"These palm trees look lovely now," says Semie "Cortez" Hearns, "but at night, they get ugly."
On a recent Friday night, as we stroll down Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Clearwater's poverty-stricken North Greenwood neighborhood, he seems to have a point: The scene doesn't look too inviting.
Young men hang out near Wick City Cutz, smoking blunts and drinking out of plastic cups. Drug deals go down brazenly on the corner. Junkies sit in front of the Blue Chip Bar, and vagrants, apparently homeless, sleep behind it.
Hearns, 19, waves to them all. Some respond with quizzical looks: They don't know what to make of me, a white guy in a collared shirt scribbling in a notebook, following behind one of their own.
"He's the news," Hearns tells them. They nod, a little relieved I'm not with the police.
There's been a lot of strange faces around the neighborhood in recent months, since the wider Clearwater community got wind of Hearns' project Da Hood Gone Wild, a DVD of street fights and dancing women filmed on this very strip and distributed in local stores and on the Internet. Clearwater Mayor Frank Hibbard and other community leaders harshly criticized the DVD for portraying North Greenwood in a bad light. Then, the day after the St. Petersburg Times published an article about Da Hood, police arrested Hearns' filming partner Allan Burney in connection with a shooting that left Michael Scott, a 23-year-old Clearwater man, dead. (Burney denies involvement.) In the aftermath, antidrug activists marched through the neighborhood, and Scientologists staged a community fair.
It's been a tumultuous few months, admits Hearns, who is on holiday break from a Christian college in Missouri. And with the February release of Da Hood Gone Wild Volume Two, it could get just a bit crazier.
Just one mile south of North Greenwood, in a nice middle-class neighborhood, "Kill Bill" and "Redeye" look over edited footage for the next installment of Da Hood Gone Wild. Bill is the 44-year-old owner of a Clearwater film and video production business. Redeye, 30, is Bill's brother. They are both white and have lived in Clearwater almost their entire lives. (They won't reveal their full names due to threats received after the DVD was released.)
Hearns met Bill while converting his many videotapes of brawls and babes into a DVD at Bill's store. Bill suggested Hearns turn the home videos into a commercial enterprise. Hearns brought on his longtime friend Burney, who had helped film some of the footage; Bill enlisted his brother, a professional video editor. They all signed a contract, agreed to split everything four ways and set out to create the brand. Their motto: cars, cops, girls, fights. They haven't achieved financial success — 400 of the first DVDs sold at $17.99 each — but the producers of Da Hood have found notoriety.
"I don't think the DVD completely represents what goes on in the neighborhood," says Mayor Hibbard. "I think the cameras actually encourage some of the behavior."
But if community leaders were upset by the first volume — an amateurish collection of relatively tame scraps between teens and shaky footage of drugs and girls — they'll flip over the new video. The new DVD is more violent, disturbing and, as Bill proudly points out, shot mostly in high definition.
Redeye turns on his flat screen monitor and plays a few scenes for me. In one, a woman in bright-orange shorts pummels another female in a white tank top until her shirt comes off. A crowd of 30 goads them on, yelling and laughing. A Clearwater police substation, a white building just barely visible in the corner of the screen, is less than a block away.
In another segment, an 8-year-old starts a fight with a teenager twice his size.
"The DVD has a message," insists Redeye. "Yeah, we try to lighten it up a bit and make it seem less depressing, but the message is look at what's going on, and people want to pretend it doesn't happen."
In the last scene they show me, a man with a gold grill and a 40-ounce of Old English malt liquor spouts off to the camera while a masked man behind him poses with a short semi-automatic machine gun.
"Betty Lane is so fucking wild," the man screams, a blunt hanging from his lips. "You want some, come get us!"
Betty Lane, one of the main roads through North Greenwood, is where Michael Scott was shot and killed in October.
"This is where it goes down — drugs, junkies, fights," Hearns tells me as we stand on the corner of LaSalle Street and MLK Avenue.
As a police cruiser prowls by, we move down MLK, past Big Jim's BBQ, the Elk's Lodge and the Blue Chip Bar. There, "Que-Lee" takes a minute to give me North Greenwood in three words: "Money, ho's and cars."
"It's a drug area," he adds, dreadlocks swinging around his face. "That's what it is. That's all Greenwood is based on."
Hearns agrees: "This is how it is around here. They judge us, but they don't help us. They see what's going on, but they're not doing anything about it."
Mayor Hibbard says millions of dollars have been spent improving the neighborhood, from a new library and recreation center to streetscaping. He's working with community leaders to turn around the neighborhood, he says.
Hearns isn't waiting for the city. He's hoping any financial success from the DVD could be reinvested in North Greenwood. But he's also a realist.
"We don't like what we're doing," he says. "We don't want to record these fights. We want everyone to do good. But it ain't our job to be breaking up fights."
This article appears in Jan 23-29, 2008.