Movies

The Popcorn King

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"Whatever envy somebody is harboring — and most people are harboring at least a little bit of envy — Brett is going to bring it out of them," says Jay Stern, the former New Line executive who now runs Ratner's production company, Rat Entertainment. "He's living the dream. He has a tremendous amount of fun. He doesn't hide the fact that he has fun. He enjoys life to the hilt, and if people aren't enjoying life to the hilt ... envy's going to come up for them."

But is it merely envy that explains why, in my career as a journalist, I have never been greeted with as many expressions of skepticism, bafflement and outright disbelief from colleagues and friends as I have since first announcing I was working on this story? "You want to write about him?" they have asked, not infrequently followed by, "Did he really fuck Lindsay Lohan?" All of which, I must admit, has only served to redouble my interest. Most of the time when you tell people about a filmmaker you're profiling, all you get is a noncommittal "Oh" or an uncomprehending "Who?" But with Ratner, everyone — especially, I find, those who've never met the man or even seen many of his films — has an opinion.

It is a level of scrutiny, it must be said, that Ratner helps to bring upon himself. "The traditional Hollywood image of the director is the quiet guy in the background who's the puppeteer, not the guy who's out there in front of everybody," says Davis, who has produced or executive-produced four Ratner films. "That's who Brett is. But so what?"

"He seems to be almost an effervescent symbol of popular culture," adds director James Toback, who cast Ratner as himself in his 1999 urban drama Black and White. "And it's as if by being someone who says, 'This is where we are today in popular culture,' that means you're not taking things as seriously as you should. With Brett, the irony is that he's smarter than the people who think that way about him."

Which brings me to the other reason I've wanted to write about Ratner. It is an idea that may initially strike you as radical or preposterous, and which could jeopardize my standing in the film-criticism community. And yet, here goes: Brett Ratner is a talented filmmaker who deserves to be taken seriously.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to overstate the case for Ratner by suggesting that he's one of those innovative movie stylists whose work forever alters the face of the medium. (He's not — or, at least, not yet.) But neither is Ratner one of the anonymous Hollywood hacks who makes a library's worth of movies without ever leaving a recognizable fingerprint. Nor is he one of the prodigiously untalented, self-serious directors — the true fauxteurs — who achieve "importance" by pandering to the basest instincts of Oscar voters. What I am proposing is simply that Ratner excels at a kind of highly enjoyable, wholly unpretentious entertainment that isn't nearly as easy to manufacture as it seems; that he is a singular personality; and that, unlike many Hollywood flavors-of-the-month, he is most definitely here to stay. In fact, he's just getting started.

There is a mythology about Brett Ratner that goes something like this: Scrappy Jewish kid from Miami Beach who dreams of making movies skips high school to hang out on the set of Brian De Palma's Scarface until he makes himself such a nuisance that De Palma casts him as an extra. That same kid later talks his way into NYU film school despite an unimpressive GPA, where, on a lark, he writes to Steven Spielberg asking for $1,000 toward the budget of a student film, and later receives a check in the mail. A chance meeting with then-nascent Def Jam Records mogul Russell Simmons gets him a gig directing hip-hop music videos; those videos just happen to premiere on MTV at the very moment the network begins adding directors' names to the credit blocks, thus turning Ratner into one of the most sought-after video directors of the early '90s and an avatar of hip-hop's infiltration of mainstream pop culture.

"He embraced me, treated me like his little brother or his son, and he exposed me to that world," says Ratner of Simmons. "I wasn't the white kid who was like, 'Yo, what's up with that?' I was doing hip-hop videos, but I wasn't acting black. I was who I was."

"There are only a handful of guys that I've met in the movie world who mix interracially as though there were no such thing as race — not just who have some black friends, but who actually behave in a way when they're in interracial situations where there is no sense that they're even thinking about it," says Toback. "I always sort of secretly prided myself on feeling that this was a quality I had and that no one else I'd met had to the same degree, but starting with the first day of shooting on Black and White, I saw that Brett has the same thing. The irony was that he was playing a guy who wanted to direct Wu-Tang Clan in a video, and in real life he already had directed them in a video!"

Ratner's videos — some of them can be found as extras on the DVDs of his feature films — are stylish, highly cinematic affairs, usually conceived as mininarratives rather than collages of abstract images. One, for the 1994 Heavy D track "Nuttin' but Love," included an appearance by then up-and-coming comic Chris Tucker, who three years later would be cast opposite Charlie Sheen in the New Line—produced action comedy Money Talks. When the film's original director proved unable to cope with his star's rampant improvising and walked off the set, it was Tucker who suggested Ratner as a replacement.

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