“It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when a star … slips into the nether realm, becomes flat and reproducible, something read instead of someone known.” – Ann Powers, Village Voice, April 19, 1994.
“You’re nobody, til somebody kills you.” – The Notorious BIG, Life After Death.
Somebody (we still don’t know who) killed Biggie 12 years ago. And with the release of Life After Death a fortnight after his murder, Christopher Wallace aka Notorious BIG aka Biggie Smalls (among many other monikers) finally, ironically, lived up to his name and started the transformation into the flat product that Ann Powers describes.
She was writing about Kurt Cobain, but you can stretch her meaning to fit Biggie, his former-friend-turned-rival Tupac Shakur or indeed any popular figure, from Che Guevara to Bettie Page, with a life story that movie makers can sensationalise into legend.
Hollywood loves a hip hop biopic like Notorious, the recently released movie of Biggie’s life, because the legend is already formed: sketched out by the rapper through his self-aggrandising lyrics, inked in by the fans and press as they buy the records and speculate over the story’s truth, and finally, necessarily, sealed by the star’s death.
The role of the screenwriter is simply to tick off a list of what TV critic Gareth McLean calls ’Things That Happened‘ – a series of checkpoint events in the life, bestowed momentous status by a mix of wish fulfillment and communal hyperbole.
They’re often exaggerated beyond belief (check out the scene in Notorious in which Biggie’s legendary opening rhyme from smash hit ‘Juicy‘ arrives fully formed, just ready to fall onto the tape) but why should that matter? The life is the pre-amble. The death is the story.
Biggie’s story (like Cobain’s) is essentially interesting to Hollywood because he died a violent death. There is a natural, tragic conclusion to the tale – a young man with a gift murdered before his time.
With that in mind, how do you tell the Jay Z story? Or, even worse, the Beastie Boys story? Three Jewish middle-class white kids defy expectations by making era-defining hip hop and outraging the tabloids before getting old and banging on about Tibet a lot?
Fine, but where’s the blockbuster?
An exception is Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile (2002) – essentially, though not officially, a biopic of Eminem. The hero not only survived, but seemed to be on the way to super stardom at the movie’s close. At the time of release Eminem was the biggest rapper in the world – representing a rare example of a person with legendary status assured without death closing the story.
Makers of hip hop biopics like Notorious must soon run out of source material. Notorious’s writer, Cheo Hodari Coker, is lined up to pen the Run DMC biopic, which would naturally culminate with the death of producer Jam Master Jay (murdered in his studio in 2002). But what after that? Another Tupac movie?
Put bluntly, if the artists ain’t dying, the movie ain’t flying. You’re nobody until somebody kills you.
