Movies: The Gospel According to Tigre
IF THERE’S A thread running through Hill’s character and craft, it probably has something to do with not letting people be too certain about what’s going to happen next. “I was brought up to be an independent thinker,” Hill says. “I was brought up multi-racial, multi–everything. My mom told me, ‘When you’re at the table, don’t be the person who’s always talking about black issues. Be able to talk about art, science.’ She would take me to the opera, to the theater. She didn’t tell me to deny what I was. She said, ‘Be aware of who you are, but that’s not all you are.’”
There’s a beautiful painting of Hill’s mother in the dining room of his house. Ramona Dacua was a guidance counselor in the Philadelphia schools. She was half Filipino — her father, a member of a well-off Cebu City family, had arrived in the United States in 1919. Irvin Hill, from Pittsburgh, played football at Penn State, became a major in the Marines and later a defense contractor. Tigre’s parents had Tigre in Pittsburgh. Then Irvin Hill went to Vietnam.
“He was away a lot,” Hill remembers. The couple split when Tigre was four or five. He moved with his mom and grandfather to Wynnefield, a racially diverse neighborhood of single-family homes. His father, who died in 2002, remained an icon, the big man in the uniform.
It was a suburban life. Hill even played peewee ice hockey for the Haverford Hawks. “When my mom got me into hockey lessons, she said, ‘Listen, people are going to say things about your race. And remember, that’s their problem, not yours,’” he says. “I got picked on by the white kids because I was black playing ice hockey, and I also got picked on by the black kids because I was playing ice hockey.”
Hill attended Episcopal Academy, then Archbishop Carroll in Radnor. When he was 16, the good Catholic education at Carroll made him wonder, and his twisted cinematic sensibility began flowering. He made a film, A Moral Dilemma, about a psychotic teenager who is killing little kids and then confesses to a priest, who finds himself in an ethical pickle when a Wayne police detective starts asking questions.
Hill gave me a copy of the 30-minute video, warning me he was only 16 when he wrote it. (It’s a dispensation he’s not ready to extend to teenaged Abu-Jamal quoting Mao: “He was a very smart 16,” Hill says.) Moral Dilemma works — the narrative, the craft, it’s all there. The film earned Hill a partial scholarship to the School of Visual Arts in New York. He liked New York but not the school, and returned to Philly to study at Temple. There he wrote the screenplay for Casanova’s Demise — about a male escort who commits rape and as punishment is castrated. Okey-dokey.
