Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
Emanuel Levy
David Poland
Doug Pratt
Ray Pride

JANUARY 24, 2005

6:00pm - "I separated from my wife six years ago… I moved into a house a few blocks away… we got divorced about three years ago… the other night, she kissed me… for the first time in six years, she kissed me… she was just so proud… in that moment, everything was forgiven… I have my family back… my family… so all of this… I don't give a hot damn about all of this… I have my family back…"

This is the voice of a human being… someone who is not worrying about Paris Hilton or what sold for how much, even if the film he stars in fetched one of the highest prices ever paid for a Sundance film… that someone is Terrence Howard.

We only had a few minutes with Mr. Howard, a colleague and I sucking up a few moments of break time between roundtable sessions. But it took less time to connect to this man's heart than pretty much any interview I've ever done. My guess is that it is his heart and not my interviewing skill that brought that about.

It is impossible to respond to that comment… as a human being… after it's been said, there is no follow up. There is nothing else, no detail, no chat about awards, that is anything less than degrading to both the interviewer and the interviewee after that.

But before we got there, Mr. Howard had already explained that he grew up in a home not unlike the one his character is master of in Hustle & Flow. He grew up in a tough part of Cleveland before moving to Canoga Park with his uncle, who was a small-time pimp. (The film is set in Memphis.) There his uncle had - as Howard tells it - three girls who worked for him and lived in the house, the characters of the women not unlike the characters of the three women who are in his life in the film. Not only that, but as a teenager he was left alone by that uncle - incarcerated in New York for a year - in charge of the girls, getting instruction only by long distance phone. He learned how to manage these women as individuals… as real people. This quality is one of the magical things about the film, though Mr. Howard says that he and the cast stuck to Craig Brewer's script, word for word, throughout.

Mr. Brewer, when talking about the origins of the film, tells the story of a pimp in an old car outside of a location on his last film, a zoned-out white girl with micro-braids in the front seat, trying to talk him into a toss with all of the sales skill of Dale Carnegie after four joints.

Terrence Howard was Brewer's first and only choice for the role of D Jay… perhaps because of Howard's history. Apparently, he was offered millions to make the film with a real-life rapper in the lead role. But Brewer held tight to Howard, turned down the easier money, and eventually found Stephanie Allain, who was an exec at Columbia back when her now-producing-partner John Singleton came to that studio with Boyz In the Hood.

The result is a very powerful film. But perhaps even more important, it is the debut of two new young talents who are going to be with us for a long, long time.

Day Four
Day Three
Day Two
Day One
Preview: The Hot Button