In 1967, Brenton Wood looked as if he was on the cusp of mainstream success.

The Compton crooner’s single “The Oogum Boogum Song” became a hit and ranked 34th and 19th on the Billboard’s Hot 100 and Top Selling R&B Singles charts, respectively. A few months later, Wood debuted his second hit, “Gimme Little Sign,” which peaked at No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot 100.

Wood, who was born Alfred Jesse Smith, died Friday of natural causes at his home in Moreno Valley, his manager and assistant Manny Gallegos confirmed to Variety. He was 83.

Wood’s slinky and upbeat tunes are infectious. His seductive and affable manner of describing the essence of a budding romance in layman’s terms is inviting. Whether solo or with a partner, it’s easy to groove to the beat.

Wood continued releasing tracks but none ever garnered similar success. Frustrated with the music industry, he quit for a couple of years, then inched back onto the club circuit. There, he found an audience that would sustain him for decades: Latinos.

He would play major California cities, then travel through Mexico and into Arizona before returning home. As his audience aged, Wood began to perform on themed cruises and at festivals with Chicano musical luminaries including Los Lobos, Thee Midniters and Ozomatli. Wood’s romantic oldies resonated with a new generation of lovebirds, becoming a soundtrack of Southern California life — literally, as Wood found a third career as a performer at weddings, quinceañeras and anniversary parties.

Bob Merlis, a former executive for Warner Bros. Records and co-author of “Heart & Soul: A Celebration of Black Music Style in America 1930-1975,” described the artist as a “local hero” to L.A. — a “standard bearer for the Southern California pop soul scene.”

“Nothing else sounded like them,” said Merlis, who now runs a public relations and consulting firm. “It was so different and that instrumentation is very unusual.”

“They’ve kind of picked me out of the whole batch, and they keep me going,” Wood told The Times in 1992. “I appreciate it, because if I was waiting for the big boys to call, I’d have died a long time ago.”

Wood’s lyrics captured the cat-and-mouse chase of a first love, the kind of infatuation that makes people act a fool. He encapsulated that all-too-familiar yearning to whisk away a lover to bask in their honeymoon paradise. But he also wrote about heartache — and the triumphant moment when the pain wears off.

“Latinos like to dedicate songs, and his songs are good for that,” radio veteran Art Laboe told The Times in 1992. “It’s not the big hits they like. It’s songs like ‘Take a Chance,’ ‘I Think You’ve Got Your Fools Mixed Up’ — if a girl’s having trouble with her boyfriend, she’ll dedicate that to him.”

The songwriter was born July 26, 1941, in Shreveport, La., and moved west to San Pedro when he was 3. He moved throughout L.A.’s inner cities, selling papers and fish and shining shoes until he created a career in the music industry.

Wood was 7 when a pianist mesmerized him. Without a television set at home, he spent hours at the park, watching and mimicking the performer, using two fingers to tap on imaginary keys until he got his own piano. At 10, Brenton Wood wrote his first song about a man who wanted to be a bird. It was cheerful and rhymed but lacked oomph.

He found his groove when he met his first girlfriend. Then, the words flowed out.

The Compton High School graduate enrolled at East Los Angeles College and sang in local R&B groups such as Little Freddie and the Rockets and the Quotations in the 1950s before he went solo. He took on his stage name, Brenton Wood, from the wealthy L.A. enclave of Brentwood, where a manager lived.

Wood’s “The Oogum Boogum Song” came entirely by accident. He was working the graveyard shift at Harvey Aluminum in Torrance when the melody came to him.

“It took me about six weeks, because I had to switch the verses around about a hundred times,” he told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2000. “That was a song about fashion changes in the ’60s with bell-bottom hip-huggers and high-heeled boots and all the different styles of clothes the girls were wearing — hot pants and all that stuff.”

The bouncy track was later featured in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous” and Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling.”

“It was one of the best feelings you could have,” Wood told Cal State Fullerton’s Titan TV in 2014.

By 1970, he founded Mr. Wood Records and produced other artists’ singles. Latino listeners were already embracing him as one of their own.

Chicano music historian Gene Aguilera recalls being “glued up” to his little transistor radio as a teen, listening to Wood’s “Gimmie Little Sign” mixed in with the Beatles and the Supremes on KRLA-AM 1110 all within an hour. Walking his neighborhood, he would hear Wood’s voice along with Thee Midniters wafting in the background, emanating from nearby parties or from lowriders cruising down Whittier Boulevard, bumping his tunes.

“Even though he wasn’t born here, he’s just forever going to be etched in our consciousness,” said Aguilera, who last saw the artist perform at a local park in Baldwin Park before the pandemic.

“His music was really accepted by East L.A. because of the slow groove he’s got, very soulful, that people from East L.A. just love.”

Vega is a former Times staff writer.

Times are tough, even in the world of romantic comedies. In Umberto Carteni’s “The Love Scam,” two brothers in Naples face almost certain eviction just as Vito (Antonio Folletto) tries to secure solo custody of his son after his partner left for her home country. His brother, Antonello (Vincenzo Nemolato), a lovable but irresponsible goof, ignored bills that have now put their family’s old home in the hands of a wealthy developer. In an effort to stay in the home their grandfather built and not lose custody of Vito’s infant son Napoleon, the two men devise a scheme to woo the daughter of the developer, Marina (Laura Adriani), in order to pay off her father’s company with their own money–but only if Vito can transform into Carlo, a wealthy man-about-town looking for investors for his phony charity. 

Mistaken identity and lying to impress a potential partner is a well-tread territory in the rom-com genre. For instance, Tom Hanks tries to hide his identity from Meg Ryan in their enemies-into-lovers internet-age classic “You’ve Got Mail.” James Stewart hid his identity even though he knew Margaret Sullavan was his long-suffering pen pal in the original 1940 film version of this beloved story, “The Shop Around the Corner.” Robert Downey Jr. pretends to be someone he’s not to spend time with Marisa Tomei in Rome in Norman Jewison’s “Only You.” Even in the Disney version of “Aladdin,” our hero pretends he’s a rich suitor to get close to his love interest, Jasmine, even though the opulent act isn’t what she’s really interested in. Although this familiar trope of courting by deception might inspire horror in any real-life situation, somehow it still works because they’re still making these kinds of movies. Maybe the reveal is so innocuously satisfying that the audience knows something one of the other characters doesn’t. Then, we watch our heroes make the right choices and fall in love despite the odds–at least until the credits roll. 

Although “The Love Scam” follows these recognizable story beats, it ends up feeling deceptively charming thanks to its cast and crew. Writers Caterina Salvadori and Ciro Zecca manage to fit in a few surprises, overthrowing our expectations along the way to the anticipated ending. Director Carteni captures a nuanced view of Southern Italy, showing off its natural beauty, idyllic sunsets, and historic art and architecture, but also the struggles that some of Vito and Antonello’s neighbors endure as their home crumbles around them. Carteni leads a cast of endearing performers, all of whom work well together even when the narrative gets a little silly. 

As Vito and Carlo, Folletto juggles the duties of two different personas with a few eccentric quirks and fatherhood duties in between. He acts so effortlessly, even when his character feels self-conscious; you can see Adriani’s Marina let her guard down in real-time. Their chemistry makes this movie memorable. Her character is flustered with expectations and stress, so to watch her grow from a frightening boss to a down-to-earth character who embraces life is a thrill, allowing Adriani to show off her range. I was less enamored by the storyline that Marina’s true dream was to become a chef over a businesswoman. While that fits with the genre’s sometimes more conservative gendered expectations, the writers incorporate it by giving Vito the night cleaning shift at a restaurant he then tries to pass off as his own to entice her to cook with him, so it feels less like a lesson in returning to domesticity. Although they feature heavily in the beginning, Vito’s brother Antonello and Napoleon step aside when Carlo begins to win over Marina’s attention. Still, the odd pairing of an ill-equipped uncle and adorable baby makes for some good jokes. In addition to Marina’s initial no-nonsense personality, her suspicious boyfriend Federico (Loris De Luna) is the power-hungry foil to Folletto’s kindhearted, would-be scammer. It gives him something of an invisible enemy to fight for Marina’s love.

While “The Love Scam” isn’t breaking new rom-com ground, it sufficiently checks the expected boxes and features a formidable romantic pair with Folletto and Adriani. The scam-within-a-scam house of cards narrative is just scaffolding for the movie’s real stars. Although many recent romantic movies also use cutesy gimmicks for their backdrop, their leads lack the heat to deliver something resembling a believable yet expected happy ending. In “The Love Scam,” there are scenes where Vito longingly looks at Marina in such a way that we understand why she would give this stranger the time of day, why they bring out the best in each other, and why we want to keep watching to see what happens to them, even if we kind of already know where their story is headed. Adding just a dash more sincerity than your average streaming romantic movie goes a long way. 

On Netflix now.