Ice Cube in 'Lottery Ticket,' TBS's 'Are We There Yet?'

Ice Cube, pioneer rapper, movie mogul, and television powerhouse, is the winner of the entertainment trifecta.

He doesn't play the numbers, he grosses them. The 22 films he's starred in and/or produced - films like Friday, Barbershop, Are We There Yet? - have scored more than a billion dollars worldwide.

Next up is Lottery Ticket, opening Friday, an affable urban fantasy starring Bow Wow as Kevin, a young man not so different from Cube himself. Kevin thinks the lottery offers false hope - and infinite comic potential.

"It feels bad to lose and doesn't feel good to win," Cube (nom de rap of the guy born O'Shea Jackson) says with a sigh, kicking back in a Philadelphia hotel room. "You don't get something for nothing," says the soft-spoken entrepreneur whose work ethic never takes a vacation. "Nothing substantial, anyway."

"If it's too good to be true, then it's not true - that's what I try to instill in my kids." He has four, with Kimberly Woodruff, his wife of 18 years.

This is true: It's Cube's trifecta season. He has something for every demographic. TBS has ordered up 90 more episodes of Cube Productions' Are We There Yet?, the PG-rated family comedy based on his popular film of 2005. Lottery Ticket, PG-13 slapstick also featuring Terry Crews, Loretta Devine, and Brandon T. Jackson, hits screens this week. I Am the West, his "cocky" CD (presumably not for youngsters), arrives in stores on Sept. 24.

Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Cube, 41, got his nickname as a teenager from his big brother who thought he was working too hard to be cool.

It was while watching his father, Hosea, working long hours as a machinist at Western Brass - "a dirty place dark as a coal mine" - that he resolved to "work with my hands, not my back."

After getting his high school diploma from Taft High, Cube enrolled in an architectural drafting course that molded his professional thinking.

"Didn't want to do the four-year college thing because my music was taking off," he recalls. "So I enrolled at the Phoenix Institute of Technology for a year, so I would have some skill to fall back on."

For the youth known for his caricatures and graffiti tags, "drafting required precision. And planning. I learned that you have to start with a plan."

"In the entertainment business, you gotta build the tracks and drive the train. I learned that from drafting."