A Filmmaker for All Sounds

Filmmaker Doug Pray arrives at the Astro coffee shop in Silver Lake looking like a man caught in a time warp. His close-cropped, sandy brown hair and classic sideburns fit right into the eatery’s retro ‘50s decor.

At 41, Pray is anything but retro. The filmmaker arguably is on the cutting edge, having directed two of the most distinctive musical films in recent years.

His 1996 film “Hype!” was an exploration of the Seattle-based grunge rock movement, and included such bands as Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam. The documentary won critical notice at the Sundance Film Festival. Kristine McKenna, writing for The Times, called the film “a brilliant synthesis of social anthropology and entertainment.” Now Pray brings that sensibility to his latest project, “Scratch,” which arrives in L.A. theaters this week.

“Scratch” is a guided tour of the frequently misunderstood world of hip-hop, culminating in an analysis of its least-understood performer, the hip-hop DJ. When producers Brad Blondheim and Ernest Meza (“Cliffhanger,” “The General’s Daughter”) approached Pray in 1999 about making the film, the director resisted the idea of taking on a hip-hop movie.

“I just really felt like this was something that a real hip-hop expert should do, someone who is just born and raised hip-hop and understands that [culture],” Pray said. “And I was burned out because ‘Hype!’ took me four or five years to make. It’s a big process, it just takes a lot out of you to make a documentary ... [and] is difficult to justify that many years of really not being paid.”

Blondheim and Meza wouldn’t take no for an answer. “They started sending me CDs,” Pray said. The first was by Rob Swift, one of the masters of hip-hop core music-making techniques called DJ “scratching.”

The technique involves the manipulation of a vinyl record on a turntable and the sound it makes when the needle rhythmically scratches back and forth across the surface of the record. To the undiscerning, this might have seemed like noise, but Pray, a trained musician instinctively understood it as a musical language. “I’m a musician, I have played bass and guitar, a little bit of keyboard, and really grew up with music a lot. So I did have an ear for something that seemed different and interesting, and Rob Swift kind of blew me away.”

Pray listened to the dozens of CDs that were sent to him, then decided he would take a chance and meet with some of the marquee DJs he had been listening to. Pray met Mix Master Mike at Meza’s house. “He was just so completely cool and seemed really open to the idea of a movie that would expose the culture in a different way.” The filmmaker began to realize that hip-hop was not that different from the grunge rock movement of “Hype!” “Basically, the whole do-it-yourself movement, like put out your own records, so like you have these guys just putting out their own records of them just scratching, of them just totally being DJs, [is] the exact same idea that Nirvana was doing or any of those bands up in Seattle” in producing and distributing their own records. He emphasized the two movements also share a “love of vinyl because Seattle is really a vinyl-based revolution.”

Pray committed in May 1999 to direct the project and began putting together his production team. Earlier that year, he had edited the Albert and Allen Hughes film “American Pimp.” Pray got the twins, directors of such films as “Menace II Society” and “From Hell,” to join his team as executive producers, and they provided technical expertise and editing equipment.

Next, he hired cinematographer Robert Bennett (“Hype!,” “American History X”), who is noted for his coverage of live performances.

David Bartlett, whose work includes “Total Recall” and “Speed,” joined in the critical role of sound editor. Production began in October.

Pray, who also edited the film, applied techniques in his editing process that he learned from the film’s stars--the so-called “turntablists” (whose story his film essentially chronicles). “I can’t DJ at all ... I’m terrible. I can’t scratch or anything, but I realized one night, I was really like a DJ. You take an interview and look for the break in the interview. I could go this way, or I could go that way. You could mix weird things, and it makes you want to have more fun with transitions, like how do we get out of this scene. In the end you start feeling like a DJ.”

“Scratch,” which screened in 2001 at Sundance, has an easy-to-follow narrative. Pray, as an outsider, takes uninitiated viewers into the world of the hip-hopper through interviews with pioneers, clever editing and a soundtrack featuring many of hip-hop’s classic recordings. For hard-core hip-hoppers, he follows the origins of DJ scratching from Grand Wizard Theodore’s discovery to GrandMixer D.ST’s beginnings on Herbie Hancock’s “Rock It,” and follows the progress of its new-school innovators Qbert Babu and Mix Master Mike and their contributions to the turntablist movement.

The documentary also examines the international scope of DJing as well, displaying the diversity of race, color, gender and openness of innovation. “I love the fact that I just made a film, and it’s one of the first films I’ve ever seen in my life where [diversity] was never an issue,” Pray said. “It was never, ‘Let’s be sure to keep this diverse,’ because that’s exactly how the community is.”

“Scratch” plays Friday through Thursday at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A., (310) 478-6379.