Ernest R. Dickerson left Newark almost 50 years ago.

But recently, he took a drive over to his old home at one of the city’s first housing projects.

Or, he tried to.

What he saw was nothing like his memories of the South Ward.

“It’s all just flat now. All the projects that I grew up in are all gone,” he says — Seth Boyden Terrace was demolished last year.

The new tenant?

Hollywood.

Under construction: a $125 million, 300,000-square-foot Lionsgate film and TV studio.

Dickerson, 72, knows a little something about that business.

After starting out as a cinematographer on Spike Lee’s films including “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), “School Daze” (1988) and “Do the Right Thing” (1989), the filmmaker launched his directing career with the 1992 movie “Juice.”

The movie, regarded as a classic, stars Omar Epps and Tupac Shakur in their first major film roles and a soundtrack loaded with the sounds of hip-hop’s golden age.

This weekend, Dickerson will be honored with a lifetime achievement award at a Newark Black Film Festival screening of the film.

“It is good to come back home,” says Dickerson, an alum of Essex Catholic High School who now lives in Los Angeles. “I’m so glad to see that Newark is coming up — New Jersey is coming up — in so many ways.”

The celebration of the movie arrives during hip-hop’s 50th anniversary year, which marks the music’s birth in New York in the summer of 1973. Also nearly 50 years old: the Newark Black Film Festival, the longest-running Black film festival in the country.

‘More timely than ever’

In “Juice,” Omar Epps plays Quincy “Q” Powell, a Harlem high school student with dreams of making it as a DJ.

When he’s on the turntables, he goes by Gee-Q.

His aspirations cause friction with his friend (Roland) Bishop, played by Shakur.

Bishop, frustrated by constant threats from a local Puerto Rican gang, the police and a neighborhood store owner, starts displaying some worrying behavior.

“All we do is f---ing run!” he says — he’d rather go out in a blaze.

Bishop shocks Q and their friends Eric “Steel” Thurman (Jermaine Hopkins) and Raheem Porter (Khalil Kain) with deadly gunfire, leaving them shaken.

After he does the unthinkable, he hounds Q, targeting him with a menacing stare.

Though it would be a decade before he could make the film, Dickerson had written the script for “Juice” with Gerard Brown by 1981, as they noticed an influx of guns. The story shows the weapons to be “a false symbol of manhood,” he says.

“Unfortunately now, 31 years later, ‘Juice’ is even more timely than ever because the use of guns has just gotten worse,” the director tells NJ Advance Media. “This country is cursed with firepower.”

Some dismissed the film as ”just another hip-hop gangster movie, which it was not,” Dickerson says.

The director learned that church groups were taking kids to see the movie since one of its themes is how peer pressure can push you in the wrong direction.

“I just felt that we had found a pulse that was really going on,” he says.

When Dickerson’s daughter was a teen, she told him her friends were having “Juice” parties where they would watch the film on VHS and quote the dialogue.

“I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” he says. “I was so surprised. But I’m happy that it’s lasted this long.”

Soundtrack to hip-hop’s golden age

Beyond its still-timely story, “Juice” stands as one of the great hip-hop movies.

Rousing needle-drops energize the film, which opens with a spinning Def Jam record — Eric B & Rakim’s kinetic “Juice (Know the Ledge).”

The swaggering “Uptown Anthem” from East Orange’s Naughty By Nature gets the crowd moving during Q’s big DJ battle scene.

When Q runs from Bishop into a crowded elevator, his gun-toting friend tries to shoot him. Cue Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man.”

“To me, hip-hop needed to be part of the movie because that was the music of the lives of our main characters,” Dickerson says.

He always wanted Epps’ character, Q — aka Gee-Q — to be an aspiring DJ.

“I was really interested in the scratch and mix sessions,” he says. “I thought it was so interesting that young guys that couldn’t afford to play with instruments invented whole new instruments with the twin turntable and sampling and scratching ... It was creating a whole new sound.”

It was important to Dickerson that his film have its own sound, too. His favorite group at the time was Public Enemy.

“I wanted the mastermind behind their sound,” he says — Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee and the Bomb Squad.

The producers scored the movie and put together the “Juice” soundtrack, which also includes music from Too $hort, Big Daddy Kane, Salt-N-Pepa and Teddy Riley featuring Tammy Lucas.

“Right now, everything is digital and computerized,” Dickerson says. “And it’s so much easier to do, so much easier to find those sounds (he hopes AI doesn’t take it completely out of artists’ hands). But back in those days, guys had to really do their research, really had to do their homework to find what was on what records and what sounds to come together and mix together to make their individual contribution.”

Hip-hop legend Fab 5 Freddy and his fellow “Yo! MTV Raps” hosts Ed Lover and Doctor Dré appear in “Juice,” as do Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith of EPMD and Kool DJ Red Alert.

Dickerson met Newark and East Orange’s Queen Latifah when he was the cinematographer on Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” (1991).

“In Juice,” her Ruffhouse MC character hosts the DJ battle and gives Q an encouraging response when he submits his audition tape.

“She really bonded with my mother,” Dickerson recalls.

In the movie, his mother, Jacqui Dickerson, a former Newark Public Library employee, plays Sweets, a woman who supplies Q with a gun. (“Are you Lorraine Powell’s son?” she asks before giving him the weapon.)

“She was able to get her SAG card so she could do something in her retirement besides just sit at home.”

Tupac: From ’91 till infinity

When Dickerson started working with Shakur on “Juice,” he hadn’t yet become the artist that made him a hip-hop legend.

“This is before Tupac was the Tupac that the world knows, this is before he’d even done his earliest stuff,” Dickerson says.

At the beginning of 1991, 2Pac was chiefly known as a member of Oakland hip-hop group Digital Underground. Later that year, Shakur would release his debut solo album, “2Pacalypse Now,” which included the single “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” a song that told a story about teen pregnancy and sexual abuse. “Juice” was released in theaters two months after that.

Shakur’s onscreen charisma is apparent to anyone who watches the film. But Dickerson would observe the young actor and rapper during his downtime, too.

“The amazing thing about it, the thing that I remember, is on set in between setups, while we were setting up camera and everything else, sometimes he would sit over on the side with a notebook and he would write,” the director says. “And I like to think that a lot of what he was writing was a lot of the music.

“Because one of the things that Tupac was doing — we were shooting in Harlem ... he was meeting people in the neighborhood. If he saw a young mother that looked like she was having some issues or some kind of problems, something really interesting, he would go over and talk to them. He would go over to talk to people that looked like they were struggling, people that looked like they were just trying to deal with some stuff ... That was one of the great things about him ... he loved people and he would communicate with folks. And I like to think that maybe some of that found its way into his music.”

Clip contains profanity

Shakur would go on to release three more albums before he died in 1996 after a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. He was just 25. (Six posthumous albums followed.)

By the time of his death, he had starred in two more feature films: John Singleton’s “Poetic Justice” (1993) with Janet Jackson and Regina King, and basketball drama “Above the Rim” (1994).

Three more — “Gridlock’d,” “Bullet” and “Gang Related” — were released soon after Shakur died.

The expanding ‘Juice’ universe

LeRon Lee first saw “Juice” when he was 10 years old.

“It’s just a very raw film,” he says.

But in that rawness, there’s a certain authenticity.

“It was a film that spoke to the youth in a special way,” Lee says — Dickerson’s characters walked the walk, talked the talk and listened to the music.

“We were introducing the world to our world ... ‘Juice’ is one of those films that were pioneers in basically showcasing us as a people.”

Lee is a Newark filmmaker and member of the committee that curates the Newark Black Film Festival.

The festival was founded 49 years ago, in 1974, and became a sanctuary for Black filmmakers who were were shut out of opportunities to show their work, Lee says. (The event, which previously stretched over a longer span of summer, now lasts a week at the Newark Museum of Art and ends Sunday, July 16.)

“For Ernest to be on the scene and doing what he did and basically transforming how we absorb film itself is just something remarkable that we wanted to celebrate,” he says.

In “Juice,” locals could see Jersey hip-hop greats like Latifah and Treach from Naughty By Nature on the big screen.

Actor Jermaine Hopkins, who hails from Newark and plays Steel in the movie, is set to join Dickerson at a festival Q&A Saturday. So will actor Khalil Kain, who plays Raheem, and producer Ralph McDaniels, of “Video Music Box” fame.

“What it gave us was this electrifying experience,” Lee says of the movie. “It also gave us permission — ‘We can be in these films, too. We can tell our story.’ ‘Boyz N the Hood’ (the 1991 film directed by Singleton) was another one.”

But Dickerson says isn’t done with Q, Bishop, Steel and Raheem.

He has plans to expand the “Juice” universe by creating a prequel series with his wife, Rose Geddes Dickerson.

“It’s something we’re working on right now,” he says. “So hopefully we’ll be able to show that to the world in the next couple years ... we’re looking at adult animation, telling everything that happened before the events in ‘Juice’ ... because that would be a way of keeping Tupac(’s character) involved.”

Movies, music and TV

Growing up in Newark, Dickerson delighted in fantasy and adventure films like “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958) and “The Great Escape” (1963).

He remembers seeing “Ben Hur” (1959) at the Adams Theatre downtown, and reveling in the James Bond films.

“Those movies definitely made me more interested in the craft of filmmaking,” Dickerson says. “I never thought of it as escape. I always thought of it as a product that was manufactured by a bunch of people.”

He’d sit up late and watch more films with his uncle.

“It was my uncle who met who made me realize the movies are photographed,” says the director, who started noticing the “director of photography” credits on the films they watched. He still finds the stormy black-and-white opening of one of those movies, David Lean’s “Oliver Twist” (1948), particularly haunting. Seeing “In Cold Blood” (1967) in the theater got him even more interested in lighting and composition, and headed down a path toward becoming a cinematographer.

Dickerson met Spike Lee when they were the only Black film students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

It was there that Dickerson began his run as director of photography for Lee’s movies, starting with the 1983 student film “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads.” (Their classmate Ang Lee, who would go on to win best director Oscars for “Brokeback Mountain” and “Life of “Pi,” was assistant director on the same film.)

The team of Lee and Dickerson would become known for the double dolly shot, which creates a “floating” effect first used for Lee’s character, Giant, in “Mo’ Better Blues” (1990). The idea was to offer a different point of view, an over-the-shoulder perspective, Dickerson says. They also used it for walking shots in “Jungle Fever” (1991). But when they applied the technique to Denzel Washington in “Malcolm X” (1992), it took on a greater meaning.

“That was intended to be a spiritual moment,” Dickerson says. “Almost, he was feeling the prophecy of his possible death ... Sometimes a little bit of surrealism could be more truthful to the moment.”

Dickerson’s career, which has been jam-packed with TV directing gigs in the last 30-plus years, also includes some pretty famous music videos.

His first feature cinematography job out of NYU was the John Sayles sci-fi movie “The Brother From Another Planet” (1984). That brought him a very New Jersey opportunity — Bruce Springsteen’s 1984 “Born in the U.S.A.” video, also directed by Sayles.

“It was great working with somebody like Springsteen because he was so cool, very calm, very nice guy,” he says, and it was the same with the band, including Clarence Clemons on saxophone. Later, Dickerson joined Lee on Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” video (1989). He also collaborated with the director on a video for Miles Davis.

Dickerson, whose feature films have included the Snoop Dogg horror movie “Bones” (2001) and the DMX film “Never Die Alone” (2004), won a Daytime Emmy for the TV movie “Our America” (2002).

During the reign of prestige TV, helming episodes for cable networks and streamers has provided steady work for the filmmaker, just not on a movie set. His TV directing credits range from “The Wire” to “ER,” “The Walking Dead,” “Dexter,” “Treme,” “Weeds,” “Bosch” and “House of Cards.”

Starting with “The Wire” “spoiled” him, Dickerson says — “I felt like I was directing a mini-movie. They wanted my point of view, which isn’t the same on all TV shows.”

When he makes trips to Jersey, the director usually stays with his daughter and granddaughter in Somerset.

He may soon be spending more time in the state.

“I’m actually trying to see if there’s some way I can get a production to come back here,” he says. “I’d love to come back here and do something.”

Director Ernest R. Dickerson, producer Ralph McDaniels and actors Khalil Kain (Raheem) and Jermaine Hopkins (Steel) will be at the Newark Black Film Festival’s screening of “Juice” (rated R, 95 minutes), 7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 15 at the Newark Museum of Art’s Billy Johnson Auditorium (49 Washington St., Newark). Admission $10; newarkmuseumart.org.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.