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Midday, May 27, 2008. I was on the edge of East NY, Brooklyn, looking for a shop that sold $10 Boost phone cads. Not the $20 ones– what am I, Trump?

Somebody told me to go over to Pitkin Avenue in Brownsville, across the L train tracks. Once there, I stumbled across a great commotion at the Vad Dyke Houses housing project. Crowds were gathered and men with walkie talkies darted about. A crime scene. No, a movie shoot. I went up to a short black woman with dreads, a headset and a hardware store full of items hanging from her cargo pants.

“What’s shooting?” I asked. “Brooklyn’s Finest, a movie,” she said. “Cop stuff, huh?” “Well, sorta. It’s the director who did Training Day, Antoine Fuqua.” “Ah, Fuqua,” I said, remembering how much I love that director’s tactile widescreen compositions but mostly loathe his vision of humanity.

Never mind. I had my digital recorder on me, so I whipped it out and decided to play Film Journalist with the cute P.A. “Can I interview you?”

“Well, I don’t know anything about the film that you couldn’t get off Google.”

“No, not about the film. About you, what you’re doing here.”

“Umm, if you’re really interested in me…” She took out a 3×5 cardboard flyer with TV on the Radio-ish band posing on a tree. There she was in the center, but with straight blue hair instead of dreads. She looked like Storm of X-Men’s curvy cousin. “…call me and we’ll talk about my band.”

Cool.

I went into the courtyard, where the crew was clustered around a project building corner with giant HMI lights, reflectors and scirms pointing into windows. I recognized Fuqua from publicity stills. He was slapping five with a bunch of extras and crew members as tall and stocky as he. They all looked like cops and soldiers. A friend of mine whose NYU professor once worked for Fuqua as a screenwriter had related a story of the prof’s being chewed out by the director, and “sobbing like a little girl” in the aftermath. So I had been curious as to what an action director who could make a grown man cry looked like up close. Well, he looked like a killing machine. Wearing camouflage pants and a tight black muscle shirt, Fuqua had the presence of somebody who could command the likes of Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Chow Yun-Fat.

The crew packed up equipment and went for craft service at the Van Dyke community center. “I’m gonna be in the movie one way or ‘nother,” a pretty young girl pushing a stroller said. A 20-something fly guy said, “I’ma get in this movie even if I hafta go get my gun an’ start my own shoot-out.” “Noo,” singsonged a middle aged church woman nearby. “Don’t say thaat.” I went on to the Pitkin Avenue shopping area to continue the phone card quest.

When I passed through the Van Dyke houses on my way back to East NY, the place had gone all Training Day: Police tape, bigger crowds than before, patrol cars and an ambulance. I nestled into a small group of women who were hanging over a fence watching Fuqua compose a shot with a director’s finder. Several thugged-out extras and one Don Cheadle stood by. A husky AD came up to us and shouted, “Okay, when we get ready to roll, I need y’all to face that way,” he said, pointing to a murder scene across the courtyard. “And be angry. Y’all are mad, sad.” We said, “Okay.”

They rehearsed. Cheadle rolled up in some kind of sleek black car with tinted windows and hopped out with a small thug entourage, grim-faced. He had on a Kangol, black satiny baseball jacket with the sleeves drawn back to the elbows and camouflage pants like Fuqua’s. He stormed past us, all Oscar-serious. “He looks like he just got home from prison,” said the woman next to me. Yeah, he did sort of look like an O.G. out of step with fashion, especially in contrast to the teens he was slapping five with.

“Cut! Back to one!”

While the crew reset, I asked Pop, a chubby 17 year old in geek glasses who was busy cracking up his homeboys, what he made of all this. “It’s great, a great opportunity for this neighborhood to come up.” Did he think this crime film would reflect reality well? “It might be a little exaggerated, but yeah.” Are there any young filmmakers in Brownsville that he knows of? “Me, of course,” said Pop’s friend B. “I’m the next dude to shoot a movie over here. I’m shooting a movie over here. Watch. Probably, like 2012. Around there. I’ll be, like, 20-something. Probably be rich by then, make a movie.”

What would your movie be about? “About my life, man. Growing up out here.”

Would there be much gunplay in your movie? “Nah. I don’t believe in all that violence.”

His buddy Jamel asked me for tips about getting picked for a bit part in the movie. He said he wanted to become an actor but had a “standby” career– lawyer. I started to tell him what little I knew about getting into acting when he started musing about my earlier question. “I’ve been here since 3rd grade. It’s been about nine years. I had one bad experience. A close friend of mine. He got tossed out the window from the 10th floor. Right across the street.” He gestured beyond the camera crane and grip trucks. “He died.”

“What’s up with that?” I said. “Every housing project I’ve ever been to or heard of, there’s always that: Somebody gets tossed out the window.”

“I guess that’s the theme,” Jamel said. We all laughed.

These kids. No offense to Mr. Fuqua, but I’m much more anxious to see their film than his new crime saga, which, glimpsed from the sidelines, at least, looks like Training Day, Brooklyn Style.