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Last Updated: Feb 25th, 2009 - 10:41:37 |
On a recent brisk afternoon, Voletta Wallace faced a junket of reporters in front of the Brooklyn apartment building where she raised her son Christopher, known to the world as Biggie Smalls or the Notorious B.I.G.
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| Voletta Wallace and Wayne Barrow, producers of the film "Notorious," face the media outside the apartment building where Wallace raised her son, known to the world as the Notorious B.I.G. Photo by Esther Iverem |
“Just like you are learning things about my son, I am learning about him at the same time,” Wallace said, clad in a golden brown, full-length fur coat. Wallace is one of the producers of “Notorious,” the biopic opening tomorrow that tells the story of her son, who was gunned down outside a Los Angeles party in the wee hours of March 9, 1997. But perhaps unintentionally, the movie also recreates what was for many the end of an energetic if troubled era in hip-hop, when the streets—like Wallace’s old haunt in Bedford Stuyvesant— became the most promoted affirmation of the music and its artists.
“The real issue from that time is that so many of our young men gave up on education as a way to improve themselves,” said Robert Rutledge, a 60-year-old man who lives steps from where Biggie grew up and sold crack, before hitting big in the music world. “A movie won’t show what this neighborhood went through, what a lot of Black neighborhoods went through, and what part the culture played in that.”
For Jamal Woolard, the talented newcomer who transformed himself into Biggie by gaining weight, memorizing Big’s flow and every gesture, it was a challenge to separate out the performer’s street and professional persona from the man. “Everything I got from the Internet was the Notorious B.I.G.,” Woolard said in an interview. “But there was a shield up. He had the shades on. I couldn’t read his eyes.” Woolard said that he made the most headway learning about his subject by spending three months speaking to Big’s mother and estranged wife, the singer Faith Evans. “He was always screwing up his face,” Woolard added. “The only time he had a plain face was when he died.”
“Notorious,” directed George Tillman (“Soul Food,” “Men of Honor”), is executive produced by Sean “Diddy” Combs. Tillman said that he wanted to tell a story that looked good and recalled the times. “I said, let’s try to capture a very unique palette for the different phases of his life. I didn’t want to make it look like a music video.”
Of course, much of the controversy of that era, particularly the hyped East Coast-West Coast beef and the disagreements between Biggie and the rapper Tupac Shakur (who was also shot to death in September of 1996), is told from the perspective of Biggie and the East Coast hip hop establishment. “Pac and Biggie didn’t understand that they couldn’t control the streets,” said Anthony Mackie,” who plays Shakur in the film. “The streets will get you,” he said.
On the day after her trip to Brooklyn, Voletta Wallace faced reporters while sitting next to Angela Bassett, who plays her in film. Still, to this day, Wallace relates how, working hard to support her family, she didn’t know so much about what her teen-age son was doing, how she didn’t know that what looked like dried mashed potatoes under his bed was really crack cocaine being prepared for sale, how she didn’t even know until his funeral procession through the streets of Brooklyn that he was such a megastar and so beloved.
“I cannot go back,” she said. “If my son was here today and I was hearing these stories about him, maybe—God knows as big as he is—I’d strangle the daylights out of him because he disrespected my home, he disrespected me and I don’t think I could sit and smile at him. Maybe I would even hate him. I don’t know. But I can you this day that I still love my son.”
She would not comment on the still open case of her son’s murder or the fact that the movie does suggest that those working at the party on the night of his murder may have had some knowledge of a plot. She said the movie is something she felt she had to do. “Maybe I need to find solace,” she said, “but I don’t think I’ll ever find closure.”
You can order Esther Iverem's critically praised We Gotta Have It: Twenty Years of Seeing Black at the Movies, 1986-2006 (Thunder’s Mouth Press, April 2007)at Amazon.com or purchase at your favorite bookstore. It makes a wonderful gift! Thanks!
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