Slam: The Book

Independent filmmaker Marc Levin's Slam, the story of a black spoken-work poet from the ghetto who goes to jail for drug possession, won the prestigious Grand Jury Prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. The award, and Levin's cinema verite style, seem the only justifications for this eponymous mishmash of personal accounts and poems by those who worked on the movie. Stratton, who co-produced and co-wrote the film, compiled this volume with his wife, writer Kim Wozencraft, whose new novel, The Catch, is also out from Doubleday in September (see above)--both are ex-cons and together they founded the magazine Prison Life. The book opens with a salute to the filmmakers' ""guerrilla-style"" tactics: With sporadic funding, Slam was shot in 12 days at a prison and housing project, using real prisoners and poets as actors. Yet most of the entries exude banal solipsism. Levin's preproduction diary, which also traces his career in documentary filmmaking, is full of clunky prose (""A full moon is rising like a large yellow tennis ball""), and self-importance (he recalls a ""grand brainstorming powwow"" with Norman Mailer). Poet Sonja Sohn, who plays a prison teacher in the film, says Slam drew her away from ""slow suicide,"" but fails to articulate why. Production assistant Robert Leaver's journal from the set gets mired in minutiae, such as the music he listens to driving and whether the coffee ""is dreck"" or from Starbuck's. Spoken-word performer Saul Williams, who plays the film's protagonist, provides one of the book's few highlights, riffing lyrically and unself-consciously on the task of making a movie ""in the 'hood."" (Sept.) FYI: Slam will be released simultaneously with the a Trimark movie, a soundtrack from Sony records; and there will be a reading tour featuring the cast.