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Despite its working title, Turntable: A Trip-Hop Odyssey isn’t a long-form music video or Scratch-style documentary; rather, the film falls into a drug-running, gun-pulling genre best described as "gangsta pulp." Spun around dark hero Vincent (Russell G. Jones, who played Tommy in Squeeze), Patton-Spruill’s script opens with Vincent’s two criminal siblings, Andre and Jerome, selling drugs to four other thugs, a transaction their incarcerated father hooked up from behind bars. But the narcotics are all bogus, so the brothers try to gun down the buyers once they get the payoff. Two die easily; two others survive thanks to bullet-proof vests. After Andre and Jerome run off with the cash, leaving behind a useless stash of impotent white powder, the buyers spend the rest of the film trying to get revenge and their money. And, naturally, they bump off anyone who gets in their way.

Turntable’s dialogue isn’t exactly Shakespearean. During the drug deal, the customers want to search Jerome, but he isn’t having any of it: "Fuck you. What, you want to see my shit? Fuck, yeah, I got guns. I got a couple of knives too, nigga, damn. You don’t know me. Lay a hand on me or my brother and I’ll chop it off, so help me."

"All the characters, when it first comes out, all sound like me," Patton-Spruill says, smoking a cigarette on the set one morning. "Then I try to make each character sound more unique and like themselves and say things that they would say." But the lines are only a guide. "I try and push my actors not to worry about saying the words exactly as they are, but worry about the meaning of the words."

Turntable’s budget, says Patton-Spruill, is "under $200,000." The recent Garden State, a big-name indie, had a budget of $2.5 million. Even a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial filmed in Providence during the Democratic National Convention reportedly cost $500,000 for a two-day shoot.

"He understands his limitations within the budget," says Turntable producer Lenny Manzo. "He really has a way of making something out of nothing."

"To be sustainable, the last thing I want to do is make the movie, do nothing, find someone to give me money," explains Patton-Spruill. "I’d rather be in a situation where I have everything necessary to make movies, and it lowers my overall production cost, so I never lose my investment money. You never want to [lose your investment money]. Otherwise your career is over."

To that end, Turntable’s actors and crew members are nearly all Patton-Spruill’s relatives, protégés, or people he’s known for years. The catatonic kindergartener in the murder scene is Patton-Spruill’s six-year-old daughter. Charlie Mumbles is played by Patton-Spruill’s dad. Detective Jackson is Lonnie Farmer, a local performer who’s had bit parts in Mystic River and Cider House Rules. Sergeant McCoy is Will Lyman, a character actor who narrates PBS’s Frontline and NOVA, and who played Colonel Roger Atkins on last year’s ABC show Threat Matrix. Beecher Cotton, Turntable’s director of photography, started out years ago as an intern with FilmShack. Of the prominent actors, both Russell G. Jones and Tyrone Burton debuted in Squeeze. The makeup woman, the still photographer, and some extras are all Patton-Spruill’s cousins.

But the filmmaker doesn’t see Turntable as a test of FilmShack’s resources. "The company’s doing great. The team is fantastic. We really have a killer young group of people together," Patton-Spruill says. "If it’s a test of anybody, it’s more of a true test of me."

A Roxbury nightclub, Slades Bar & Grille, in the early afternoon. For the past two days, the crew’s been here since 4 a.m.; yesterday morning, they shot scenes with Ed OG that will be used in his new video for "Boston," a song that will also be featured in Turntable.

But the big celebrity on set today is Tony Todd, the dusky 6’5" behemoth who’s played more than one kind of alien in Star Trek’s various incarnations, and starred in Clive Barker’s 1992 horror film Candyman. Patton-Spruill met Todd, a Connecticut native, when the latter was in town doing August Wilson’s King Hedley II at the Huntington Theatre. Patton-Spruill thought he’d be perfect for Turntable’s arch-villain, fictitious club owner Victor Slade. "There’s no one that does malevolence better than him," says Patton-Spruill. "There’s no one that can just speak and scare the crap out of you. He doesn’t have to do anything and he’s scary."

Todd was down for it. "I’ve been on multi-million-dollar film sets like The Rock, where they have every lens possible, and giant cranes," he explains. "But it’s not as much fun. People are jaded. Everyone’s excited here. I like working outside the Hollywood system in independent films. They get you all jazzed up."

Today’s agenda is a choreographed fight. Todd’s character, Victor, is angry that the club’s DJ has taken up with his ex-girl, a feisty dancer called Critter. The new couple come to pick up their checks, and a brawl ensues. The dancer slaps her ex-boss. He strangles her. The DJ tries to stop him; the club owner slams him into a table. Then Victor punches, throws, and kicks him — until there’s a fatal shooting.

"I’m working on a new theory," says Patton-Spruill between takes. "The modern audience can’t wait longer than three minutes without something happening. So you try to balance cinéma vérité and all that, but the reality is something has to happen. Otherwise, I’d say, 80 percent of the audience is going to be like, ‘Kick him in the ding. Do something.’"

Like Squeeze, Turntable reflects a French New Wave influence. "What I really wanted to do was to take an archetypal French New Wave film and set it here in the ’hood of my hometown and update it," Patton-Spruill explains. "I just really wanted to write something pulpy with French sensibilities. The French New Wave cats had it right. Essentially what they were doing is remaking Hollywood movies with limited resources. All those movies were made with a hot sandwich and two rolls of film." Making films cheaply, he insists, is a hallmark of the genre. "I think to really be a French New Wave movie, you can’t have a lot of resources."

That’s also the goal of FilmShack: to make low-budget moviemaking affordable. "I’m trying to build a miniature version of an old-school, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s studio system where you have a bunch of stock actors," Patton-Spruill says. "If I had my way, we’d be doing four or five or six movies a year. In my ideal world, I’d like to continue what we’re doing and build a real stock studio."

Which is why if Turntable ultimately isn’t as relevant or affecting as Squeeze, it almost doesn’t matter. What’s more important is that Robert Patton-Spruill, who could very well become the Roger Corman of the ’hood, is back behind the camera.

"I can’t create in Los Angeles," says Patton-Spruill. "There’s not a big enough film scene in New York to make that worth my while. But here at home, I’m safe. It’s like asking Woody Allen to make a movie outside of Manhattan. Boston is where I make films."

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com