Craig Brewer’s Spaceship

The “Coming 2 America” director smashes paradigms from his perch atop Crosstown Concourse.

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Craig Brewer has always thought of Memphis as home. “My mom and dad, all of my family,” he says, “are from the region between Collierville and Rossville.”

Brewer was born in 1971 in Newport News, Virginia, where his father, Walter, was stationed in the Army. The family eventually landed in Vallejo, California, where his mother, Gail, tried to help young Craig fit in. “I tried baseball,” he recalls. “My mother was doing anything she could to get me involved in something extracurricular. Then I got bit by the theater bug. I grew up in children’s theater. If I wasn’t in a play, I was stage managing, I was hanging lights, I was painting sets, I was singing and dancing.”

At home, he was obsessed with movies. “There was a film festival in our house every weekend,” he says. “My father would rent five movies, and we’d watch all of them. … The big bang was Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller.’ I was an enormous Michael Jackson fan. I bought the ‘Beat It’ zipper jacket on layaway. I wore it to church, much to my mother’s chagrin.”

The VHS version of the “Thriller” music video included a “making of” documentary, showing how director John Landis had transformed Michael Jackson into a zombie. Brewer was captivated. “That’s when I started saying, ‘I want to be a director.’”

His dad introduced him to Landis’ film The Blues Brothers. “That was the first time I saw James Brown perform, the first time I ever saw Aretha Franklin.”

The core of the Blues Brothers band — Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, and Willie Hall — were all from Memphis. “We would visit Memphis all the time. I remember getting a shirt from Beale Street that said ‘blues.’ I wore it out. So when people were playing Duran Duran, I was like ‘John Lee Hooker!’ It made me feel special.”

The family moved to Orange County, and Brewer became the star of the Fountain Valley High School drama department. “I would be in their big musical, then I would write a play, produce, and direct it,” he says. “So at a very early age, I was asking, ‘What’s our budget? How much do we think we can make with ticket sales and advertisements in the program? With those projections, what kind of play can we make?’ Doing theater was how I was going to be a director without needing money and a film crew and all that kind of stuff. I’m glad that I went into the theater, because there’s so much I draw upon for film. I’m particularly proud when I come into a situation and deal with staging in a way that’s economical, but feels natural.”

Brewer studied at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. “I lost both of my grandfathers, back here at home, within a year of each other,” he recalls. “I said, ‘I want to go back home.’ I kept calling Memphis home.”

With Jodi Hagee, then his fiancée, he moved into the house where his father grew up and took care of his ailing grandmother. “I didn’t go to college,” he says. “I didn’t make any movies when I was in California. People told me I was making a mistake, that I should just go to L.A., get on a crew, and work my way up.”

Brewer got a job at a Barnes & Noble bookstore and discovered the P & H Cafe, the Midtown watering hole that served as the nexus of the Memphis theater and art scene. “I met Wanda Wilson and Jim Dickinson on the same night,” he recalls. “Mud Boy and the Neutrons were playing, along with an opener of the Delta Queens. It was these guys who were doing really intense, raspy, drunken blues music, but they were dressed up as old ladies, with robes and hair curlers and everything. I just fell in love, like it was the thing I was missing.”

He sought out other local filmmakers, such as John Pickle, who was creating a lo-fi music and comedy show for cable. “I found out about Mike McCarthy working at Barnes & Noble. I was shelving magazines, and on the back of Femme Fatale was an ad for Teenage Tupelo.”

McCarthy was making films Brewer calls “rockabilly-inspired fever dreams” by the skin of his teeth. “He’s a miracle, if you ask me.”

Craig and Jodi, having married, relocated to Midtown, where they lived with Jodi’s siblings, Erin and Seth Hagee. “I volunteered my time to make a movie with Mike McCarthy and tried to make shorts here and there. We lived in a shotgun house on Vinton, where it dead-ends into East Parkway, and we were living the Hustle & Flow life. We weren’t pimps and prostitutes, but there were four of us living with no central heat and air, building sets in our small house, making movies.”

Brewer’s first attempt at filmmaking, Melody’s Surviving, “was a disaster. The thing about shooting on film is that you need to have everything that comes with it. You need a big crew, you need costumes. You need to have movie stars, and then you need to have distribution of the final product that’s going to celebrate that image.”

It was 1998, and digital video technology had just become available, making it possible to create DVD-quality images and edit on a desktop computer. “I would say that me and Pickle, out of that early group, were the only ones who were defiantly pro-video. It was like, why are we chasing this? Just so we can call it a film? It didn’t make any sense.”

When Brewer’s father died suddenly, his $20,000 inheritance became the budget of The Poor & Hungry, the screenplay Brewer had written about the denizens of the P & H Cafe. Shot on black-and-white digital video, with a two-person crew and all local actors, the film is a gritty tale of Memphis street culture. In 2000, at the first film festival to bear the name Indie Memphis, The Poor & Hungry became a local sensation.

Then, something happened that still seems impossible. The $20,000 “digiflick” won the prestigious Discovery Award at the Hollywood Film Festival. Brewer — and Memphis — represented the vanguard of the digital revolution.

“There was this whole community of people who were finally being armed to go out and make stuff of their own,” he says. “It’s something that I feel really lucky that I was able to do. I do not think I would be where I am today if I didn’t leave California when I did, and treat Memphis like my university. I believed there was a new way of doing things, and I felt that it was much more democratic and much more open for everybody to be an artist. It felt like a revolution.”

The times were changing. Malco Theatres ran The Poor & Hungry in Memphis for six weeks, and it sold to the Independent Film Channel. Brewer got an agent, and he slept on couches in Hollywood while he pitched his next film, another story of the Memphis streets. To his revolutionary comrades back on the bluff, he was an inspirational success. “If you equate success, meaning, did I get money? Yeah, no.”

Brewer’s new screenplay caught the attention of John Singleton, the first African American and the youngest person ever nominated for Best Director. Singleton took Brewer under his wing. They almost landed a $1.5 million deal with Paramount/MTV, but the studio got cold feet. Frustrated, Singleton violated the cardinal rule of Hollywood: Don’t play with your own money. He financed the $3 million production himself, which shot in Memphis with a cast of unknowns, including Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson.

In January 2005, Hustle & Flow made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival. That night, a bidding war erupted, and before the sun rose, Hustle & Flow had sold for $9 million, a Sundance record. The buyer was Paramount/MTV.

“To watch Hustle & Flow in a movie theater in Memphis is probably one of the biggest highs I’ll ever experience,” says Brewer. “There’s nothing quite like seeing an audience just vibrate and bounce when ‘Whoop That Trick’ is starting to happen.”

At the 2006 Academy Awards, Terrence Howard was nominated for Best Actor. But the real shock came when Memphis hip hop bad boys Three 6 Mafia won Best Original Song for “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”

Still, Hustle & Flow’s box office was disappointing. “It did not make the kind of money the studio had thought they would make,” says Brewer. “It’s made so much more money over the last 10 years than they ever thought they would make, because it is constantly being played on TV. Time is the real gauge of a movie — what’s going to last, and what’s going to stay. But luckily, I had already started filming my next movie. So I wasn’t so worried about it.”

Black Snake Moan was originally supposed to be another no-budget digiflick. Instead, it filmed in Memphis with Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci, and, in his acting debut, Justin Timberlake. Jackson would later say it was his best onscreen performance. Brewer continued to bring productions to the Mid-South, such as $5 Cover, a pioneering web series about the struggles of Memphis musicians, which would prove to be ahead of its time.

Hollywood was changing, becoming obsessed with sequels, remakes, and reboots. Brewer was pitching new, original ideas, but none of them ever made it out of the development phase. In 2011, Paramount tapped Brewer to helm the remake of the 1984 dance film Footloose. The film was a success, and Warner Bros. hired Brewer to write and direct a $100 million Tarzan movie. It was Brewer’s ticket to the top tier of Hollywood directors.

But any celebration was short-lived. The project fell into “development hell” and the studio replaced Brewer with Harry Potter director David Yates. “He’s a good director, so, you know, I get it now,” Brewer says. “At the time I was hurt.”

When The Legend of Tarzan was finally released in 2016, Brewer was credited as screenwriter. The stress of constant uncertainty and dashed expectations had taken a heavy toll. He split with his wife, Jodi, and the pair sold their Midtown house. Brewer had an apartment in Hollywood as his West Coast base, but he found himself without a Memphis home.

Around the same time, the Crosstown Concourse project was taking shape. “[Dr.] Scott Morris [of the Church Health Center] for years had been talking about what was going to happen here,” Brewer recalls. “When I was looking for an apartment at the same time I needed an office, they offered a really great deal on the office space. I knew that I would need to put some money into it as well to get it to be what I needed it to be. I had a dream that one day I might be able to do some of the things here that I had to go to California to do.”

Brewer decided to take the plunge. “I moved in right before the Concourse opened to the public,” he says. “So I’ve been here from the beginning. And luckily, because I came in so early and decided I was going to move my whole operation here, I was able to have a custom build. They took two units — a two-bedroom apartment and a one-bedroom apartment — and turned it into what I have here.”

The top-floor space, which is the main residential area of the Concourse, includes a balcony with stunning views of Midtown and Downtown. “It’s been perfect,” Brewer says. “When my kids are here, they’ve got really great spaces. My daughter, Wren, likes to scooter around the atrium.”

Meanwhile, Brewer was looking to shake up his career. “I needed a steady job. For a good 10 years, it seemed like I was singing for my supper from project to project.”

In 2015, ten years after Brewer had paired Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson in Hustle & Flow, producer Lee Daniels had reunited the actors to lead his Fox primetime musical drama Empire. Howard and Henson played Lucious and Cookie Lyon, reformed gangsters who ran a hip hop record label. Empire became a global phenomenon.

The similarities between Empire and Hustle & Flow did not go unremarked. “Every time I took a flight out of Memphis, everybody in security would say, ‘Man, we’re watching your new show. We love it!’ I was like, ‘Well guys, that’s not my show.’ And then finally, one day I was going through security, and I was like, ‘Hey guys, guess where I’m going? To Chicago to direct Empire!’”

Brewer started directing episodes in Season 2, then joined the show’s staff. “I loved working with Terrence and Taraji again — particularly Terrence. We love each other like brothers, and we argue like brothers. I’m fiercely loyal to him.

“But what I didn’t realize at the time was that Empire would be one of the most important things that has happened to me in my life,” he says. “It helped train me to be a more efficient director, to be able to handle talent. I was able to work with a lot of different actors; Phylicia Rashad, Forest Whitaker, so many people I’ve loved and respected. I was able to have some stability in my life. So when Empire ended, I remember going to set on my first day of Dolomite Is My Name, and I had no fear. I just was like, I know what I’m doing.”

Brewer had met Larry Karaszewski when they sat on a screenwriting panel together for Indie Memphis. Karaszewski and his partner, Scott Alexander, had reinvented the biopic in the 1990s with Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt, which was made in Memphis. The duo wrote a film about Rudy Ray Moore, the renegade Blackspoitation auteur known for his outrageous pimp character Dolomite. Moore’s take-no-prisoners standup routines had been a huge influence on Eddie Murphy when he was a young comedian. The star, who by 2018 was mostly doing voices for animated films like Shrek, got a greenlight from Netflix by simply performing Dolomite comedy routines he had memorized as a teenager.

“I probably wasn’t the first guy whose name was being thrown around for Dolomite Is My Name,” says Brewer. “But luckily, I had met Eddie when we were trying to develop an animated movie.”

Dolomite Is My Name earned Brewer the best reviews of his career. By the time Murphy and Brewer were working the awards circuit, they were already in pre-production on their next collaboration: a sequel to Murphy’s most-loved movie, 1988’s Coming to America. For Brewer, it was an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of John Landis, who helmed the original picture.

Coming 2 America was the biggest movie of Brewer’s life. The cast was stacked with Black talent, including Arsenio Hall, Shari Headley, James Earl Jones, John Amos, Kiki Layne, Tracy Morgan, Leslie Jones, Trevor Noah, Morgan Freeman, and Wesley Snipes.

Filming wrapped at the end of 2019, and post-production was going full-tilt when the coronavirus pandemic shut down Hollywood. “We had done a month or two of editing to get it to the director’s cut, but we still had work to do,” he says. “We thought we even had some additional shooting to do in New York. But then the pandemic hit, and we had to learn in real time how we could work remotely.”

Brewer’s office space, which is in a different part of the Concourse than his living quarters, had only been finished a short time before it was pressed into emergency service. Using the office’s giant projection screen and state-of-the-art sound system, Brewer utilized videoconferencing software to communicate with his editors and sound engineers scattered across the country.

The experience helped him appreciate his choice to live and work in Crosstown. “There’s a community here,” he says. “I love having French Truck Coffee downstairs. It’s where so many meetings take place. And there’s nothing better than one of those great Memphis sunsets that happen outside my window. I’m able to go outside and watch this gorgeous show. The perfect night is when I have people over to watch something and I get to say, Which would you like? Would you like Farm Burger? Would you like Trasimeno pizza? Would you like Global Café? I have it all here. I’ve got everything I need, and I don’t really have to leave the complex all that much. They call it ‘the spaceship’ and I kind of need to just be in the spaceship every once in a while.”

Coming 2 America’s release was repeatedly delayed, as movie theaters in America stayed dark. In the fall, Paramount sold it to Amazon for its Prime Video streaming service. The decision proved to be the right one. Coming 2 America’s debut in March was the most-watched event of the pandemic era and cemented Amazon’s status as a major player in the streaming wars. “It wasn’t necessarily the world’s go-to place for a new movie that’s coming out,” Brewer says, “but I think they’re now in that mode.”

The film’s runaway success has been gratifying for Brewer, a Hollywood survivor who has endured more than his share of ups and down. “People are coming up to me to say, ‘We all watched Coming 2 America last night, and I had a great time!’ I didn’t know that would mean so much to me, but it really does. I’m just glad the movie is helping heal a very hard year.”