The time: Aug. 7, 2000. The setting: a Los Angeles hotel room strewn with the debris of an ongoing celebration. “The Poor & Hungry,” a $20,000 movie shot in Memphis, has just won the Hollywood film festival’s award for best digital feature, and its writer and director Craig Brewer has suddenly become the nobody everybody’s talking about. Buzzed on a variety of cocktails and pure adrenaline, the man of the hour sits on his rumpled bed sipping a beer.
