troubled that much of the content in his movie has outlasted the fade haircuts his characters sport. Many of the issues addressed in the movie haven’t gone away.

“No, they haven’t,” he says. “They’re issues that still exist in a lot of neighborhoods all over America, not just African-American neighborhoods, Asian-American neighborhoods, Hispanic-American, white-American neighborhoods. These are problems that affect all kids. Maybe that’s why the influence of the film has lasted so long, and it’s managed to stay relevant, unfortunately.”