Jeffrey Levy-Hinte is one of those enviable individuals who manages to be creative and practical, all at the same time.

Levy-Hinte, 42, is a producer with a string of hits under his belt -- Laurel Canyon, Thirteen, Mysterious Skin, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and The Dungeon Masters, among others -- and he's also the director of the documentary Soul Power, which opens in theatres today.

Levy-Hinte was an editor on the film When We Were Kings, Leon Gast's Academy Award winning documentary about the 1974 heavyweight championship fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.

The fight took place in Zaire, and there was a three-day music festival organized to coincide with the bout. The festival featured American R&B stars and African artists; among the U.S. acts were The Spinners, James Brown, B.B. King and Bill Withers.

Back in the mid-1990s, Levy-Hinte saw the concert footage while he was editing the boxing footage for Gast's movie, which came out in 1996. Ten years later, Levy-Hinte started putting together a separate music documentary. The hard part of that, he says, was what to leave out.

"It was painful," says the filmmaker of editing Soul Power. "We screened all 125 hours of footage. I asked myself, 'What do I respond to? What's important? What's powerful?' "

Levy-Hinte, who is the President of Antidote Films, says his route to filmmaking was a circuitous one.

The Santa Monica native, currently living in New York, studied at Cal State, Northridge, and the University of Michigan. He was a student of political science. He worked in commercial real estate after university.

"I also did woodworking for about 18 months, but I couldn't sustain it," he says.

The real estate scene, he says, "Was mind-numbing and depressing. I don't know where it came from, but I suddenly just decided I wanted to make movies. It was so exciting at that time, the mid-'90s, with all the independent cinema just exploding. So I looked around and thought, 'What can I do to quickly train myself and get in there?' And the answer was, I could edit."

Specifically, Levy-Hinte taught himself to edit on the Avid system, which was fairly new at the time, and he caught a wave of technical transition in the industry. He says he was thinking in a business way, but it worked -- he got the job on When We Were Kings because he could use Avid.

"Then I created post-production facilities, because I wanted to build up an economic base," says Levy-Hinte, "and then I started producing."

The filmmaker is keenly aware that Soul Power is a slice of American life at a crucial social and racial juncture. Muhammad Ali and James Brown, among others, make "Black Power" statements in the movie.

"They were living the Civil Rights movement at that time," says the filmmaker. "Usually people consign it to the '60s."

And nobody in the movie, Levy-Hinte suggests, could ever have imagined a time when a black American would be in the White House.

He says, "I would love it if Barack Obama could see Soul Power."

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