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I didn't know what 'EXT,' 'INT' - I didn't know that meant 'exterior,' 'interior.' I just knew my lines. This is embarrassing to really cop to, because I'm looking back on it now, I didn't know what stage direction was. It was about picking up your sides for an audition the next day. "You gotta remember this was early in my career," Gooding says. When casting for the film began, Singleton focused on the lead role, Tre Styles, which eventually went to Cuba Gooding Jr., still just a kid himself, on the hustle for his next gig.
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He said, 'I'd say this conversation's over.'" "'What would you say if we gave you $100,000?' And John was so cool. "He was offered like $100,000 just to walk away," Allain says. Nevermind that he'd never directed a feature film before: Singleton was determined to direct the script himself, despite the objections of the studio. "You know, it's like if a person looks at you wrong, if a certain slight could turn into, like: boom!" "It's like you, you're taught to have the potential to explode," he says. Singleton says he just wanted to put a young, black, male experience of Los Angeles up on the screen. "It was one of those moments where I closed my door, I sat and I read it in one sitting," Allain says. Singleton's script was written with power and immediacy.
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And the movie that we would make would always be something like what I did with Boyz N The Hood." So me and my friends would catch the bus up to Hollywood, and we'd go see the movies, and we spent the whole time going down Vermont talking about the movie we would make. "I loved the pictures, but none of those people looked like me.
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"It's a story that a lot of those cats used to make in the '80s, in the suburbs, but made in the 'hood," Singleton says of the films that inspired Boyz N The Hood. The script focused on the relationship between Tre and his father, Furious Styles, a single parent trying to instill values in his troubled son contrary to the pressures and temptations of his environment. The kid was 22-year-old John Singleton, and his script told the story of Tre, Ricky and Doughboy, three friends growing up with dreams of one day moving beyond their violent circumstances in South Central. And I'm thinking, 'Okay, this kid's not really a reader, he's a writer. And he's telling me how he's gonna direct it, and he's not even out of school and he has an agent. Little John shows up in my office and he starts telling me about the script he wrote. "I heard about a kid who was still in school who was interested in the job," Allain says. In May of 1990, Allain says, she was looking for an assistant who would read scripts for the studio. Stephanie Allain, who worked at Columbia Pictures at the time, was one of the few female executives - and one of the few executives of color - at a major Hollywood studio. Into this environment, 20 years ago this month, Singleton's film exploded off the screen, challenging the tabloid stereotypes of urban life and chipping away at notions of who could and should be making movies in Hollywood.
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In particular, South Central was notorious for gang colors and drive-by shootings.
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"This is Los Angeles, gang capital of the nation." Then, "In South Central L.A., it's tough to beat the streets."Įven before the strain between police and the black community became symbolized by the videotaped beating of Rodney King at the hands of LAPD officers, the city was becoming synonymous with crack cocaine and gang violence. In the original trailer for John Singleton's 1991 film Boyz N The Hood, violent images play over a thudding drum track, as voice over introduces viewers to the hard heart of South Central Los Angeles.