“He was scarily, crazily, absolutely, and completely confident,” she remembered. The conversation quickly went from the open reader position to Singleton pitching a movie. She had read one of his award-winning screenplays, Twilight Time, a story about four sisters coming together at their mother’s funeral. Allain already believed in Singleton’s talent.
YOUTUBE EAZY E BOYZ IN DA HOOD CLEAN MOVIE
In Allain’s office, Singleton spent the meeting discussing Boyz n the Hood, the movie he had written and was planning to direct. Singleton already had an agent, and not one from any piddling agency, but CAA, the house that Mike Ovitz built. Filled with moxie, he arrived for a job interview with Stephanie Allain, a script reader for Amy Pascal and Dawn Steel, two of Columbia Pictures’ top executives Allain had been promoted out of the story department and wanted to replace herself with another person of color. Singleton wrote what he knew, as the phrase goes, and finished the script within three weeks.Įver the comic book nerd, Singleton had an origin story to rival that of any superhero. These guys were talking about shit that I seen.” “If you didn’t grow up in Los Angeles, it looked like cowboys and Indians, but for me, this is the shit I knew. He would put special effects within the beats, so you could visualize what was happening,” Singleton said. “ Dre used to do these cool scenes within the flow of the song. I’m making my movie.” He soon started writing, often with N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It as his soundtrack. Afterward, he walked down the street with the girl he was dating, talking to himself, muttering “I got to do my shit. Then, in the summer of 1989, Singleton saw Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing at a preview screening in Hollywood. There was no doubt in his mind or our mind that he would be successful because he wouldn’t have had it any other way.” When asked about Singleton’s demeanor in college, Norrington described a man driven, almost, by destiny.
His room was filled with film reels, books about film, movies, comic books, and clothes scattered about.” “We would then come over, some girls, and we’d watch the films he shot. “John would have these projects for film school, where he would have to shoot a short film,” he said in 2006.
Malcolm Norrington, a fellow Trojan, recalled movie nights in Singleton’s dorm.
In its earliest inception, the movie was called Summer of ’84, but Singleton tabled the idea at school, where he twice won USC’s Jack Nicholson writing award for best feature-length screenplay. He first shared the plot for Boyz n the Hood on his application to USC’s film-writing program. But he also admired Spielberg and Lucas, and later on Truffaut. at the time, Singleton looked up to Marcus Allen, Magic, and Kareem. He already knew, at that point, what he wanted to do with his life. in his first major role, Singleton was around 11 years old when his mother sent him to live with his father. Like Tre Styles, the film’s protagonist, played by Cuba Gooding Jr. John Singleton Was a Beacon of Authenticityīoyz, of course, was his story. Singleton, who died on Monday at 51, said that was the best compliment he ever received for Boyz n the Hood, a film that earned $57.5 million at the domestic box office and received Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director Singleton was the first African American and the youngest person to ever be nominated in the latter category.Īt a time when Hollywood-and white America as a whole-didn’t concern itself with the young Black men growing up in inner cities, John Singleton brought their stories-his stories-to the big screen. “During the movie, he kept saying, ‘That’s my story. “He really liked it,” she told Singleton. She went on to say how much she loved the film, and that her boyfriend did as well. “You could tell he did time.” The man, whose eyes were red and watery, did not open his mouth. “He was an OG, a gangster dude,” Singleton told me during a 2006 interview I did for a Boyz n the Hood oral history originally published in King magazine. A woman and her boyfriend then approached the filmmaker. Wearing a hat that read “South Central LA,” Singleton thanked the audience for their support. At one point in the evening, he arrived at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, the theater he frequented as a kid. Along with a few USC friends and some cast members, Singleton stopped at local theaters to gauge the audience’s reaction to the movie. On the night Boyz n the Hood opened in theaters in July 1991, the film’s 23-year-old writer-director John Singleton rented a limousine and rode around his native Los Angeles.