It's around nine o'clock on a fall night in Toronto's Allan Gardens. The downtown park, which has a slightly unsavoury nighttime reputation, is virtually deserted on this Friday evening, except for its southwest corner. The area has seen regular weekend protests against homelessness in the city, but tonight the bright lights of a video shoot are trained on its greenhouse and fountain, which stand in for the Tavern On The Green restaurant in New York's Central Park. A shiny new silver Mercedes CL-600 coupe is parked nearby. It's a key prop in this shoot -- enough that, just a few hours earlier, frantic phone calls were made to auto-parts dealers in the city to track down special rims for its wheels. The star of the video demanded custom Milano rims, so they have been procured -- at a price tag of $2,000, for a few seconds on film.

This attention to detail should come as no surprise, because the hero of this big-budget music-video shoot has a reputation to maintain. He's LL Cool J, the hip-hop icon and Hollywood actor. In a musical genre that produces a new flavour each month, LL Cool J has managed to stay at the top for fifteen years, selling millions of records and maintaining street credibility with the young music-buying public. The right look is an important part of his success. That's why his label has hired the hottest director in hip hop to shoot the video for his latest single, "You and Me." 

The young man charged with making sure that LL's visual image is still cool is a twenty-four-year-old Canadian who grew up in the less-than-fashionable Southern Ontario city of Brampton. Wiry, dressed in baggy jeans, his head covered by the hood of his sweatshirt, Julien Lutz -- or Little X, as he is better known -- looks more like a university student than a powerful force in popular music. But in the five years since he left Toronto for New York, he has risen from a lowly intern position at a commercial production house to become one of the most sought-after directors in the industry. He has made videos for such stars as Sisqo, Mystikal, Nelly, and Jay-Z, as well as for more mainstream performers such as Deborah Cox and the comedian Chris Rock. This summer, Rolling Stone named him the year's "hot video director," in its annual "Hot" issue. This fall, his video for the Mystikal single "Shake Ya Ass" was the most played clip on both MTV and Black Entertainment Television (BET). Before the video's release, Mystikal was little known outside hip-hop circles. Now he's a platinum-selling performer, moving more than a million copies in the U.S., and ranked near the top of both pop and R & B charts.

It's no secret that hip-hop and R & B acts dominate radio and video playlists across the United States. MTV's parent company, Viacom, recently purchased BET, and the two now reach over 70 million households in the U.S. alone, which means their playlists have a huge impact on music sales. In Canada, too, hip hop is a staple of MuchMusic's video rotations. There is a handful of video directors whose reputation dramatically increases the odds that an act will make it onto those narrow playlists. Little X, a rising star of what the industry calls the "booty video," is one of them.

Of course, that fact may be lost on the few dozen LL Cool J fans hovering around the Toronto video set on the first afternoon of the two-day shoot, screaming for the rap star's autograph. On this rainy day, production is moving slowly. The police try to stop rush-hour traffic, sometimes unsuccessfully. At one point, Little X shakes his head at the playback monitor as a streetcar enters the shot, ruining yet another take. "Let's reload," he yells out.

LL Cool J, in baggy denim pants and a red New York Yankees cap bearing the initials G.O.A.T. (his new album's name, short for Greatest Of All Time), is the good guy in this video. He stands in the brick doorway of a fine-foods store and, head tilted, hands clasped in typical LL style, begins rapping to the female lead about her current boyfriend's bad behaviour: "Damn, you and your man had beef / So he left you uptown, teary-eyed on a backstreet / For me to scoop up in a Bentley drop." His co-star listens, pouting. She's in a yellow leather jacket and skin-tight pants, though by the end of the video, she'll be down to her lingerie, then topless in LL's arms in his Manhattan loft. The scene being filmed today will only take up a few seconds in the finished video, but Little X requests shot after shot until he thinks everything is perfect. "Benny, hair and makeup, move them up, let's go," he calls.

Little X is instrumental in packaging some of hip hop's biggest performers (his budgets run as high as $1 million [U.S.]), but he also knows he cannot stray too far from the formula that defines current hip-hop video. Skimpily clad women are a staple of the form; the sultry female lead in the LL Cool J video and the bicycle-riding, lollipop-sucking women in the 1999 Choclair video "Let's Ride" follow suit. "X is good with the girls," says Margo Wainwright, the senior director of video production at Def Jam recordings in New York. High-end consumer goods are also a staple. The dictates are rigid: the champagne of the moment is Cristal, the jewellery platinum -- an upgrade from gold -- and the car usually a Bentley convertible (the LL Cool J video being a slight departure).

Little X follows those rules, but he also elevates the level of the booty video with his smart visual style. Non-traditional video colours such as luminous blues and greens, modern-looking sets, and arty slow motion characterize his videos. The overall effect is subtle, sophisticated, quieter than most examples of the genre. As Wainright says, "He knows the difference between beauty and booty."

It was a much more political Julien Lutz who threw himself into the thriving underground hip-hop scene in the Toronto area in the early 1990s. Sometime around the release of Spike Lee's film Malcolm X, Lutz took the name "Little X." At sixteen, he moved out of his parents' home and began drawing comics for fanzines and designing flyers for local hip-hop acts. He also performed spoken-word poetry, mostly about his frustrations as a young black man in suburban Ontario. "It was a pull-no-punches style of poetry," says Katt, a spoken-word performer who knew Little X then and now edits some of his videos. 

In 1993, Little X landed a semester-long internship with MuchMusic through a high-school co-op program. He also directed a video accompanying a friend's poem for a school project. "That's when I thought, hey, maybe I can do this," he recalls. Over the next two years, he began directing independent videos for a pittance for local artists. But budgets for hip-hop videos are small in Canada, and Little X quickly realized he needed to move to the U.S. if he wanted to move up. He began sending out his portfolio.

In 1995, he got an entry-level job with Hype Williams's production company in New York. It was his big break -- Williams is arguably the most successful video director in hip hop and the godfather of the "booty video." Little X began by drawing storyboards, sketches of every scene in a video, for hip-hop giants such as Puff Daddy, Missy Elliott, and Will Smith. He also worked on commercial accounts for Sprite and Kraft. A year later, he got the chance to direct, starting with a video for Choclair's "What It Takes." "They grabbed me and put me right on the chopping block," he says. Just twenty-one at the time, he remembers the simple directive from his employers: make hits. He did. Hype Williams says Little X has an innate ability to know what will appeal to the hip-hop consumer, "a real sense of what young people want."

His visual strengths were also always apparent, according to Margo Wainwright. "I met him when he first came up from Canada. There was definitely a raw talent," she says. He has refined that into a personal style. Tony Young, better known as the MuchMusic veejay Master T, says Little X somehow matches his talents with the content of the song and the reputation of the performer. "Along with Hype, he brings out the best in artists," he says. When asked what distinguishes his visual style, Little X shrugs, "To tell you the truth, I really don't know." There are certain lenses and lighting styles that he likes, but he says it's hard to translate technical preferences into how people react to his videos. "If the visuals on the screen make me really understand what that song is about, or really feel that song somehow, that's what the key to a music video is," he explains.

And so the video for "Girls Dem Sugar," by the reggae artist Beenie Man, turns a simple song about the physical charms of women into an atmospheric snapshot of a Jamaican dance-hall party. In Mystikal's "Shake Ya Ass," Little X found a way around making "just another line-them-up-and-shake type video," he says, by shooting a more mysterious, Eyes Wide Shut-style scenario of a party at a mansion. And in his arresting video for Choclair's "Let's Ride," Little X works his style on Toronto, imbuing office towers and empty streets with a sense of cool. "It's visually attractive. It makes Toronto look very different," says MuchMusic's Tony Young.

Of course, not everyone is sold. There is increasing criticism within the hip-hop community of the materialism and overt sexuality in the videos. In promoting his recent movie, Bamboozled, director Spike Lee has referred to hip-hop videos as modern-day minstrel shows, suggesting that their images of drug kings and bikini-clad party girls are harmful caricatures created for the amusement of middle-class America. Young, who produced a MuchMusic special on the booty-video phenomenon a year ago, is also critical of this trend. "You'd think things would have changed, but it's escalated," he says. "There's a lot of dough out there. Nobody wants to take a chance and say I'm going to do something different."

Little X thinks hip-hop culture is being unfairly singled out because it's more mainstream than ever. "Long before hip hop, beautiful women played a key role in marketing all kinds of things. That's just the way this world works. Women sell products to men and women." But he is also not above occasionally lampooning those clichés himself. His 1999 video for the song "I'll Bee Dat," by the New Jersey-based performer Redman, spoofed hip hop's exaggerated sexuality and its commercialism. (It features various Redman products, including a fictitious Redman cereal.) The clip was critically praised and received a nomination for best video at the awards held by the hip-hop magazine The Source. It was easier to take a chance in this case because Redman has a comic rap persona. For most other performers, Little X says there are boundaries as to what he can do. "Whether people realize it or not, black culture is cool culture for the world. And cool people don't do certain things, like make fun of themselves. There are these weird rules you can bend but you can't break. I'm hoping that if you bend them enough, finally somewhere down the line, people can break them."