The Popcorn King

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.

Ratner was ultimately one of three directors considered for the assignment; once again, his chutzpah carried the day. "He came in and, for 20 or 25 minutes straight, just pitched his heart out to say why he should be the director," remembers Stern, who, together with New Line's then president of production Michael De Luca, ended up giving Ratner the job. Released in the summer of 1997, Money Talks wasn't a great movie, but it was funny (Ratner deems it his funniest film to date), a fine early showcase for Tucker, and a generally solid effort by an untested director thrown into the fires of a major Hollywood production just two weeks before the start of shooting.

After the movie became a modest hit, Ratner turned his powers of persuasion on Stern, entreating him to leave the studio to come and work for him. At the time, Stern declined. "I was like, 'I'm kind of an up-and-coming executive. I'm not going to leave and go produce movies. You directed one movie!'" Four years later, when Ratner renewed the offer in the wake of Rush Hour, Stern accepted. "When he gets enthusiastic about something," Stern says, "look out — he's going to make it happen."