"The thing about Alex is he's really good at what he does," says Coolidge, a stencil artist whose work makes a brief cameo in the film. "People contact me pretty regularly and ask if they can come out with me and take pictures. I'm not into that, really, but I looked at the stuff [Alex] had done, and you know, it's really good."

After a couple of years shooting, during which he racked up more than 55 hours of raw footage, Luster called in his old buddy and former Fox-26 co-worker Tony Reyes, also an actor and screenwriter, to help mold the raw material into a classic three-act narrative format.

Reyes took what in Luster's hands had been merely a topic and turned it into a story. "He took it to that next level, made it sing," says Luster. "If it was just me, it would just be a bunch of profiles of artists where they say, 'My name is so-and-so and blah-blah-blah,' and then I would have the anti-street art people come on and say, 'My name is so-and-so, and I don't like it.'"

As the final product started coming into focus, Luster started showing rough cuts to experts. One such screening took place at a documentary filmmaking conference in San Antonio. The expert told Luster that while he loved what he saw, Luster needed to make it more national. "I don't care about Houston," the man said. "Nobody gives a shit about Houston. You need to be talking to people in New York and L.A. and Chicago."

"That's already been done," Luster replied. "That's not my own personal story. I would never get the time I got with Houston people as I would get those people."

Still, Luster went away wondering if this advice had been on the mark. He consulted with Reyes. "Do we go that way?" he asked. He even started budgeting out plane tickets, and sent a few e-mails via GONZO247 to contacts in the street scenes coast to coast. And then one day he brought the whole idea to a screeching halt.

"I just didn't care. This is about Houston and I don't really care. If it does well here and it doesn't do anything anywhere else, screw it, I don't care."
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Luster's bicultural childhood prepared him well for a career spent working both sides of the language divide. He was raised in both Westbury and Sabinas Hidalgo, Nuevo Leon, his mother's once-small, now-bustling northern Mexican hometown. Most holidays and summers, Luster's parents would send the soon-to-be-director across the river.

"There was no daycare, it was just freedom," Luster recalls. "My blind grandmother was looking after two kids — and we were like badasses, plus we were like kings because we were from out of town, from the rich land, little kings of Sabinas. That forced me to learn Spanish. There's just no way to get by there without knowing Spanish."

Back in Houston, Luster attended HISD schools on the Southwest side. TV and movies saved his life, he says. Literally kept him alive. One day he got off a Metro bus on his way home from Johnston Middle School and was walking down a busy street near his house. Just as he was walking past a car wash, a car screeched around the corner and slammed on the brakes right in front of him. From seeing many a cop show and gangster flick, Luster knew just what to do. He kissed the concrete just as the car's occupants opened fire on the car wash. "I could feel one of the bullets go right past my head, like fwwwissshh," he says.

The earliest seeds of his future career were planted around the same time, Luster's father Ron says. When Alex was 11 or 12, the elder Luster found a screenplay hidden in the bedroom his oddly restless son was constantly rearranging. "It was pretty good for a kid," Ron Luster remembers. "It was sad and dark, but it was also interesting and fairly well-written." Around the same time, Luster shot some claymation films with a camera borrowed from some family friends. "Looking back you could tell, but we didn't know it would go this far then," Ron remembers.

Meanwhile, things weren't going all that well in school. Alex remembers feeling unchallenged and says he was falling in with a bad crowd. Ron says his son was an indifferent student. He was sent to an alternative high school. And right around that time, he and his mother both signed on as interns at Noticiero 48, a Spanish-language news station owned by Telemundo and broadcast on Channel 48. Within months, he'd risen from unpaid intern to paid chief news editor.