Straight Outta Compton opens nationwide on Friday, August 14. So seeing the movie being made without me was something I couldnt do. “And I think a lot of that comes from the N.W.A. or at least era”. “I’m intrigued by it”.
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Hervey’s pic for the meme doesn’t need any adjusting.
Institutional censure of the group only added to its appeal. We savvy viewers can roll all our eyes when one clearly doomed character makes a promise to another, or the camera dollies up and focuses on a face as it utters historic words, but these tricks of storytelling have built modern cinema, and there’s not always a good reason to throw them away. When he wrote rhymes at Taft High School, a 90-minute bus ride from his home in Compton, Calif., he imagined himself in Run-D.M.C., EPMD or Public Enemy.
When asked how N.W.A. would respond to the social commentary of today, Gary said, “Probably the same way they did back then”. It was pretty fun.
“The film exhibits the why, not simply the where-when, however why did we do this type of music”.
“I keep looking at him and thinking he’s a young me”, he said.
Hervey’s childhood in the Compton projects is well documented. “It’s more about the humanity than the hood s- they can show”. Before that were years of witnessing how the police operated in his neighbourhood. It’s inspired by Straight Outta Compton, we’re gonna call the album Compton: The Soundtrack. You know if a world of homogenized packaged entertainment, I was just floored. If you sanitize this movie, the fans would smell it coming.
No one was exempt from that violence.
“Before we came along it was already going on”, he said.
“I wasn’t a knucklehead, but when you are out …”
But do the drughouse-wrecking motorized battering rams, aggressive harassment by the Daryl Gates era LAPD and Rodney King unrest the film depicts still have relevance today, when new video footage of police brutalizing blacks from across the nation is a weekly occurrence?
“That means do whatever it takes to make it to the house”. It more than peripherally touches on the strained relations between young African-Americans and police at the time. “They couldn’t tell who was legit and who wasn’t, who was going to cause them a problem and who wasn’t”. Here’s a sound business strategy: Remake a 1960s TV series that never caught on in syndication and is thus remembered fondly by only 35 percent of that segment of the population that’s now too old to go to the movies anyway. We weren’t very quiet about it, even with the treatment.
“This is a major motion picture we’re talking about, which speaks to cultural relevance in a profound way”, Boyd said. How do you feel on the popularity it’s gotten?
What did you envision for the film, what was the main thing you wanted audiences to pull from the experience? “It was wild, it was a chaotic time in Compton”.
“But in them days, the brutality was deep in the ghetto”.
“The police here are more civil”.
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“Remember”, he told Adolfo, “I grew up in Cleveland on the same block as Bone Thugs-n-Harmony”. You know, when Dr. Dre and Ice Cube left N.W.A and started their solo careers, I ended up working with them.
