Stickball bats and Spaldeens. Going sewer to sewer, and looking out for cars coming down the block. For generations of youngsters growing up in Brooklyn, these are indelible memories of spring and summer. Tow young filmmakers from Park Slope have captured these quintessential Brooklyn moments in a new faux-documentary called When Broomsticks Were King. Made for the princely sum of $300, the movie was shot right on 10th and 5th streets in just three weeks. No sooner had Jason Cusato and partner Ricardo Pantoja finished editing the 30-minute film when it was accepted to not one, but two prestigious film festivals. Broomsticks will be shown at Madison Square Garden as part of the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival running now through September 17. Later in the fall, the boys from Brooklyn will travel to the West Coast for a showing of the documentary at the Angel City Film Festival in San Francisco, October 22 to 30.

"We were shocked," said Cusato. "San Francisco came first. New York came the next day." The Angel City Film Festival actually accepted two of Cusato and Pantoja submissions. In addition to Broomsticks, the festival also accepted an earlier collaboration between the young Brooklyn filmmakers, both 26, called The Out of Work Mime. The collaboration between Cusato and Pantoja goes all the way back to elementary school at St. Thomas Aquinas. And, in fact, the entire project was made possible with the help of friends and family. Both Cusato's father and uncle appear in the film as old-time stickball champs. But directing their own gang of friends proved to be the toughest thing about shooting Broomsticks â€" at least at the outset.

Insert: By the end of shooting, Cusato found that actors that were once hard to pin down were now coming out of the woodwork and even asking to do a sequel.

The filmmakers actually goofed and let a few guys show up on set with earrings a definite no-no for characters who were supposed to be playing the neighborhood game 20 and 30 years ago. It was something the older guys working on the film were quick to jump on: "If they were playing balk in our day, they wouldn't be wearin' a friggin' earring."

To shoot scenes that depicted the reminiscences of the old stickball players, Cusato and Pantoja deftly shot in grainy, 8mm film and later transferred it to digital format. "Shooting around cars was very tough," said Cusato. The duo estimates that they spent approximately $20,000 on camera equipment over a two-year period all with the sole intentions of making their own films. Both draw inspiration from successful do-it-yourself filmmakers like Kevin Smith of Clerks fame. Broomsticks was entirely edited on the duo's iMac.

By the end of shooting, Cusato found that actors that were once hard to pin down were coming out of the woodwork and even asking to do a sequel. Although the filmmakers originally envisioned Broomsticks as a spoof, both Cusato and Pantoja were moved at how authentic the actors' stickball memories really became. "The guys spoke from the heart," Cusato says.

Where will the next generation of talented movie makers come from? One of them might already be busily working out of his basement workshop in Park Slope. A quick look around Jason Cusato's improvised 11th Street post production space will tell you exactly where the determined young filmmaker's heart lies.

With his collection of baseball caps lining the walls and an array of camera tripods covering the floor, Cusato 27, is still at his desktop editing a few scenes of his new movie called "The Bag" which is set to premiere at BAM's Rose Cinemas in just 10 days.

"Things are going so well," Cusato says. Cusato has been down this road before twice in fact. His first film outing about the dying neighborhood sport of street stickball won both critical and audience acclaim. For his second film, Cusato dusted off the old Poe story of the Tell Tale Heart and updated it with Brooklyn attitudes and locations. "I'm building each time out and getting more knowledge," Cusato says. As his expertise grows, so does his film crew. The burgeoning writer/director has seen the size of his cast and crew roughly double in each of his successive projects.

"I'm trying to stretch out," Cusato says. "Just by making film, I'm learning more." Although Cusato did study at the School of Visual Arts, he doesn't think that the art of filmmaking is something you can learn sitting in a classroom. "You have to have a natural gift," Cusato explains. "It's not like becoming a plumber. Going to school will just bring out your talents." Cusato has taken his particular talents and honed them on his own neighborhood streets. He shot "The Bag" last April and May on locations in Red Hook, Windsor Terrace, Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge.

"It was a lot of fun to shoot," Cusato says. "The movie is a lot of fun, too. I'm really excited, because I think people are really going to get a laugh out of this." "The Bag" follows the exploits of a band of hapless neighborhood pals who believe that their buddy has accidentally killed his date after one particularly wild encounter.

"We previewed it down there [BAM] last week and the projection guy was dying hysterically," Cusato says. From BAM, Cusato has his sights set on taking "The Bag" on the film festival circuit. "Just the fact that I want to get there is inspiring," Cusato says. He’s already started work on his next project. "We had a casting call three weeks ago and it went great," Cusato says. "We have amazing actors in the film."

The Bag premieres at BAM Rose Cinemas on August 17 at 9 p.m.

It's his way of saying "thanks for all the inspiration." On Tuesday, December 23, Park Slope filmmaker Jason Cusato will be giving the gift of laughter to friends, neighbors and "anyone else who wants to come" at the premiere of his hour-long sketch comedy show at the Blah Blah Lounge, 501 11th Street off of 7th Avenue, at 7 p.m. Admission is free. Unlike "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas," "Olive the Other Reindeer," "Frosty the Snowman" and other holiday shows everyone watches, his "Christmas Special" is a bit different.

Instead of celebrating the holiday, Cusato and his friends prefer to spoof it. Some of the sketches include "The Six Million Dollar Elf," "NYPD Clause" in which Ol'Saint Nick invokes the spirit of Andy Sipowitz and a tribute to the "Odd Couple." Instead of Felix and Oscar, a Park Slope apartment will be shared by Santa and the Easter Bunny. Which roomie smokes cigars is anyone’s guess.

Cusato, the founder of Park Slope Films, said that there are eight sketches that he, Derek Primont and other close friends put together over the last few months. Cusato wrote the sketches with his friends, who acted in the film. He even plays a role or two.

This is the second time Cusato, a life long Park Sloper, and pals have put together a Christmas show. "This is usually a family and friends type of thing. Since it turned out much better this time around and the ideas came out so well, I thought it would be something everyone would enjoy," he said. "And my friends’ acting ability has gotten a lot better," explained Cusato.

Nearly all of the sketches were filmed in Park Slope, on the streets where Cusato got the inspiration for his stickball mockumentary "When Broomsticks were King" and his films "The Bag" and "York Street." "When Broomsticks were King" won a Best Documentary award during the 2000 Rutgers Film Festival. Cusato is currently fine-tuning the script for his fourth picture, which he hopes to start filming in 2004.

Not bad for a kid from 11th Street whose heart, apparently, is to quote another Christmas special "two sizes too big."

"It's my way of giving something to the community which has given so much to me," Cusato said. For further information about the Christmas Show can contact Park Slope Films at (718) 369-0973.

Taped-up broomsticks and Spaldeens were in high demand in Coney Island Saturday as the 11th annual Brooklyn Stickball Classic swung into town. Dozens of Spaldeen slammers and sewer cap superstars participated in the coveted event, which was led by "Stickball Commissioner" Curtis Sliwa, the Bronx born, Canarsie raised founder of the Guardian Angels turned talk show host.

As members of the Dodgers Symphony band played on, eight person teams tested their mettle by gripping their hands upon their favorite stickball bat and attempted to knock one out of the park, or at least down the block. Ironically, the competition was held just down the block from Peggy O'Neil's and KeySpan Park on Surf Avenue, where the Brooklyn Cyclones clinched the McNamara Division, but not the minor league World Series war against the Williamsport Crosscutters.

The winners of Saturday's stickball competition, which was sponsored by both the Modell's sporting goods chain and the Daily News, received a chance to represent Brooklyn in a city wide stickball competition which will be held in October. Before teams took to the field-players were able to take part in a "long ball" hitting contest, where people found out just how far a Spaldeen would go. Ray Goffio, the owner of the Brooklyn Egg Cream Company managed to send his Spaldeen 240 feet.

Teams participating in the classic included a team from Park Slope Films, the production company who paid homage to the urban sport with the mock-umentary entitled "When Broomsticks were King." The short film, which was written and directed by Park Slope grown and budding filmmaker Jason Cusato, received rave reviews at Peggy O'Neil's the evening of the competition as players tended to their swinging arms with pints of beer and all American restaurant fare. It was the second time that the movie has been shown on the premises, the last time during this past summer's Coney Island Tuesday Night Film Series.

The film was awarded "Best Documentary" at the Rutgers Film Festival in 2002. Those who haven't seen the film will be given a chance to see the movie, which captures not only the lore, but the love of homegrown neighborhood sport, can get their chance to see it again when it makes its debut at the Coney Island Short Film Festival this Sunday, September 28 at 2 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at the box office, 3006 West 12th Street at Surf Avenue a half hour before the viewing.

Ask any dyed-in-the-wool stickball player what the most commonly heard scream at any neighborhood grudge match was, and the answer would undoubtedly be -- with intonation included -- “CAAAR!” as a player warns teammates further down the block of an oncoming Cadillac.

But this past Friday, the scream heard on 11th Street between 4th and 5th avenues in Park Slope was “LIMMMO.”

A Hollywood chariot had arrived to whisk neighborhood filmmaker Jason Cusato and an entourage of friends and family to Tribeca Cinemas’ Independent Features Film Festival, where his film, “When Broomsticks Were King: A Tribute to Stickball and the Heroes Who Played” was showcased.

The touching remembrance of the sewer cap superstars in a pre-Yuppified south Brooklyn was one of 20 films shown at the Independent Features Film Festival, the winner of which gets a distribution contract with several independent movie theaters across the country. But to Cusato, a School of Visual Arts graduate who converted his family basement into his own small movie studio, the real kick was not seeing his film on the screen.It was seeing his cast members dressed to the nines, filing into the theater.“We’ve never had the whole cast together since the movie wrapped in 2000,” the 32-year-old filmmaker said. “It’s really great to have the movie playing at the Tribeca Theater, but it was great to have all the characters back together again. My Dad and my whole family are in the film. So is my softball league.”

Filmed almost entirely in the southern Slope for a whopping $300, “When Broomsticks Were King” is a nostalgic mockumentory about Brooklyn in the 1960s, when a young man’s day out with his buddies would entail nothing more than a clear street, a Spalding ball, a few landmarks for bases and your mother’s mop handle.

Throughout the course of the 27-minute film, Cusato’s father Vincent and his high school friends regale the audience with tales of the masters of the manhole covers: neighborhood gods who could smack a “Spaldeen” down three sewer caps, if not further.

The remembrances are interspersed with Cusato and fellow cast members re-enacting some of those cherished moments.

“When we finished ‘Broomsticks’ we sent it to festivals all over and won a few,” Cusato remembered. “But then I went on to other projects.”

His projects included “York Street,” another film festival favorite. He also flexed his directing muscles with two more films, a smattering of Christmas specials and music videos for the band Speaker Box.

Currently, the intrepid lensman is filming a series of “film shorts” with Brooklyn screenwriter Claire Riley

Cusato said that he was so busy that he “got backtracked” on ‘Broomsticks,’ which, everywhere it went, quickly built a fan base.

“As soon as we came out with ‘Broomsticks’ the response was intense,” said Cusato. “People were going crazy for it. The audience can really relate to my father and my uncles’ stories.”

But Cusato’s films have always been family affairs – if not neighborhood ones. His company, Park Slope Films, is comprised of his cousin, Scott Nawrocki and longtime friends Ed Heegan and Adam Berger. “I do the directing and editing, Scott does the sound work, Eddie is an actor and producer and Adam is a jack of all trades that does the set design for us,” he said.

After some re-editing, Park Slope Films unleashed both “Broomsticks” and “York Street” on the film festival circuit earlier this year. Once again, they were successful. With over 200 full length features and short films submitted to the Independent Features Film Festivals first on-line competition, “Broomsticks” quickly ascended to the top. Cusato got the call that his film was one of the top 20 finalists at the beginning of July. Even if he doesn’t leave the festival victorious (the winners hadn’t been announced as this paper went to press) Cusato said that the real prize was taking his family and friends out on the town in a stretch limo and hob knobbing with other filmmakers. “After going to these festivals, I love filmmaking even more,” he said. “Meeting other directors and actors rejuvenates me. I get more excited than I was when I first started.” To learn more about Cusato’s film work, one can log onto www.parkslopefilms.com.

PARK SLOPE – All of us old-time Brooklynites know that it ain’t like years ago around here. Just ask Jason Cusato, 26, who grew up on 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues when things were different.

“On Saturday morning,” he remembers, “my block would be packed with kids playing games. We all played whiffle-ball. We played football on the sidewalk when we were too young to go in the street. And block parties – there used to be a million people on the block. One year we rented backboards and hoops to play basketball. There’d be barbeques and buckets of beer. Now it’s so sad. We had a block party last year. MY house and our neighbors were the only people out, and at night another neighbor came out and complained that we were making too much noise.”

Kids today, Jason points out, don’t know from playing in the street. They’re too busy with Nintendo and other computer games. But Jason played the same games his father played – stickball, for example, and skellzies.

“Our generation was in-between,” says Jason’s old friend, Ricardo Pantoja, a 16th –Streeter. Jason and Ricardo, who were classmates at St. Thomas Aquinas Grammar School, Fourth Avenue and Eighth Street, are mates now in the art of making movies, joined in an enterprise called “Park Slope Productions.” Last week they went back to St. Thomas to host the premiere of three “shorts” about games of Brooklyn past. “Brooklyn Trilogy,” as they call it, was partly written and directed and by Jason, with the help of Ricardo, who is assistant-director and cinematographer.

It was not such a surprise that the films are technically rather primitive – they were made for as little as $300. The main surprise was their tone. Rather than being standard nostalgic retrospectives of Brooklyn’s golden age, these are all comic send-ups of the sporting life of decades past, with, at least in one case, some nostalgia woven in.

The opener is “When Broomsticks Were King,” for which Jason sat down, one by one, a group of middle-aged guys in their living rooms, gave them fake names, as well as fake nicknames, and asked them to recount their stickball memories and make up what they didn’t remember. Between their talking heads he inserted black-and-white shots of Jason and Ricardo and friends pretending to be the old guys in their salad days, batting and catching to the clicking sound of an eight-millimeter movie-projector. The interviews, meanwhile, are edited so that they evolve from straight recollection to absurd exaggeration. The viewer isn’t quite sure what’s going on until someone recalls that 11th Street (the archrival of 10th Street in quest of the annual championship) was the first block to integrate its team, bringing in a player whose name no one can get straight: “Juan Valdez, Don Juan – I don’t know – his nickname was ‘The Spanish Guy.’” Then there’s a cut to “The Spanish Guy,” speaking Spanish.

The role is played by Ricardo’s Peruvian stepfather. Jason’s father, Vinny, who was in fact, Jason points out, a legendary stickball-player, is in there, too, in the part of Rich “Straight Shootin’” Capezio. All performances are by local amateurs, and they’re good. The irony is so well brought off that I am willing to accept that the character of Mike Brennan, who obviously grew up in Ireland, had been a Brooklyn stickballer. (The vainest of all the memoirists, he claims, dubiously, that he was a regular “three sewer” clouter, and is the only one who names himself as the best player of his time.)

The second part of the trilogy, amusing, but not as successful as the others, is a narrated “newsreel” of the 1979 handball match between the Brooklyn and Manhattan champion teams. The final film has better ironic substance. This is “The Story of Joe Higgins,” subtitled “The Greatest Skellzies Player Who Ever Lived.” The very conceit of an annual international skellzies championship – a game played by flicking bottle-caps from square to square on the pavement – is enough to induce a giggle. But add to the flavor an Australian narrator, an absurdly bewigged hero, a devastating household accident, and a Soviet officer as a perennial challenger, and some good laughs will follow.

Jason and Ricardo started working up skits on audio tape when they were 12 or 13, then moved on to doing, in Jason’s words, “real goofball stuff” on video. Jason’s cousins, Adam and Scott Nawrocki, got involved, and in the more mature productions Adam is a featured performer and Scott the sound technician. At Bishop Ford High School and LIU, Ricardo studied art and became a painter. After LaSalle High School in Manhattan, Jason, urged by his mother, aimed at becoming a fireman. But to do that he needed 35 college credits.

“I figured I should take some courses I was interested in, because if I took math or history, I’d flunk and I wouldn’t get the credits. So, since I always loved movies, I went to the School of Visual Arts and took an acting class and some film classes. I wound up failing the fireman’s test anyway.”

Before finishing at LIU, Ricardo went off to the Navy for four years. When he came home, there was Jason, trained and ready for projects and needing a collaborator with an artist’s eye. Without quitting their regular jobs – Jason works at Leopoldi’s Hardware on Fifth Avenue; Ricardo is a sous-chef and waiter for a caterer – they went into production, activating the hidden talents of their friends and relations.

In February, “When Broomsticks Were King” won the prize for the best documentary among more than 100 films presented at the Rutgers University Film Festival. An honor kike that could give these guys the idea that there’s a career in this.

“It’s an odd industry to break into,” says Jason. “The route we’re trying to take right now is to do shorts and enter film festivals. Maybe someone will see your talent and say, ‘I’m interested in you directing something.’ We’d like to get on BCAT”

That’s Brooklyn Cable Access Television. Yo, BCAT, air this “Brooklyn Trilogy.” It’d be a three-sewer home-run for ya.

Nothing can stop a good old-fashioned stickball game not even a torrential downpour. That's how a bunch of hardcore broomstick barons felt as they set up outside of Peggy O'Neill's restaurant outside Key Span Park in Coney Island, as storm clouds loomed in the horizon. For the better part of the day, beach-goers were sprinkled with intermittent rainstorms. But, just before the fourth installment of the Coney Island Tuesday Night Film Series at Peggy O'Neill's things got a little wet.

Still, fill series organizer Anthony Gigante, independent film director Jason Cusato and some of the stars of his mockumentary "When Broomsticks Were King" braced the impending storm to knock a Spaldeen across a sewer cap or two.

Made with the princely sum of $300, the movie was shot right on 10th and 5th streets in just three weeks. No sooner had Jason Cusato and partner Ricardo Jones completed editing the 30-minute film, when I was accepted to not one, but two prestigious film festivals.

Cusato said that the entire project was made possible by the help of friends and family. Both the director's father and uncle appear in the film as old-time stickball champs. Approximately 60 people braced harsh winds and rain to get to the film's premiere at the Coney Island Tuesday Night Film Series, which is sponsored in part by Peggy O'Neill's and Bexel Video of New York. "It went over very well," Gigante recalled. "The rough day turned out to be a beautiful night." Gigante said that he and Cusato are making plans to hold a stickball game for charity.

"We think it's going to be at the end of August," Gigante said. "We want to close down Surf Avenue and have a real stickball extravaganza with teams from all over the borough. It will be a great way to bring back the old days." "What we had Tuesday was a prelude," Gigante said. "We had to test the Coney Island air to see how the wind currents handled the ball."

The Coney Island Tuesday Night Film Series concluded Tuesday, July 29, withy the movie "Moonstruck."

I bounced in my seat watching "When Broomsticks Were King: A Tribute to Stickball and the Heroes Who Played," a movie by Brooklyn filmmaker Jason Cusato that played last week at the Independent Features Film Festival.

The 27-minute short, shot several years ago, is currently making the rounds of the festivals winning prizes and standing O's for its nostalgic gaze back at this vanished king of New York City street games. It hit me like a three-sewer shot because most of what I know about life I learned from stickball.

Stickball is - or, sadly, was - a stripped-bare version of baseball played in the gutters of New York City using your mudda's wooden mop handle as a bat and a small pink ball called a "spaldeen," a Brooklynese bastardization of Spalding, the company that made the magical little orb.

Back in the 1960s, I spent almost every single day of spring, summer and fall playing stickball on 11th and 12th Sts. in what Realtors today call Southern Park Slope. You showed up with your stick and met your friends on Winslow's stoop, where the two best players chose up sides.

Some neighborhoods played pitching-in, but we played fungo style, meaning you stood at a manhole cover that served as home plate and tossed the ball up and hit it and ran the bases.

A two-sewer shot was considered a slug. If you hit "three sewers," you were up there with Maris, Mantle and Mays.

The games were loud, argumentative and fiercely competitive, and clutch hits or heroic plays became the stuff of local legend. The girls used to sit on stoops with a tinny transistor radio listening to Cousin Brucie spin the top 10 on "W-A-Beatles-C," watching and whispering color commentary on the sweaty guys who were mostly trim and ripped from tireless daily play. The best stickball hitters usually scored with the chicks.

Stickball taught us team play, competition, tenacity, hustle, discourse, discipline, performance under pressure and how to navigate the endless roller-coaster ride between triumph and defeat. Like life. No classroom could ever teach you the second set of street-smart-instincts that came from fearlessly shagging flies in honking bus and truck traffic when someone launched a fly into the middle of Seventh Ave.

Guys who played stickball as kids still know a 10th of a second before the rest of the world when the red light is gonna turn green.

That game, that Brooklyn, that city and that street education that came from stickball played for keeps from dawn to dusk has all but vanished. My theory is that stickball was swallowed whole by Pac-Man in the late 1970s; as computer games rose, street games declined. And stickball's demise has made for fatter, duller, dumber, less motivated generations of indoor kids. Sorry, video games don't prepare kids for life. Toru Iwatani, the man who created Pac-Man, has probably done more to promote childhood obesity than the Big Mac.

So it was pure nostalgic pleasure to watch "Broomsticks." This is not a documentary; anyone looking for a history of the greatest street game ever played should look elsewhere. Instead, this little film is a fictional three-sewer tribute to all middle-aged guys who ever worshiped at the altar of the manhole cover. Starring Cusato's father, uncles and cousins with pitch-poifect Brooklyn accents and nicknames like "Boom Boom" Nunzio, Pauly (The Legend) Ganuch, "The Natural" and "The Spanish Guy," "Broomsticks" features sepia-toned re-creations of old stickball games juxtaposed with talking gray heads reminiscing about the days of old when stickball was gold.

"I'm 32, and my generation was probably the last one to play a little stickball," says Cusato, who grew up on 11th St. in Park Slope, went to LaSalle Academy and studied filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts. "But mostly we played computer games. Occasionally, we still play stickball. We used to play in Curtis Sliwa's stickball tournament in Coney Island, and he screened an earlier version of my film afterwards. But for my father and uncles, stickball was like a religion. Hearing their stickball stories moved me to make the film as a tribute to them."

"Broomsticks" was benched as Cusato directed his first feature-length film, "York Street," a gritty street tale with a powerful lead performance by Edward Heegan, a Windsor Terrace resident. That film is available on DVD.

"After 'York Street,' I reedited 'Broomsticks' and started taking it to festivals," says Cusato. "We've been accepted or won in film festivals like Brooklyn Indie House, Rutgers, E.Vil, Jilted, Georgetown, Rochester, Del Ray, Staten Island, Coney Island. The next local festival it will play at will be Wildwood in September, and a DVD release is coming soon.

"Even people who never heard of stickball love the film because of the Brooklyn characters and because it celebrates a forgotten generation. Someday, I'd love to shoot a feature set in the age of stickball."