Slam

From the Back Cover
Winner Cannes Film Festival 1998 Camera d'Or and the Sundance Film Festival 1998 Grand Jury Prize Directed by award-winning documentary filmmaker Marc Levin, Slam is a gritty, inspiring portrait of urban poverty and the redemptive power of art. Set in a war-zone housing project known as Dodge City and in the infamous Washington, D.C., city jail, Slam tells the story of Ray Joshua, a talented young poet and rapper who is busted on petty drug charges and sucked into the black hole of the criminal justice system. In jail, Ray meets Lauren, a volunteer teaching a writing class for the prisoners. She encourages Ray to use his gift to give voice to the anguish of a generation of young men who have been thrown away. And this book is more than just a screenplay. It also contains the poetry featured in the film, as well as behind-the-scenes filmmakers' and actors' diaries telling the story of the making of Slam in a two-week guerilla shoot inside the walls of the D.C. jail and on the killing streets of the Anacostia housing projects in southeast Washington, D.C. "Slam . . . seizes hold of your imagination. It's the kind of movie that makes you believe in movies."-Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly "A landmark film that defies easy categorization."-Variety "An unlikely mix of cinema verit visuals and colorful verse makes this fight-the-system message movie a visceral look at art's redemptive powers."-Premiere "Brace yourself for a slam-dunk of a movie . . . [Slam] makes Godard's Breathless look like a cartoon. . . . Independent filmmaking could find no higher ground than a film with an innovative style and social conscience that delivers the message: art redeems life."-The Hollywood Reporter Richard Stratton, the former editor and publisher of Prison Life magazine, co-wrote and produced the film. Kim Wozencraft, his wife, is the internationally best-selling author of Rush. Her latest novel is The Catch. They live in New York City.


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Independent filmmaker Marc Levin's Slam, the story of a black spoken-work poet from the ghetto who goes to jail for drug possession, won the prestigious Grand Jury Prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. The award, and Levin's cinema verite style, seem the only justifications for this eponymous mishmash of personal accounts and poems by those who worked on the movie. Stratton, who co-produced and co-wrote the film, compiled this volume with his wife, writer Kim Wozencraft, whose new novel, The Catch, is also out from Doubleday in September (see above)--both are ex-cons and together they founded the magazine Prison Life. The book opens with a salute to the filmmakers' "guerrilla-style" tactics: With sporadic funding, Slam was shot in 12 days at a prison and housing project, using real prisoners and poets as actors. Yet most of the entries exude banal solipsism. Levin's preproduction diary, which also traces his career in documentary filmmaking, is full of clunky prose ("A full moon is rising like a large yellow tennis ball"), and self-importance (he recalls a "grand brainstorming powwow" with Norman Mailer). Poet Sonja Sohn, who plays a prison teacher in the film, says Slam drew her away from "slow suicide," but fails to articulate why. Production assistant Robert Leaver's journal from the set gets mired in minutiae, such as the music he listens to driving and whether the coffee "is dreck" or from Starbuck's. Spoken-word performer Saul Williams, who plays the film's protagonist, provides one of the book's few highlights, riffing lyrically and unself-consciously on the task of making a movie "in the 'hood." (Sept.) FYI: Slam will be released simultaneously with the a Trimark movie, a soundtrack from Sony records; and there will be a reading tour featuring the cast.


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