By ANDRE MOUCHARD
The Orange County Register

Street-racing guru Sean Murphy is brilliant, stupid, rational, crazy and confident. Except when he's not. Which is now.

"I don't want to come off looking like the Wizard in that movie," he muses. "You know ... that Oz movie."

Murphy has a point. His Irvine office is borderline rat-hole. A rental. His office neighbors sell car parts. The warehouse they share is filled with parts and souped-up cars and a couple mechanics. A machine stored next to Murphy's desk prints stickers. Usually for car-related stuff. And it's busted.

So the office doesn't exactly scream bad-ass. And that could be a problem for cooler-than-you Murphy, a man with a graffiti tattoo on his neck, far above the reach of any button-down collar.

The image issue is particularly important now for Murphy as he moves to parlay his role as Sherpa to street-racing culture into a role as a not-so-mini Hollywood mogul and full-time culture salesman.

"Ah, cool isn't so cool anyway," Murphy says, when thinking how his office might be perceived.

"What I do ... is what counts."

Reality, of course, has its limits.

The biggest movie in America is a street-racing flick, "2 Fast 2 Furious." It grossed $52 million in its opening weekend.

"Fifty-two," Murphy says after reading Variety, which he does daily. "They're doing something right."

He seems in awe of both the movie's popularity and the whims of the street-racing movie market. He doesn't say much either way about the movie's street-racing credibility, in part because he's talking with the folks who made "2 Fast" about a possible movie deal himself.

Murphy, through his fledgling company, Teckademics, has issued two street-racing movies, "Mischief" and "Mischief 3000." His movies (he produces; he hires street racers to direct and edit) went into pay-per-view rotation on DirecTV this month. Both have already been huge sellers in the direct-to-home video/DVD market, cracking 200,000 units sold in a medium where 35,000 is a big sales number.

The appeal of Murphy's vision of street racing is obvious.

Hollywood makes street-racing movies with lame plot lines and women with lip gloss. Murphy's movies feature real racers going really fast and sometimes crashing real cars, not to mention real cops making real arrests and real women showing off semi-real breasts.

To the huge and growing world of hard-core street racers ‚ teens and young adults who race and sometimes crash their mechanically enhanced economy cars on public roads ‚ Murphy, 35, is a borderline hero. He's the one grown-up businessman, so far, who has dipped into the street-racing world in a way that is authentic and risky and true to whatever ideals one holds when your definition of fun is doing 200 mph on the 405.

"You see Sean at some (street-racing) scene, and he's got the baggy pants and the shirt and the hat backward and the tattoo on his neck, and you just freak thinking of him in a meeting with some business guy in his Dockers," says Kevin Kraak, an Orange-based racer and rally driver who recently signed a deal to work as a legal, nonstreet driver.

Murphy is stoked about this, even as the backlash against street racing kicks into a higher gear.

After "2 Fast" opened, it took one day before a fatal car crash in Los Angeles was connected to street racing. In the past few months, in the wake of other deaths in Southern California and elsewhere, authorities have issued new laws to crack down on street racing. A police official in Los Angeles even characterized street racing as "violent crime," pointing out how deaths in car crashes, including those suffered by nonracers, are similar to gangland slaughter.

Murphy preaches nonstreet racing. And many street racers take their cars to tracks, not streets.

But Murphy is savvy enough to know that his movies, and street racing's appeal in general, wouldn't be of much interest if all the racing was on a track. The idea of running away from cops and racing in the middle of the night on semi-deserted roads is the essential romance of all hot rodding.

"Is it better that people race on tracks? Yeah. But people don't. They never have. Hot rodding has always been about being on the streets or whatever, and that's what's happening now," he says. "This is just the latest chapter in something that started with the Model T."

That attitude might already be winning Hollywood over.

In addition to the possible feature movie, which Murphy downplays as "nothing but Hollywood talk so far," he's busy on several entertainment fronts. He's working on a 13-episode street-racing TV series, half-hour shows that apparently combine the merits of "Jackass" and "Demolition Derby" with your garden-variety police chase. He's closing in on a video game deal, soliciting ideas from racers through the chat-room portion of his Teckademics Web site. Later this summer he'll have "Girls of Mischief" available for sale via infomercial, a turbocharged knock-off of "Girls Gone Wild."

He's also got Teckademics Apparel, making jeans and shirts and other gear for a huge group of customers who, for now, don't have a favorite brand. Last week, Murphy signed a test-order to sell Teckademics Apparel through Marshall's. And if you go to the Puma store in South Coast Plaza you can find a Teckademics display selling something known as "racing" shoes.

Murphy, when pressed, will even demonstrate how the $100 sneakers can help in executing the tricky racing maneuver of keeping one foot simultaneously on both the gas and brake pedals.

He'll stand on one foot while doing this and almost fall over. Then he'll crack up.

"I don't see this having an end for five, six years," he says of the street-racing trend.

"And if you look at the auto industry, they're designing cars (to appeal to street racers) that are 10 years out. So I don't know. Maybe I'm being conservative."

There were 16 kids ‚ all boys ‚ waiting outside the garage for the barbershop stylings of Sean and his twin brother, Bear Murphy. It was 1980. The Murphys were in junior high.

A few weeks earlier the brothers started going to a public school in their hometown, near Santa Barbara. Before that they'd gone to private school. But that had ended badly, with expulsions.

"We were punks. Little kid punks. We wore Black Flag T-shirts and shaved our heads back when that was a pretty (darned) scary thing for a lot of people," Sean Murphy says, taking a guilty drag off a cigarette he's trying not to smoke.

At first, the public school kids mocked the Murphy brothers. Long hair and Led Zeppelin (or something similar) were still in. Punks were still weird.

But the twins were hyper (literally) and funny and good surfers. Within a few days punk was the rage of that particular junior high school.

"So we shaved all these kids' heads. Right in our garage," Murphy says, laughing. "Got our picture in the paper and everything."

It wasn't the last time he sold the world on the controversial slice of pop culture.

When they were in their mid-20s the Murphys were in a punk band, Porn Star. It gained some following in Santa Barbara, but Sean Murphy, the drummer, noticed something odd at their shows.

"We'd sell more shirts and (stuff) than we did records. The shirts were the deal."

So Sean worked out a licensing arrangement to use the name Porn Star on clothes. By the late 1990s, Porn Star Clothing was one of the better-known brands in the streetwear business, riding the trend in which porn movies and porn culture went from underground to semi-mainstream product.

He helped make that happen. Had fun doing it. Took heat.

"I don't do radio interviews anymore," he says, ordering a pastrami sandwich. "They don't tell you what it's about, but when you get on the air they start just beating the crap out of you, saying you're selling porn to little kids and (stuff)."

He laughs now. But, later, he says he "got tired of schlepping porn" and notes that the "anti-porn people can wear you out."

So, eventually, he got out of Porn Star. He made some money. He got sober. He had kids (two sons).

He tried to relax with his money. But he got itchy.

"Vacations are about as fun as a lawsuit. Don't like 'em."

He'd noticed that tens of thousands of kids would turn out for import night car shows and similar events. He also noticed that they didn't dress in any particular brand.

Early last year, with $5,000 invested and the first "Mischief" movie already made, he set up Teckademics as its own company, not just a brand. He sells some car parts (rims and springs) to give the brand some authenticity, but the main business is licensing deals and entertainment.

Even the name is concocted, he says, while thinking about business in his bed.

"I thought how the kids like to be recognized for the technology they put into their cars," he says. "And academics ... well, they're into academics too. It's not a dumb guys' thing."

Smart enough, he knows, to spot somebody who tries to be something he's not.

That's not Murphy.

Murphy can tune a car, but he's no mechanic. And while he drives really fast on race tracks, and says he's been to many grass-roots street races and even mentions that he's been zapped with a ticket for excessive speeding, he's no street racer. Not really.

"I don't really claim that," he says. "I'm more of a business guy. But, in that arena, Teckademics is set."