Be Cool

Felix Gary Gray (born July 17, 1969) is an American music video and film director. Gray was born in New York City. He was raised in South Central Los Angeles and Highland Park, Illinois. For a short time in the 1990s he worked at Bally Total Fitness as a trainer. He studied film and television at Los Angeles City College but dropped out to pursue his film-making. At first he worked as a cameraman for Fox Television, CNN and E!. This experience helped him find work as a music video director.

Gray has directed more than 30 music videos for musical artists such as Ice Cube, Queen Latifah, TLC, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, and Mary J. Blige, and won several awards for his video work. For Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage”, he received the 1995 Billboard Music Video Award for Best Rap Video. For TLC’s “Waterfalls”, he received the MTV Music Video Award for Video of the Year, as well as an NAACP Image Award. He was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1998 for directing “How Come, How Long”, Stevie Wonder and Babyface’s video.

He made the transition into motion pictures in 1995 with his first film, the surprising hit Friday (with rapper-producer friend Ice Cube), firmly establishing himself in the feature world. He next directed the 1996 heist picture Set It Off (with Jada Pinkett Smith) and then The Negotiator (1998), whose $50 million budget was the highest ever given to an African-American director. Starring Academy Award winner Kevin Spacey and nominee Samuel L. Jackson, the drama earned Gray both Best Film and Best Director awards at the 1998 Acapulco Film Festival. Perhaps Gray’s best known film is The Italian Job, featuring an all-star cast including Academy Award winner Charlize Theron, Edward Norton, and Mark Wahlberg. Gray designed car and boat chases through downtown Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Venice, Italy. The film grossed over $100 million domestically and won Best Director award at the 2004 American Black Film Festival.Gray’s features also include the action-drama A Man Apart (2003) starring Vin Diesel and the crime comedy Be Cool (2005), based on the novel of the same name by Elmore Leonard. His new film, Law Abiding Citizen, starring Academy Award-winner Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler, was released on October 16, 2009.

Gray was seen on the MTV show Punk’d when The Rock was the subject of a practical joke on the set of his movie Be Cool. Gray and his Be Cool cast members (mostly uncredited) greeted The Rock after it had been revealed to him that he had just been Punk’d. He is rumored to be helming the upcoming film Kane & Lynch, based on the video game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. —wikipedia