Live From Studio SX: Jim Dziura

The truth is writers prefer to hide behind the keyboard. So when asked to be under the glare at South By Southwest's Studio SX, I timidly said yes. My subject was Jim Dziura, whose doc Number One With a Bullet looks at hiphop artists who have one thing in common: they've been shot.

Dziura (pronounced Jura) interviewed heavyweights like Ice Cube and KRS-One, but found the bigger revelations with smaller names just trying to get by, like The Last Mister Bigg, a fortyish rapper from Alabama who was shot in the head and lost his eye. He promptly replaced it with a fake eye featuring a diamond and changed his name to Diamond Eye. Just as interesting, Diamond Eye is the son of a police officer.

"There's a struggle between who he is and the persona he's created," Dziura says. "He's got to sell records. When you're poor, you've got to make money."

Dzuira is himself just as interesting. An actual gypsy (of Romani heritage), he is a wanderer whose first feature-length doc Whiskey on a Sunday had him spending two years following the punk band Flogging Molly. These days his pet project involves hopping freight trains for the doc Steel Don't Bend."

"I'm not a film buff; I'm an adventure buff," he says of this film subjects to date.

Number One With a Bullet screens 10 p.m. Wednesday and 6 p.m. Friday at the Paramount.