Bone: from the streets to the slammer to a growing force on both sides of the camera, it's been a long, wild journey for Cle Shiheed Sloan

Interview, March, 2003 by Fab 5 Freddy

F5F: [laughs) You were on the set.

B: Shooting some commercial somewhere. It was pulling me out. All of a sudden I had direction. Maybe on the weekend I get to bang real hard, but Monday I have to go back to work.

F5F: [laughs] So at this point your gangbanging was relegated to a weekend activity.

B: That was part of my strategy: I could wait for Friday, I could do my thing, and Monday I'm nowhere to be found--unless you can make it up to the Warner Bros. lot. Then I became a kind of camera PA. I would make a run up to Clairmont Camera--

F5F: --A well-known camera equipment rental house.

B: Yeah. Every time I went back, one of the owners, Denny Clairmont, would show me a little more about camera basics. I would make sure he was my last run of the day so I could hang out there a little bit. This millionaire, a powerful man in Hollywood, and I didn't even know who he was.

F5F: So he took a liking to you and explained some of the technical aspects.

B: Yeah. Then I started falling in love with the craft. I've always loved great movies. I loved Citizen Kane [1941] even before I knew anything about the filmmaking process. Also the 1938 movie Angels with Dirty Faces.

F5F: Ah, yes indeed. Humphrey Bogart.

B: Yeah, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney. It had that street element to it. It had the repercussions for doing wrong, showing that crime don't pay. But it was a lovely story. I always loved creative storytelling even before I knew what creative storytelling was.

F5F: I see.

B: So I'm living this double life. I went from camera PA to second assistant cinematographer, and then I started getting jobs as a camera assistant on big movies. And that's when I really learned the technical aspect of it: film stock, Panavision cameras, Bolex cameras. Then I felt empowered; I really saw myself becoming a filmmaker. And, of course, in my head there are all these real-life stories I've been living every day on the streets.... So I'm trying to figure out how I can marry the two.

F5F: One of the things we have in common is a quest for knowledge. You were on a quest for how this whole gangbanging thing in Los Angeles started.

B: I had always wondered, how did we get to the point where just because a cat lives five blocks over from me, we were trying to blow each other's heads off? What was the conflict that got passed on? Nobody had a clear answer, I started getting it in pieces. I asked guys older than me, and they would give me a date, some history, a name. Initially, the most concrete thing I could get out of people was that it was over a leather jacket. Every time I would ask these cats, it would come back to one clear story: 1972, at the Hollywood Palladium, a kid named Robert Ballou Jr. was beaten to death at a concert. He was murdered by the Grips for his leather jacket. That right there was the defining moment. So that's when I really got curious. I started doing some research about what had gone down, because in '65 we had the Watts riot, and everybody was pretty much on the black unification trip, standing up to the notoriously racist LAPD. And then in 1972 Robert Ballou is getting murdered over a leather jacket. I learn ed about gangs called the Slausons, the Gladiators, the Businessmen. And I asked myself, Why was there a need for black gangs in Los Angeles in 1965, if everyone was together? So then I had to go back to 1955, the whole exodus of blacks coming from the South looking for work. The schools became integrated overnight, and white America was not ready for blacks to all of a sudden integrate. That started the conflict. White gangs called "Spook Hunters" were assaulting the blacks.