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Ghetto Fabulists
Roughneck rapper 50 Cent and Irish tale-spinner Jim Sheridan might seem an unlikely pairing, but on Get Rich or Die Tryin', they proved to be a perfect fit. By BROOKE HAUSER November 2005 issue News quickly becomes legend in the South Bronx. Just yesterday, 50 Cent nearly started a riot when he decided to toss thousands of dollars worth of crisp bills into a crowd of neighborhood kids. Less than 24 hours later, despite the kind of heat that makes local news reporters want to fry eggs on sidewalks, his fans are out in full force—an adoring adolescent army. Some sit piggyback on their friends' shoulders, trying to get a better glimpse, while others take snapshots of the multiplatinum rapper with their cell phones. One girl, clutching a black-and-white composition book to her chest, leans against the barricade as her eyes well up with tears. "Fifty! Over here!" they shout. "Over here! Fiiiifffty!" The area around Yankee Stadium is commonly considered by locals to be the domain of another hip-hop heavyweight, Fat Joe, but that hasn't stopped the Queens-born Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson from taking it over to shoot his film debut, Get Rich or Die Tryin', in which he plays a character much like himself but named Marcus. Having wrapped the Toronto portion of the shoot, the production is in New York for just a few days, but 50's arrival literally has stopped traffic. Overnight, Jerome Avenue has been transformed into "Marcus's hood," with security guards trolling the strip of discount stores and Dominican cafeterias with the privileged air of club bouncers behind the velvet ropes. "Are you with us?" they ask random pedestrians, who could be shopkeepers, professional extras, or stray locals. It's hard to tell. Luckily, the crew have been given contact sheets that catalog such information, typos and all. On hand for today's scene, a turf battle between Marcus's gang and rival Colombian drug dealers, are "2 Colombian Women (Hotties), 2 NYPD, 16 Drug Feinds, 3 New Feinds w/ beater cars, 3 New Fiends w/ nice cars, and 5 Fiends (new)." In other words, if the person in question is a frizzle-haired woman pushing a grocery cart full of trash while simultaneously drinking from a brown paper baggie, chances are she is a fiend and possibly even a member of SAG. By all appearances, Get Rich is a hard-core "urban" movie, the likes of which still give most studios the jitters, despite the recent successes of Paramount's Four Brothers and Hustle & Flow (which MTV Films codistributed). For Interscope Records chairman Jimmy Iovine and Eminem's manager, Paul Rosenberg, however, the project was a no-brainer from the beginning. In 2003, 8 Mile, which they shepherded for Universal, closed out at $117 million. A few days later, 50 Cent's debut album (now the film's namesake) topped the charts, selling almost three million copies in less than a month. The rest is hip-hop history—or at least that's what Iovine hopes it will be. "We want to show hip-hop and gangsterism in a way that's never been done before," says the producer, who counts GoodFellas and The Godfather among his favorite films. "I said, 'Let's make a movie about the rise of this character: his involvement in the street, his relationship with his mother, so you really understand the "why" of what's going on. Why is there rage?' " 50 Cent answers that question most succinctly in the track, "Hate It or Love It," which he recently recorded with West Coast phenom The Game: "Comin' up I was confused, my mama kissin' a girl/Confusion occurs, comin' up in the cold world/Daddy ain't around, probably out committin' felonies . . . I wanna live good, so shit I sell dope." By now, everyone and their grandma has heard about 50 Cent's crack-dealing past and the fateful day he was shot nine times. Joy Bryant, who plays Marcus's lifelong crush in the film, was brave enough to explore the star's most famous wound. "It's a trip: There's a bullet in his tongue," she says. "We were having dinner, and he was like, 'You want to feel?' And he stuck my finger in his mouth. I mean, he is definitely walking around with scars that he can't help but see and feel every day." Some of the scars run deep. The rapper worked closely with The Sopranos executive producer and writer Terence Winter to dramatize experiences from his own childhood that in real life have been left unresolved. "See, the difference between Marcus and Curtis is, in the film, he's in a constant search for his father," says 50, sitting in his souped-up trailer with one Timberland boot on (the other seems to have disappeared). "I never knew my father growing up, but I ain't in no constant search for him." After his mother, a drug dealer, was killed, he was raised by his grandparents. "It's almost like I grew up around so many people from broken homes, I don't even know if you can call it that, 'cause that's what a home is where I'm from." Although Irish director Jim Sheridan (In America, My Left Foot) may not seem like the obvious choice to helm a film about a gangsta rapper, Iovine says he knew he was qualified when they met: "Bono brought him over to my house, actually right when we had the script written, and we were talking about it. I found he had a real affinity for hip-hop. He had a lot of the records: Doggystyle, The Chronic." But that was just the icing on the cake. Sheridan found that he personally could relate to parts of Marcus's story. "I grew up in an area of Dublin that was very poor, and there was a lot of heroin. I had fights with kids, addicts, and I had to defend myself," he says, adding that, in some ways, "the Irish experience is very close to the black experience, down to the toxic nature of the way we speak." Of course, making a movie is always a collaborative experience. Iovine and Sheridan recruited Dr. Dre to be an unofficial adviser on the film, which is being scored by Quincy Jones. And Omar Miller and Tory Kittles, who play members of Marcus's crew, introduced new slang to Sheridan during ad-libbed scenes. "Jim didn't know what a basehead was [editor's note: it means a crackhead], or, like, poppin' collars, which is like patting yourself on the back," says Miller. 50 Cent himself kindly corrected the director on how exactly one goes about cooking crack. ("I think it's baking soda with water, heat it up and put the coke in, then ice, and it freezes into crystals," Sheridan reports.) Determined to be as knowledgeable about the African-American experience as possible, Sheridan went so far as to research the history of slavery "to understand where some of the attitudes come from," he says. What Sheridan didn't know from experience—or attempt to learn through research—the cast members filled in with their own stories. Tony-winner Viola Davis modeled the role of Marcus's grandmother after her own, who was considered a "ghetto grandma" at the age of 30. Though she never met the woman who raised the young Curtis Jackson, Davis felt a strong, if unspoken, connection to 50 Cent. "We came from very similar backgrounds. I think that's why he backed off and respected me from a distance," Davis says. For Bryant, the experience also hit close to home—literally, the South Bronx. "My big scene took place two blocks from where I grew up," she says. "I got picked up in the morning, and the driver took me by the projects. I'm like, 'Wait a minute—we're going to my uncle's house?' " "To go back and see kids that were me, it was kind of wonderful," Bryant continues. Still, the actress found she didn't attract much of a crowd when paired with 50 Cent's stand-in for a B-roll shoot. “I swear to God, no one cared. We had no barricades. No one came to watch nothing. They were like, 'That's a stand-in? Who dat? 25 Cent? Oh.'” © 2005 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc. Reprinted with permission. premiere.com » |