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      *Writer/director/producer Preston Whitmore has a pretty impressive film resume, but the young Hollywood-ite is staying grounded, modestly explaining that he’s not doing anything extraordinary.

     But fans of his films might beg to differ. In particular, Whitmore is the man behind last year’s holiday hit ‘This Christmas,’ a family film that many hope has a follow-up.

      “That’s up to the studio,” Whitmore told EUR’s Lee Bailey. “It’s just a wait-and-see type of thing. Creatively, since I’ve been there, I might want to try something else. That movie was five years in the making.”

     Whitmore explained that he originally wrote the script for ‘This Christmas’ years ago. It was initially a family reunion picture. However, the studio bowed out on the script and Whitmore went on to his next project, ‘Crossover.’

      “Then they came back to me and said they wanted to make it,” he continued. “But then LionsGate made ‘Madea’s Family Reunion’ so I changed the setting to be around Christmas.”

      Bottom line, however, the ‘This Christmas’ story is rather aged for Whitmore.

    “As an artist, that’s something I did five years ago,” he said, but admitted that he was not completely finished with the concept. “Those stories were based on my family so there are many more stories to be told in regard to that. And one of the things I do want to do is more family films. So we’ll have to see what happens at the studio – if they want to see another story about the Whitfield’s.”

      As a matter of fact, Whitmore, who claimed to have written almost 70 scripts in the 18 years he’s been in the business, said that he’d already written a sequel of sorts to ‘This Christmas’ while the film was in post-production. So don’t count it out just yet, according to Whitmore's sentiments. The filmmaker expressed that his greatest pursuit is to create “intelligent comedies” starring African Americans. And if it takes another dose of the Whitfield clan, so be it.

      “Coming off of ‘This Christmas,’ immediately you’re swamped with a number of options to do the exact same thing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you want to do the right one and the right story,” he said. “I think that’s where I get dispelled sometimes. In mainstream America, any day of the week you can go out and see a romantic comedy; you can see an action picture; you can see a family picture; you can see any number of things that represent mainstream. When you’re African American, you have a film like ‘This Christmas’ and that’s all they want to make is ten more of those.”

       Whitmore, on the other hand, has made movies practically from ten different genres. He said his story began from a purist perspective of screenwriting.

      “That’s why I came into this business,” he said of his Hollywood dreams. “I’d written a great many scripts for studios and none of the movies got made, and then my father died. He never saw me make a movie.”

      Whitfield dropped off the scene for a few years and then resurfaced as a director.

      “I decided I wanted to direct, and by directing somehow I could will a movie into existence. I sat down and wrote ‘The Walking Dead’ and I got the opportunity to direct that movie. It was not a pleasant experience, so I didn’t want to direct anymore after that. Then probably for the next 10 years, I just wrote movies.”

      Back to his first love, writing, he scripted the 1996 film 'Fled' starring Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin, and learned a lot from the film’s director Kevin Hooks. With a film about fleeing jail, next up was the film ‘Lockdown’ about being in jail.

      “We often do things that are based on events that are happening in our life, so a childhood friend of mine had gone to prison and I talked to him every week and ‘Lockdown’ came out of that,” he said. Then Whitmore signed on to write a female prison flick called “Civil Brand.” That film led to him making another attempt to hone his directing chops.

      “I wasn’t exactly excited about the final product so I had to start back directing in order to really manifest the vision I had,” he said.

      At this point, Whitmore had done a lot of prison movies. They all did particularly well on DVD and urban networks, so he got a call from Sony about doing another.

      “Sony ScreenGems asked me to do a prison picture,” he said. “I turned them down; I didn’t want to do that. The called me back and said, ‘You can write and direct.’ I said, ‘Good luck with that.’ Then they said, ‘You can write, direct, produce. Here’s $1.2 million. Bring us back a movie.’”

      Thus came the film “Doing Hard Time,” starring Boris Kodjoe. But Whitmore took it on with a different perspective.

      “It was in prison, but dealt with other aspects of African American life.”

      After that, the basketball drama “Crossover” in 2006 and things were really rolling.

     “Then they came to me and asked if I wanted to revisit this family movie.”

      “This Christmas” was a box-office hit; was nominated for an Image Award, and Whitmore became one of the sought after African American writer/directors in Tinsel town. But the helmer said that he doesn’t think he’s all that.

      “As an artist, you never become satisfied. I certainly feel life is good and that I’ve accomplished many things that I wanted to,” he said modestly. “So, I feel really good about my career. And with things I have coming up in the future, incredible opportunities. But making movies is what I’m supposed to do; it’s not really like work.”

      In three years, he’s made three movies. Coming up on the fourth year, he’s just completed the film ‘Doughboy’ which he produced, directed, and financed. But Whitmore is not waiting for accolades. He knows there’s much more work to be done.

      Reflecting on a recent event honoring filmmaker Spike Lee, Whitmore said, “You would think with all of Spike’s accomplishments that he would not be on the stage saying it’s still difficult for [him] to make a movie. In that same realm, I think we’re in that same place. There are a lot of milestones that African Americans in the film profession have yet to leap.”

      Determined Whitmore pledged that his work will continue to progress Hollywood.

     “There’s still a lot of work to be done. That’s the primary reason.”