Filmmakers plan to shoot new drama in Memphis : GoMemphis.com

Memphis concert promoter Julius Lewis has worked for more than a decade with such artists as Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Anita Baker and Bobby Rush.

Now, he’s making the transition from concert stage to movie screen: Lewis is the producer and co-writer of “N-Secure,” a drama with a cast of recognizable movie and television actors that begins shooting here a week from today.

“I just feel that Hollywood, they don’t care about black movies,” said Lewis, 39, explaining his motivation for “N-Secure.”

“All they want to do is give us comedy or ‘hood’ movies,” said Lewis, founder and president of Heritage Entertainment Group. “Some of the stuff we get from out there is buffoonery. It does not play to the 25-plus crowd.”

Lewis and co-writer Christie Taylor, a former afternoon drive-time personality on WHAL-FM 95.7 (Hallelujah FM), believe the time is right for the emergence of a local production company that can create films to reach the wide audience already enjoyed by such filmmakers as Tyler Perry.

“With the kind of love Memphis is showing for movies these days, I believe we will succeed,” Taylor said, citing local enthusiasm for such productions as “Hustle & Flow,” “Walk the Line” and the upcoming “Nothing But the Truth.”

“N-Secure” stars Cordell Moore (a veteran of such Tyler Perry stage productions as “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” and “Why Did I Get Married?”) as a Desert Storm veteran whose strict upbringing and insecurities lead him into a series of troubled romantic relationships and, eventually, a web of events that includes betrayal and murder.

The supporting cast includes such familiar performers as Tempestt Bledsoe (Vanessa Huxtable on “The Cosby Show”); Essence Atkins (a regular on UPN’s “Half and Half”); Lamman Rucker (Tyler Perry’s “Meet the Browns”); Denise Boutte (Perry’s “Why Did I Get Married?”); Toni Trucks (TV’s “Barbershop”); Caryn Ward (TV’s “The Game”); R&B singer Tank; and Memphian Elise Neal (“Hustle & Flow,” “The Hughleys”). The actors mostly will play “upscale African-Americans,” Taylor said.

The director — recruited by Lewis and Taylor out of Hollywood — is David M. Matthews, a longtime composer who wrote the music for 750 episodes of “The Young and the Restless” before becoming a writer and producer on such programs as “The Nanny,” “Cybill” and “Living Single.”

“N-Secure” is “a full-on drama,” said Matthews. He said the story’s main character is a man more adept at avoiding injury in war than in “negotiating the minefields of romantic relationships.” But the movie is not a small-scale romance: the “Fatal Attraction”-meets-“C.S.I.” script calls for gunplay and a train wreck.

Film Commissioner Linn Sitler said she has been talking with Lewis about shooting here “for at least a year.”

The movie’s 24-day shoot is scheduled to begin a week from today in Lakeland. Lewis said the film will require a crew of about 30 people a day, including local and out-of-town hires. Locations will include many South Main and Midtown bars, restaurants and offices.

“People have really bent over backward to make the project work,” said Lewis, a lifelong Memphian who grew up near Stax. He originally wrote “N-Secure” as a stage play before he and Taylor — a Tipton County native and motivational speaker — converted it into a screenplay over a period of what Taylor calls “five long years.”

Taylor said the collaboration resulted in a script with appeal for fans of both “chick flicks” and action movies. “I’m extremely inspiration-minded, very female, and he is a guy’s guy,” she said.

Lewis secured loans from Regents Bank to help finance the movie, which is budgeted at about $750,000. He said his production will take full advantage of the state and local financial incentives now available for filmmakers.

“It shows what happens when there are state incentives, when suddenly we have homegrown filmmakers ... making projects with respectable budgets,” said Sitler, alluding to “N-Secure” and the recently completed shoot of Craig Brewer’s MTV New Media series “$5 Cover.”

A LeMoyne-Owen College business graduate who recently pledged $50,000 to Cummings Elementary School, his boyhood alma mater, Lewis has been in the concert business since 1995, when he promoted a Club Paradise show featuring Bobby Rush, Marvin Sease and the late Ollie Nightingale. Currently, he promotes the annual Tri-State Blues Festival, now held at the DeSoto Civic Center, and the nationwide “Blues Is Alright” concert tour, featuring such artists as Clarence Carter, Latimore and Denise LaSalle.

In recent years, Memphis African-American filmmakers such as Rod Pitts, Keenon Nikita and DeAara Lewis have found modest success producing extremely low-budget “indie” features that received scant distribution outside of the festival circuit. Their predecessor, to some extent, was Memphis kickboxing champion Anthony “Amp” Elmore, who in 1988 produced, wrote, directed and starred in the ill-fated “Contemporary Gladiator,” re-titled “Iron Thunder” for home video.

On other end of the scale, black billionaire Robert L. Johnson last year publicly flirted with the now abandoned idea of opening a regional production office in Memphis for his Our Stories Films company, which specializes in features aimed at African-American audiences.

Lewis said the film should be ready for release a year from now. He said it is uncertain whether it will debut in theaters or on cable and DVD, but like most movies, it will make most of its money outside of cinemas.

Predicted Lewis: “Memphis, Tennessee, is going to be proud of us.”