From here to Hollywood

They sit, shy but eager, in a car under a street lamp. She glances up; he reassures her with a smile. He's been waiting for this for weeks.

The girl is finally going to kiss him.

Subtle yellow light softens their faces. A camera trick makes this the most intimate moment in the movie: We see only the left half of her face, the right half of his. We feel like we're about to be kissed, too.

This is the stuff that never really happens to us. We kiss under unkind fluorescent lights. We have blemishes that ruin close-ups. We don't make out in parked cars anymore. But at this moment, we imagine we're like this couple, backlit, zoomed in, perfect.

Tommy Maddox-Upshaw casts spells like this all the time. The son of a tight-knit Mattapan family who has spent most of his life moving as a black person in stubbornly white worlds, Maddox-Upshaw is one of the few black cinematographers working in Hollywood today. His first feature film, Maureen Foley's ''American Wake," shot last year in and around Boston, was featured this summer in the Boston Film Festival.

The movie follows two men, one a firefighter whose best friend's death leaves him unanchored, the other a young fisherman whose father wants him to return to Ireland and a sure career as a traditional fiddle player. The two characters never meet; we're supposed to see their journeys as parallel struggles to reinvent themselves. Both men accept the risks reinvention implies -- overcoming the past, embracing uncertainty, and facing the threat of failure.

The past is present everywhere in a visit to the Upshaw family. Family photographs plaster the refrigerator, the walls in the kitchen and entryway, and nearly any table surface of their Mattapan home, which sits in the middle of a long row of tidy two-family houses with short driveways and large backyards. It's a quiet street, where kids ride bikes and neighbors chat on stoops, in a part of town not always so tranquil.

In the photos, Crystal hoists a tiny Tommy onto her hip during the snowstorm of '78. Kyla holds a flute to Tommy's lips. Fifteen years separate the four Upshaw children -- Crystal, 36, Kyla, 34, Tommy (who won't say how old he is, because age is a liability in Hollywood), and Kiara, 22.

The past for parents Dorothy and Tony Upshaw was a struggle for opportunity at moments when society seemed set against them. ''Knowing where our parents came from really drives Tommy," Kiara says of her brother, who recently moved to Hollywood to follow an ambitious career. ''They're from the South in the mid-'40s. That's all you gotta to say."

Dorothy, 59, grew up in North Carolina, Tony, also 59, in Alabama. Their parents couldn't afford to send them to college, so both moved to Boston in search of better jobs than African-Americans could find in the Jim Crow South. They met working at Honeywell, where Dorothy had an office job. A few years later, Tony drove trolleys for the MBTA, then became the first black inspector at the Bennett Street garage in Cambridge.

In 1969 -- a few years before a blockbusting and redlining surge that led to ''white flight" from the city -- Tony and Dorothy Upshaw bought a three-bedroom house in Mattapan. At 23, Tony Upshaw was the first of his five siblings to own property, though Mattapan at the time was a predominantly white, largely unwelcoming neighborhood.

''One day, I was working in the yard," Tony remembers, ''and an old lady comes up to me and says, 'Sonny, how much do you get paid to take care of the lawn?' " He chuckles. ''I told her I didn't make any money for it, but I did get to sleep with the lady of the house."

The same year the Upshaws moved into their new home, Massachusetts passed the Racial Imbalance Act, which required Boston schools to integrate their student populations. A year later, Metco offered parents an opportunity to send their children to schools in the suburbs. Dorothy and Tony signed Crystal up, and the program was young enough that she didn't linger on the waiting list. Ultimately, the preferential treatment for siblings of enrolled Metco students meant all four Upshaw children would graduate in the Newton public school system.

When Tommy was in first grade, he came home from school puzzled. One of his classmates said he and Tommy couldn't play together. It wasn't the first time race had come up in Tommy's life; he'd been one of a handful of black children in his class since his first days in school. ''I told him that boy can't have as many friends as you can have," Dorothy remembers. ''That seemed to make sense to him. If you can come in here and feel that security, you can face anything."

Security was the number one concern of the Upshaw household. Mattapan, like Boston, became increasingly dangerous in the 1980s. ''I watched people get beat up. I heard violence," Tommy remembers. But, he said, his parents worked hard ''to keep us busy and out of that garbage."

They took their children to cello and trumpet lessons and tennis and football games. When Kiara's championship basketball team traveled to Oklahoma, Idaho, or Florida, Dorothy and Tony put in extra hours to pay for the trips. ''If you're busy," Dorothy says, ''you can't be hanging out on the street."

There was more than just fear for their children's safety in the Upshaws' philosophy. They wanted their youngsters to explore the same options as their suburban classmates, to choose something they enjoyed, and to work to excel at it -- what Tommy calls finding ''his niche." He and his black classmates sometimes struggled to define themselves in largely white classrooms, but discovering a talent for photography helped Tommy overcome the pressure he felt at school. As he says, ''I had my niche."

Early on, Tommy became the family photographer. He took close-ups and candid shots on vacations and, later, at graduations. When Kyla, a New York casting agent, invited him to the set of a hip-hop music video she had worked on, he fell in love with film. He shot his first movie, ''Camera," when he was about 20, with the help of the Boston Video and Film Foundation. But he hadn't gone to college as an artist; he'd gone as an athlete, with little time for pursuits like making movies.

A Newton South High quarterback who led his team to an 8-2 season, Tommy went to Holy Cross on a football scholarship. When he quit the team a few years later, he replaced his athletic money with an academic scholarship. He focused his free time on his senior project, a short film he titled ''Dialogue." He wanted the silent film to represent visually how it felt to be a black student on a very white campus.

''You felt like everybody was watching you, like you're under a microscope. You wanted to let them know you weren't the first black student who'd come there," he remembers. ''It's a pretty extreme version of Boston. I had friends who never even went to school with black folks -- and this is in 2000."

The closest Holy Cross gets to a film department is visual arts, in which Tommy took a major, with a concentration in African-American studies. Through the Bishop Healy Society, a mentoring program for African-American students named after the school's first valedictorian, who was black, Tommy met Brian Heller, a cinematographer who worked on ''Good Will Hunting" and ''Signs." Heller loaned Tommy books about camera operation, color, light and composition; he took Tommy to the set of any project he had in the works.

Heller encouraged Tommy to apply to the American Film Institute, one of the nation's premiere film schools. And Heller also made a call to Maureen Foley, who co-wrote and directed the film that would become Tommy's first feature.

Foley had seen Tommy's work when she juried a student film contest at Boston University. ''I honestly thought that some student with a little bit of extra money had hired a real Hollywood DP [director photography]," she recalls. Even though he'd never shot a full-length film, Foley asked him to be her DP.

Being a cinematographer is not easy. The competition is tough, the pay is iffy, and there's no guarantee of work. ''If you want to be a doctor," Heller explains, ''you go to medical school, pass an exam, and set up shop -- then you're a doctor. But you're not a cinematographer until someone hires you. And if you don't blow it, you get hired again."

Graduating from the American Film Institute helps. But being African-American narrows the already competitive field. Tommy estimates fewer than a dozen black cinematographers work in Hollywood today, and most of them fight for the respect of the industry. ''I know black cinematographers who are some of the biggest in the world, who were told on the phone they were the only guys who could shoot this movie," Tommy says, ''and then, when everyone walks into the office, it's suddenly, 'Maybe this film's not for you.' "

To some extent, it's an old game. Tommy's literally been schooled at gliding between two worlds, black and white; he's well-practiced at working harder in one because you're part of the other.

Currently, Maddox-Upshaw -- as a young man, he added his mother's maiden name to his own last name -- lugs a 40-pound camera around Los Angeles, eight hours a day, filming women's reactions to their makeovers for Boston-based Scout Production's ''Queer Eye for the Straight Girl." When that wraps up in November, he'll shoot a short film based on the Stephen King story ''Harvey's Dream." He's eager to do another feature.

''As long as people like the work, I can handle the personal side of things," he maintains. ''Right now I'm concentrating on showing I can do the work."

"American Wake" will be shown on opening night at the Northampton Film Festival, at the Academy of Music, 274 Main St., 7:30 p.m., Oct. 27. More info at 413-582-1832 or www.niff.org