When "Gang Tapes" hit the film festivals last summer -- including the Pan-African Film Festival in Watts, San Francisco's Black Film Festival and the New York Underground Film Festival -- it got good reviews from a wide range of critics -- from gang members (Crips and Bloods, Ripp says) who showed up for local screenings, to Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times.

And then Ripp hit a brick wall. Despite the sold-out festival screenings and positive reviews, no one -- not theater owners, not even the studio that financed him -- seemed interested in helping him get widespread theater distribution. Worse, he said, everyone blamed the lack of enthusiasm not on the quality of the film itself but on its content: It was urban, violent and destined to draw black audiences whose reactions distributors feared.

"Every major theater chain in the United States has refused to play 'Gang Tapes,'" says Ripp. "They are fearful that the film will lead to an outbreak of violence in theaters. It is a purely racist perception that films depicting African-American gang members will cause violence in the theaters playing them."

Ripp believes that "Gang Tapes" is so edgy that it's a difficult film even for art houses. But the possibility that the director is reluctant to consider -- that the film is simply not very good -- is one that comes up in discussions with movie industry veterans.

"Something like 'Gang Tapes' may be having difficulty with distribution, but I would submit it's not because of the race of the cast; I think that's just a tough movie to sell. It's not 'Brown Sugar' or 'Barbershop,'" says Sam Kitt, president of 40 Acres and a Mule, Spike Lee's production company. "It's very easy to blame the powers that be, the white man, blah blah, and that's frequently true; but for filmmakers in my experience, frankly, it's never the film, it's always some outside thing."

Still, even if that's the case here, even if "Gang Tapes" is inferior, there is a long history of similar urban films that have had distribution difficulties. Edgy films of all genres may have a hard time finding funding and distribution, but edgy films about African-Americans encounter even more stereotypes and preconceptions. The hurdles for these films are put up not just by skittish theater owners fearful of the "wrong crowd," but also by studios who see no financial advantage in screening a movie that deviates from the profitable norm.

Take the case of "Way Past Cool," an independent film based on Jess Mowry's popular novel about gang life in Oakland, whose creators received film-festival awards but couldn't sell their film to a studio. Avram Ludwig, a co-producer of the film, blames simple economics. "Sixty percent of revenue from films, on average, comes from overseas sales, and in Asia and Europe they just aren't interested in the black urban themes," he says. "So because these revenues are very important to make a film profitable in the U.S., there are probably a lot fewer films that are made involving [urban] themes than there are black urban moviegoers who would see them."

Often, an urban film never makes it to theater screens simply because the studio that finances it doesn't believe that the audience size will justify a release. Kitt points out that studios and distributors are perfectly aware of the money to be made in "black" movies these days; the problem is that they are interested in only a tiny range of these films.

"Very frequently they will refer to it as 'the black audience,' as if it were a monolithic thing as opposed to discrete audience segments," Kitt says. "Because of that, and the conservative nature of the industry anyway, they tend to remake movies that have been successful in the past. So the same narrow movies get made: the upscale romantic comedy, the broad comedy." No one knows what to do with movies that have inner-city themes, unknown black actors, or art-house aspirations, he adds.

Urban films very often do perform well on television and video, mainly because taking a film straight to video enables the studio to avoid the costs of printing, advertising and distribution. As Tom Ortenberg, the president of Lions Gate Films Releasing, explains, "If a film is perceived as having these ancillary possibilities built in, it can actually dissuade a distributor from taking it out theatrically. They think, if they already have a home run on TV and video, why risk it theatrically?"

That is exactly what happened with "Gang Tapes," he says. Ortenberg says that "we knew the picture had great video potential and, frankly, did not want to risk a safe profit by potentially throwing good money after bad theatrically if the picture didn't work."

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