Comin' up Short

Growing up in South Central Los Angeles I was exposed to gang culture at an early age. In public elementary school, my classmates and I were taught how to draw and recognize gang graffiti in art class. I grew up near the corner of Florence and Normandy. On April 29th 1992 the world became familiar with my neighborhood when LA erupted after a jury acquitted four LAPD officers in the filmed beating of Rodney King. Besides being a filmmaker, I am a Los Angeles Gang expert, and there are no gang experts except participants and affiliates. This lifestyle although glamorized and vilified in the media is as mysterious to outsiders as an untouched tribe in Africa or the South Pacific.

Around 2001 I met Shorty. He invited me to his home in an area of Los Angeles called the Jungles which is an all Blood Street Gang (red) area made famous in the 2001 film Training Day, starring Denzel Washington. Shorty was a Crip (blue) leader or an OG and a notorious one at that. I thought it was interesting that he had so much respect in the streets that he could live in Blood territory with no fear of anything. During this time Shorty asked me to document and film him uniting Bloods, Crips, Mexican and Samoan Gang leaders for peace. Some years later after I met my partner, Director Queen Muhammad Ali, I would tell her about hanging out with Shorty shooting him and some of the stories he would tell me. Unbeknownst to me, Queen knew of him as Brother Jerome since she was young. She knew nothing about his Gang life and she didn’t know I was speaking of the same person. She said he was the most kind and loving brother she knew growing up. So we knew two diametrically different Shorty’s.

As time passed Shorty was like our big brother and much more than a good friend. Shorty had been talking to Ice Cube about producing a film about his life and his group Da Lench Mob. Some of which was dramatized in the 2015 film Straight Outta Compton. But everybody knows that Ice Cubes stories in his songs and persona were the real experiences of Shorty and others in Da Lench Mob. Shorty’s health started to degrade and despite his numerous almost daily treatments for renal kidney failure, we were able to conduct two interviews with Shorty totaling about 9 hours. Queen organized the interviews into the structure that became the film. Shorty’s testimony in this film could land him back in prison but he wanted to tell his story nonetheless. On many occasions Shorty would call us from the hospital and give us optimistic updated reports about his health and how he was working to get better. I remember while filming the reenactments, Shorty would call us on FaceTime from the hospital bed and laugh at how much the people looked like and acted like what he had described.

While Queen and I were shooting another film project in American Samoa Shorty passed away on Father’s Day June 16th 2019. We were devastated. We returned and helped the family with the funeral. Ice Cube paid for the funeral and spoke about how important Shorty was to him. This film is his last interview and his verified account of what really happened to Ice Cube, Da Lench Mob, and himself.