A mere 10 months ago, the filmmakers, actors and producers of this year's Sundance sensation "Hustle & Flow" were celebrating the sale of their hip-hop romance about a pimp trying to rise above.
It seemed like a fairy tale ending to a grueling indie saga. After getting rejected all over town, novice filmmaker Craig Brewer finally persuaded producer John Singleton to pony up a couple of million dollars of his own money to make the film. Brewer, producer Stephanie Allain and actors Terrence Howard, Anthony Anderson, and DJ Qualls had all worked for close to scale in return for a piece of the profits. And now it looked like there was going to be a pot of gold for the filmmaking team.
After all, at this year's Sundance film festival in January, the film sparked a frenzied bidding war, which resulted in Paramount-MTV agreeing to pay producer and financier Singleton $9 million for the right to distribute the film, which only cost him close to $3.5 million to make, and paid him an additional $7 million to develop two more films.
But Brewer, for one, has yet to see a cent; neither have Anderson, Allain or Howard. And Singleton is publicly irate at being cast as the heavy by colleagues whose careers he effectively helped launch.
Unfortunately, profit disputes are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, but in this case, the dispute does not involve the gray-faced studio with tortuous studio accounting but the film's onetime savior: Singleton, best-known as the director of such films as "Boyz N the Hood" and "2 Fast 2 Furious." Indeed, during the 22-day Memphis, Tenn., shoot of "Hustle & Flow," Singleton and Brewer bonded over their mutual love of the raw hip-hop sound called Dirty South, the province of such rappers as Lil Jon and Ludacris, who also appeared in the film. The producer and his protege were so similarly attuned that they often showed up on set wearing the same T-shirt.
Of course, money -- or the absence of it -- can put a crimp in all relationships.
According to Paramount, Singleton began getting multimillion-dollar chunks of payment in the spring and had received 99% of the $9-million fee around the time of the film's release in July. Ironically, for all its hoopla, "Hustle & Flow" only grossed $22 million dollars at the box office, according to Boxofficemojo.com, and it is unlikely that Paramount has yet recouped its outlay for the purchase and marketing of the film.
