it is 6:30 p.m. on a recent Tuesday evening and the sun is setting on the gritty streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin District as an unmarked white van turns into an alley and pulls up onto the sidewalk. The side door slides open, and from inside three people set up two large red plastic containers marked "Biohazardous Materials." A motley group of about a dozen people gather around, as one by one they step up to the containers and drop in used hypodermic syringes, counting each needle as it falls. A gaunt young man drops several syringes at once and says, unconvincingly, "Fourteen. Can I get 20 short ones?" The director of the underground needle exchange gives him a weary look. "Okay," she says with feigned reluctance, knowing that this policy of handing out more needles than are turned in is what makes her operation illegal. When the exchange is fully underway and two of the patrons have already started the meticulous ritual of shooting up, two cops walk by, turning a blind eye to the activities on the sidewalk. The director smiles at them as they walk past, then turns to the other volunteers. "Be careful," she urges in a low voice. "Last week we gave out four extra packs." In a nearby coffee shop, documentary filmmaker Steven Okazaki sits stirring his drink as he watches what's happening on the street. "That kid's on lookout for cops," he points out casually. "His buddies are shooting up right now in the alley. One of them has HIV, but his partner doesn't." He hesitates, and decides against adding the implied "yet." Having spent six months following the lives of several young heroin addicts, Okazaki knows he doesn't need to over-dramatize the events taking place around him. To accurately depict the life of a junkie on these streets, the trick isn't in capturing the drama of their despair -- it's in portraying the predictability of it. "You've got to construct a story out of their reality, and try not to get thrown off by the mundane sameness of everyday life," he says. "Part of being a junkie is that you have the same goal every day -- it's just the day-to-day pursuit of dope." Among the young, mostly white junkies at the exchange, the 43-year-old Okazaki -- who with his large frame and spiky mane of jet-black hair would be conspicuous in any company -- seems especially out of place. The more reticent ones offer him only a friendly nod of recognition. But there are a few, the ones he has been filming since last Christmas and will continue to follow through the end of the year, who seem genuinely pleased to see him. One of them, a 22-year-old blond punk girl, stands against a brick wall clutching a brown paper bag, broken glass crackling under her black military boots. Wearing a dog collar around her neck, leather and chains all over her slight body, and a buzz-cut, she peers out from under the bleach-blond strands that hang over her sunken gray eyes. "Hey, Danny, are those new pins?" Okazaki says by way of greeting, pointing at the two pins that occupy a privileged spot on the collar of her torn leather vest. One bears the NIN symbol of the hardcore industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, the other the words "Just Say No." "Yeah," she says, looking down. "My mom sent 'em to me." This seemingly insignificant interaction is all it takes for Danny to warm up to Okazaki, and she takes a seat near him on the sidewalk. She pulls out a letter she received from her mother in Iowa and tells him, "She's back together with her boyfriend. He's a drunken asshole." She goes on to read parts of the letter out loud: "Dear Danny, I love you and miss you. I have a ticket from San Francisco that's all paid for. You are beautiful. Don't fuck this up. Get out of there on me." She folds the letter, tucks it into her wallet, and looks up at him. "This puts me in a weird place, you know?" she confides. "I mean I like it here. But the ticket, it's only one way." Even after 20 years of filmmaking, Okazaki says he wasn't prepared for the obstacles he's had to confront on a daily basis while making this film. But, he explains, the challenges were part of his motivation for doing it in the first place. While he has gained much recognition for both his feature and documentary films (including "Living on Tokyo Time" and "Days of Waiting," his Academy Award-winning 1990 documentary about the years artist Estelle Ishigo, a white woman married to a Japanese-American, spent in an internment camp), he was growing frustrated with the trials of getting non-commercial films funded and screened. "I thought I was going to quit," he admits. "But I decided I couldn't until I did something really difficult. This was the hardest thing I could think of." Download a clip from "Dark End of the Street" (2.4MB) The hardest part, it turns out, was not watching the road-hard realities of these junkies -- some of whom are as young as 15, have HIV and do anything from stealing to prostitution to support their habits. Having recently completed "Alone Together," a documentary about nine young people living with HIV, he had been exposed to the lifestyle of several IV drug users. Instead, his biggest problem has been trying to maintain some professional distance from his subjects while still gaining their trust. "It's incredibly hard not to get too involved," he says. "All the ethical questions of being a journalist, all those buttons are pushed. The state a lot of these kids are in, you can change their lives just by giving them a cigarette." He recounts a story about how, in the first few weeks of filming, he and his associate producer, Jason Cohen, had arranged to follow around a couple of kids relatively new to the heroin scene. "At first, instead of stealing or making money, they'd follow us," he explained. "About mid-day, they started having a dope panic and realized they hadn't made any money. They had made us part of their plans, and we had screwed up the process. One young girl of about 18 was about to go and give somebody a blow job, prostitute herself for the first time. I thought, 'Which part of this do I least want to be party to? Her being a prostitute.' So I gave her $20. That's when we decided we were no longer going to hang out with them all day." The story Okazaki hopes to tell with his film, tentatively titled "The Dark End of the Street," is not exactly a new one. Heroin has enjoyed waves of popularity -- most notably among writers, artists and musicians -- since the late 1800s. While the number of heroin addicts in the U.S. remained stable at around 500,000 during the '70s and '80s, that number has jumped to more than 600,000 since 1990, according to a 1996 U.S. State Department Report, and research indicates that many of these users are under 25. In San Francisco, the numbers are even more grim. In 1994, abscessing puncture wounds from injecting heroin was the single most common reason for admission to San Francisco General Hospital. From January to April of this year, almost 50 heroin addicts in the Bay Area were struck by flesh-eating bacterial infections from using contaminated needles. Several victims lost limbs, and at least three lost their lives. The current boom in heroin use has been fostered by the availability of black tar heroin that is cheaper -- many junkies manage to support their habit on $20 a day -- and of higher purity than ever before. Despite the generally didactic nature of media attention recently given the subject, the coverage tends to encourage the impression that heroin is hip. A recent Rolling Stone article explored Seattle's heroin epidemic and painted a bleak picture of the more than 10,000 heroin addicts living there. But the full-page black and white photos that accompanied the story -- like the one showing a young kid with a funky haircut and a pierced ear sitting in his car, stoically stabbing himself in the neck with a syringe -- entertain the sense of melodrama that is no doubt part of the drug's allure. In the music industry in particular, where those who die heroin-related deaths become legends even before their blood runs cold, heroin has no dearth of heroes. In the eyes of most junkies, rock stars like Nirvana's Kurt Cobain tried for the Kingdom, and made it. "Music makes it cool," Okazaki concludes. "I hate saying that -- I sound like a Congressman. But I haven't met a single kid who didn't have a rock and roll reference." Such is the case with 24-year-old Tracy, one of several people profiled in a working version of the film that Okazaki will use to show potential sponsors. During the interview, she talks of having seen the movie "Sid and Nancy," about the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. "I heard about (Nancy) and thought heroin would be interesting to do as a life experience," she says. "I always said I'd try everything once. I wondered what it would be like to be that high. It would be like a dream. . ." That dream ended when a few days after the interview , Tracy was busted for possession of heroin and sent to jail to serve an 8-month sentence. "She's asking me about friends on the street writing or coming to visit," says Okazaki. "But everyone's preoccupied with the street. Most of the people on the street have an addiction, and if you don't, well. . . to be clean is to not really be part of the group." Tracy's involuntary withdrawal from that community presents a logistical problem for Okazaki, one that has come up repeatedly during filming. "You just have no control. People leave town. Kids go from overdosing, to detox, to suicide, to jail in a single day. You don't know who's going to die and who's going to stay clean," he says. "But it's a process. And the trick is putting some of that process into the film." Still debating whether or not to use narration or interior dialogue in the film, Okazaki weighs both the freedoms and dangers of putting oneself in the story. "We wait five hours for somebody to show up for an interview, and they show up finally and act like nothing's wrong," he says. "Maybe the way to show it is to have some of that conversation, maybe that would work. The question is, will that eliminate the story? The answer is, I don't know yet. But it's so hard to do good journalism and follow all the rules," he says. "You think you're on the side, but you're not. You become the story. But if you try to keep the 'I' out of it, you fudge other little things to make it work." When he loses sight of where the film is going, Okazaki reminds himself of one of his favorite films, "Waiting for Fidel," Michael Rubbo's 1975 documentary in which he vainly attempts to get an interview with Fidel Castro and ends up painting a vibrant portrait of Cuba in the process. "With any documentary, there's the possibility of cheating," he says. "There's the cheat that's part of the process, and the cheat where the audience would be fooled. And that's the kind of thing to be careful of. I know when I see a film and realize I've been taken, it makes me angry, and it makes me never trust that director again. So what do you do? You edit for another 10 hours. And figure out something else. Right now, I don't know where the film is going. But it's gotta go someplace. It's gotta say something." Photos by Olive