Strawberry Babylon Local filmmaker Trae Briers says Oxnard is ready for its close-up

(l - r) Actors Angie Ruiz, Breon Ansley and Caleeb Pinkett star in the locally made film In Your Eyes. Photo by Joshua Gates Weisberg

by Matthew Singer

It’s a blustery fall morning in Oxnard, California. Sergio Espinoza, a middle-aged Latino man with a short, graying beard, is eating breakfast before heading to his job at a local manufacturing warehouse. Yusef Johnson, a tall, handsome African-American in his early twenties, strides into the room.

“Hey Yusef, up and early today, huh?” says Sergio. He invites Yusef to help himself to some chilaquiles, then calls for his son, Juan, Yusef’s closest friend since third grade.

“Oh, I ain’t going with Juan,” Yusef informs him through a mouthful of food. “Me and CeCe going over to the beach.”

Suddenly, the mood changes. Sergio stops eating. He glares at Yusef, who’s seemingly unaware that the atmosphere has tightened. At that moment, the rest of the Espinoza family appears: Juan, who’s half-asleep; Sergio’s wife, Faviola, who looks 10 years younger than she actually is; and CeCe, Sergio’s stunning, auburn-haired daughter. She kisses her father, then she and Yusef head for the door.

“All right, Mr. E, I see you later!” yells Yusef in a nasally accent.

Sergio doesn’t respond, but the look in his eyes speaks volumes. He turns to Juan. “So, you know about this?”

Still groggy, Juan hesitates a beat before answering. “Know about what?”

“Cut!” shouts Trae Briers from his position in the adjacent living room. Reality snaps back into place, but two things remain constant: the wind is still howling outside, and the location is still Oxnard. For Briers, writer and director of the independent feature In Your Eyes and a native son of the Big Strawberry, that latter fact is of utmost importance.

“I wanted to tell a story about Oxnard,” he says. “I wanted to bring a story based on here, based on what we do here, and I wanted Hollywood to see us for how we are and what we do.” He adds, “We are too close to L.A. to not have our own empire.”

If ambition can build an empire, then Briers could be constructing the cornerstone of a new dynasty. Ten years in development, In Your Eyes combines Briers’ dual appreciation for Shakespeare and Spike Lee, using the Romeo and Juliet model of a tragic love story to examine the tension between blacks and Latinos in a community where those two groups combined make up nearly three-quarters of the population.

But the nucleus of Briers’ script is the city itself. Oxnard is no stranger to the movie industry—parts of Spartacus, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Back to the Future III have been shot here—but never has it been made as much a central character in a film as the actors themselves. Briers incorporates practically every corner of his multifarious hometown—from the rough neighborhood of Colonia to the upscale tract homes near the airport—to expose an area at odds with its own diversity.

Few people can claim to be more qualified to paint a detailed portrait of the city than Briers. Born 30 years ago at the former Community Memorial Hospital (now the site of an apartment complex), the director alleges to have “lived in every square of Oxnard except the beach.” Between first and third grade, Briers, an African-American, got himself expelled from just about every elementary school in town, mainly for fighting and usually with white classmates. His father, a transplanted Southerner, had difficulty adjusting to the less hostile racial environment of Southern California and taught his son to act defensively.

“He was like, ‘If a white person looks at you a certain way, you got to sock ’em, ’cause they’re gonna get you,’” says Briers. “When I got older, I started realizing that racism doesn’t just go through whites; it goes through everything.”

That realization came during his senior year at Hueneme High School. Like most kids who were raised in Oxnard, Briers grew up surrounded by Latino culture; but he had never encountered any interracial friction until he began dating a Mexican girl.

“I grew up with a girl—family loved me, took me in,” he says. “The girl and I went to the prom together, and we fell in love, naturally.” Despite Briers having matured from a troubled adolescent into a literate, artistic Student Body President, his girlfriend’s father opposed their relationship, solely on the basis of his skin color. “He said, ‘No, you can’t date him because he’s black.’”

After graduation, still wounded from that experience, Briers began penning the story that would ultimately become In Your Eyes. At the time, he had been attending UCSB as an economics major. But his true passion had been film ever since seeing Spike Lee’s musical comedy School Daze while in junior high. Following the death of his biological father in 1993, Briers abandoned his half-hearted business aspirations and immersed himself in the art of filmmaking. He studied every era of motion picture history, from the work of archetypal American directors like Scorsese and Coppola to the French New Wave to classic Asian cinema. He learned how to do sound editing, how to line produce, how to operate a boom mike. He co-wrote and directed short films and music videos. Finally, in November 2003, he started production on the feature-length project he first conceived a decade earlier.

Shooting entirely on location in Ventura County—at friend’s homes, local parks, mall parking lots—and not wasting capital on what he calls “a bunch of bullshit,” Briers managed to keep production costs for In Your Eyes below $100,000. As a result, he was able to spend more money on acquiring recognizable names for the lead roles. Caleeb Pinkett, younger brother of actress Jada, plays Yusef, the character Briers loosely based on himself. It may be his film debut, but Pinkett already exudes a self-assured charisma not unlike that of his megastar brother-in-law, Will Smith. He landed the part without even having to audition.

“My girlfriend, who I’m with now, she and Trae were friends during high school,” explains Pinkett. “Trae came over to the house one day. He met with me, he talked with me, and he was like, ‘Wow, I really like you, I think you’re cool. I know you’re interested in acting.’ He asked me if I was interested in reading his script. So I read his script, told him it was cool, and he asked me if I wanted to play the lead, and I said, ‘OK, cool.’”

For the role of the overbearing father Sergio, Briers snagged seasoned actor Michael DeLorenzo, best known as co-star of the police series New York Undercover. “It touched me that the characters are flawed,” says DeLorenzo. “They have problems. They have everyday, day-to-day things they have to struggle with, within themselves. The ugliness inside you; being able to deal with that, or not deal with that.”

Also a music producer, Briers wouldn’t have told a story about Oxnard without including some homegrown talent. Locally based rappers Nevamind, Terminal Madness, Lost Soulz and Q104.7 DJ J-Scratch, acquaintances from Briers’ days in the mid-90s, when he headed the small hip-hop record label Toothpaste, all have cameos, in addition to contributing to the soundtrack. This Briers plans to releasing on his imprint, resurrected under the name Tlduso Records, in conjunction with In Your Eyes’ official premiere at the Santa Barbara Independent Film Festival on February 1. Briers makes clear that his vision of a cultural empire encompasses more than movies alone: “My whole angle is to show that a movie can show everything: It can show music, it can show art, it can show culture, it can show everything.”

In regards to his own future, Briers quotes an unlikely source—the CEO of one of Oxnard’s largest corporations, Kinko’s: “‘In your twenties, you try anything. In your thirties, you learn what you just tried.

In your forties, you make your money at what you just learned. And in your fifties, you just do, you just live.’” Just don’t expect to find Briers living in the Hollywood Hills. “My mission and dream,” he says, “is when I buy a house, it’s gonna be on the beach, in Oxnard.”