New Jack City Is Turning 25. New Revelations From Its Writer Will Blow Your Mind.
Twenty five years ago this month, New Jack City opened to the public. The film, starring Wesley Snipes, Allen Payne, Ice-T, and Chris Rock, was Hollywood’s first and arguably its most enduring cinematic glimpse at the crack cocaine epidemic. At a time when Operation Desert Storm dominated the news cycle, mainstream America was blindly stepping over the junkies, and reading past the inner-city murders in the obituaries.
One man who observed it unfold before his eyes (and notebook) was journalist, author, and screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper. “B.M.C.” grew up in Harlem at a time when drug dealers were prominent community members—part role-models, and part poison peddlers. A student of his surroundings, Cooper would eventually pen the definitive writings on crack’s vice grip on its smokers, and the trade behind it—first in print, and then in the script to New Jack City.
Cooper–who later wrote Above The Rim and Sugar Hill spoke with Ambrosia For Heads. More than just the screenwriter, the music journalist had a heavy hand in the soundtrack, and the seasoned Harlem native gave valuable direction to Snipes’ portrayal of “Nino Brown” and Payne’s “G-Money.” As the conversation reveals, these are characters Cooper knew—with stories he is still telling. This interview explores the true history behind New Jack City. The film began attached to one of cinema’s most celebrated franchises, featuring a superstar lead before becoming what it is. Great actors and comedians were considered for the film, while others proved their greatness within it. Although he never sold drugs or led cartels, Barry Michael Cooper brilliantly sprinkled his bookish, street-smart youth into a film that defined Uptown in the 1980s—Good versus Evil, and all the illusive smoke between.
Ambrosia For Heads: How does it feel to watch such a benchmark of your career reach a milestone like 25 years old?
Barry Michael Cooper: I thought about this for most of the beginning of this week. Let me contextualize it like this: The Oscars—which has had a lot of issues and controversy, as we both know, over the last month and a half [were] hosted by the guy who played a crackhead in my movie: Chris Rock. That in of itself…when I step back to think about that…a little tidbit about the whole “Pookie” thing: [Chris Rock] was not the original “Pookie.” The original “Pookie”—who secured the role, who nailed it at the audition was Martin Lawrence. Chris Rock…and he’ll admit it himself, his audition wasn’t great, at all. Even during the audition he had to stop to say “let me do this again.” You could see the look on his face of “Man, I screwed this up.” Martin came in…Martin may have auditioned before him, because the late George Jackson, God rest his soul, and Doug McHenry, they were the producers. Jackson McHenry Productions had a bungalow on Warner Bros.’ lot in Burbank, [California]. So I was at both of those auditions—the ones in Burbank, and the ones at SIR Studios [in New York City]. So I saw all of the auditions. Martin came in and destroyed it. He took the words that I had on the page… I want to get in touch with Doug McHenry to get the Warner Bros. archives to release some of those auditions, man.
From Vivica Fox to Big Daddy Kane to…I can go on and on. Vivica Fox, man, actually…she auditioned for both Celina and Keisha. She killed it! It was just that she was on her soap opera at the time, called Generations. She wasn’t really that known. I told George, “This woman is incredible!” She had the New York accent and everything; she just didn’t get [the parts].
Getting back to Martin Lawrence, he came in and killed that audition. The person taping had to shut the camera off; everybody was on the floor [laughing]. But what happened was, his mentor Robin Harris died [in March of 1990]. Martin, he didn’t take it well. So he opted out of the movie. He stepped out of the movie, and that’s when they gave the role to Chris Rock. So when people talk about that New Jack City [“Suspicious Minds”] episode on Martin, he never forgot that movie, man!
Chris Rock may have not given a good audition on New Jack City, but once the cameras started rollin’ on April 16, 1990—either a Monday or Tuesday, he destroyed it. That guy became iconic. Once we got to the scene where him and Ice-T’s [character “Scotty Appleton”] is on the staircase, when he’s trying to take the turkey back from the crackhead girl, he’s looking up to the sky. He says, “You know what? It keep callin’ me, it keep callin’ me, it keep callin’ me! I want to get away from it!” … Mario Van Peebles, we used to [review the] dailies at Magno Screening Room. I remember when the lights went up, people were cryin’, man. They were cryin‘ and applauding his performance. So what he became…he doubled down, man. He took it somewhere else. From the day we started shooting, the six o’clock in the a.m. call time at the Arthur Ashe Tennis Courts in the Harlem River Projects in Harlem, [he showed up]. Then, we went across the bridge, ironically, where we shot the “say a prayer before I start scramblin'” scene of him and Ice-T—that was on the same block where Larry Davis had shot the cops, on Woodcrest Avenue. It was crazy, man. It was really, really crazy. Chris Rock, to me, is a lot like a modern day Jack Lemmon. Jack Lemmon could do Some Like It Hot, and then he could turn around and do Days Of Wine And Roses with Lee Remmick. This dude…if you give him the right script, and the right vehicle, he could do damage as a dramatic actor. He’s incredible. One of my favorite films of 2014 was Top Five. This dude’s talent is limitless.
When I think about 25 years, I think about a guy like Chris Rock, who started off…he can never live down “Pookie.” He made that. When you go on the New Jack City Twitter timeline and see so many references to “Pookie,” that’s how great his performance is. So that’s what it means to me…to look back over the tunnel of 25 years of when that movie was released, to today, it’s crazy. I can’t even really put it into words.
Ambrosia For Heads: New Jack City opens with “Nino Brown” dropping the man from the bridge and then a pan of the building with I Corinthians 6:9 painted on the side. That verse is again recited at “Pookie’s” funeral. “Nino” dies after being shot and falling in a similar way as his victim in the beginning. Can you explain the significance of the verse and what it foreshadowed for the film?
Barry Michael Cooper: You’re very perceptive. Originally, this is what happened: when I got hired to write New Jack City, I was doing my thing with Spin magazine as an investigative journalist. The first story I did was the crack-story [Crack, a Tiffany Drug at Woolworth Prices], which was the first national piece on crack cocaine—before Time, Newsweek, New York Times, anybody. I lived in West Baltimore, [Maryland] at the time. I lived up around this area called Mondawmin Mall—which is not far from where the [2015] riots originated. I’m out jogging on the track at Frederick Douglass High School, a block from me. I’m joggin’ and these kids was like, “Hey! Hey! Hey! There’s Fat Albert!” I [dismiss it]. They’re kids, man. I’m on my last lap, my 40th lap to eight miles. [Laughing] I’m coming around and this kid goes, “Look at you, you fat mothafukka!” I’m like, “You know what? They need spankings.” [Laughing] I went over to the kid, I said, “What’s your problem? What are you doing right now? I oughta come over there and [kick] your ass.” They couldn’t have been 15 years old. He said, “Stay right there. I’m gonna go home and get my shyt. Stay right there, you talkin’ all that shyt…” I thought to myself, “A gun?” I ran like Usain Bolt up the staircase. That very night, I saw on the news, where two kids were murdered a few blocks away from me near Fulton and North Avenue. [I saw that the crack trade and violence] was an epidemic. Long story short, I contacted a guy who I consider a mentor, an editor at The Village Voice and Spin magazine. He also produced Sugar Hill. His name is Rudy Langlais. I said, “Rudy, there’s an epidemic. There’s kids killing kids down here in B-More. It’s crazy. I don’t know how they’re getting access to these guns.” I wrote the story [for the February, 1986 issue of Spin], won some awards. I was on the loading dock, at a place called Lexington Market, here in Baltimore. I got a call. My supervisor said, “A guy called from the Howard Bloom Agency in New York”—a publicist in New York, I took the call. He said, “A guy named George Jackson wants to speak to you.” I’m still a little confused as to what’s going on. I take the call. The guy says, “I’m a big fan of your work; I saw the Baltimore piece. You need to be writing movies.” I said, “Who are you?” He said, “My name is George Jackson, and I work for Indigo,” which was Richard Pryor’s company. I still think it’s a joke [until it becomes clear we knew some of the same people in Harlem, which notably included the onetime Bad Boy Records artist Loon]. He and Rudy brought me on. Initially, “New Jack” was the Nicky Barnes story—[written by] Thomas [Lee] Wright. He wrote it for Francis Ford Coppola, for Paramount. That actually was supposed to be part of The Godfather, Part III; Eddie Murphy was supposed to play Nicky Barnes. [Paramount President] Frank Mancuso, Jr., who had hired Eddie Murphy and given him that huge contract—Eddie Murphy was the first actor to get $15 million for a film. [Mancuso] said, “We hired you to do comedies. You’re not doing this.” So the script went into “turnaround”—so they sold it to Warner Bros. Quincy Jones and Clarence Avant from Grio Productions, they bought the script, and it landed in George Jackson’s lap, who said, “[Barry Michael Cooper] is the guy who should write it. He’s from Harlem. He knows the streets, and a he’s a really visual writer.”
So long story short, when I was thinking about “Nino Brown,” I was thinking about the dudes I grew up with—but not one in particular. I was also thinking about myself—”how would I be as a dude sellin’ drugs?” I used to see dudes…there used to be a spot—which is nothin’ but million-dollars condos now, but a block on 123rd Street—known as “23rd Street,” between Seventh Avenue and Lenox Avenue. The hawkers would be outside saying, “Dust! Dust! Make ya’ head bust.” When the cops would roll through they’d yell, “Ness! Raise up!” They was callin’ the cops “Ness” back then. I used to carry a little reporters notebook with me. I know it was God’s will. I would just watch people and take notes. Then I learned the different [grades of cocaine]—”rock” was the bargain basement, “fishscale” was in the middle, and “flake” or what they call “the Perico,” the best cocaine. There was a block on 129th Street, between Eighth and St. Nicholas, where we would score. I would watch when raids would come to the block—they’d call it “a sweep.” [Police cruisers would block both ends of the block]. They’d put flares down in the middle of the street and the cops would say, “Look at all the roaches runnin’!” Dudes would be trying to swallow the bags and run. I watched all of that. I never sold drugs, but I was out there. I had a weird life, ’cause one foot was in the library—at [Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture], the other foot was in the streets.
So creating “Nino Brown,” it was an amalgam of these guys. It was watching the original [1932 Howard Hawks-directed] Scarface with Paul Muni, which is what Mario watched—his shots and [lighting], and some of it was straight-up [Bram Stoker’s] Dracula. When you look at Wesley closely, or look at a few of his close-up-shots—when he says, “Cancel that bytch. I’ll buy another one,” and they zoom in for that extreme-close-up shot, read the frame and look at his eyes. He’s wearing eyeliner like a pharaoh. He did that purposely. There’s a lot of Horror film elements to this. “Nino’s” mansion was like Transylvania. There was a reason for that.
So that passage from I Corinthians 6:9…George Jackson came to pick me up one day. We were going to a meeting at Warner Bros. I had just finished reading my scriptures for the day. He said, “What is that? You read The Bible?” I said, “Everyday. I don’t follow it, but I’m trying to learn it. That’s how I was raised.” So we turned to [that verse] and he said, “Man, look at that!” He never forgot that passage! To be honest with you, when I saw that spray painting [of I Corinthians 6:9] on that wall on Woodcrest Avenue in the Bronx, I was shocked. I looked at George, I said, “Yo!” He said, “I never forgot that passage.” That’s what [the whole premise is]: Idol worship—trying to replace God with a false god.
Twenty five years ago this month, New Jack City opened to the public. The film, starring Wesley Snipes, Allen Payne, Ice-T, and Chris Rock, was Hollywood’s first and arguably its most enduring cinematic glimpse at the crack cocaine epidemic. At a time when Operation Desert Storm dominated the news cycle, mainstream America was blindly stepping over the junkies, and reading past the inner-city murders in the obituaries.
One man who observed it unfold before his eyes (and notebook) was journalist, author, and screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper. “B.M.C.” grew up in Harlem at a time when drug dealers were prominent community members—part role-models, and part poison peddlers. A student of his surroundings, Cooper would eventually pen the definitive writings on crack’s vice grip on its smokers, and the trade behind it—first in print, and then in the script to New Jack City.
Cooper–who later wrote Above The Rim and Sugar Hill spoke with Ambrosia For Heads. More than just the screenwriter, the music journalist had a heavy hand in the soundtrack, and the seasoned Harlem native gave valuable direction to Snipes’ portrayal of “Nino Brown” and Payne’s “G-Money.” As the conversation reveals, these are characters Cooper knew—with stories he is still telling. This interview explores the true history behind New Jack City. The film began attached to one of cinema’s most celebrated franchises, featuring a superstar lead before becoming what it is. Great actors and comedians were considered for the film, while others proved their greatness within it. Although he never sold drugs or led cartels, Barry Michael Cooper brilliantly sprinkled his bookish, street-smart youth into a film that defined Uptown in the 1980s—Good versus Evil, and all the illusive smoke between.
Ambrosia For Heads: How does it feel to watch such a benchmark of your career reach a milestone like 25 years old?
Barry Michael Cooper: I thought about this for most of the beginning of this week. Let me contextualize it like this: The Oscars—which has had a lot of issues and controversy, as we both know, over the last month and a half [were] hosted by the guy who played a crackhead in my movie: Chris Rock. That in of itself…when I step back to think about that…a little tidbit about the whole “Pookie” thing: [Chris Rock] was not the original “Pookie.” The original “Pookie”—who secured the role, who nailed it at the audition was Martin Lawrence. Chris Rock…and he’ll admit it himself, his audition wasn’t great, at all. Even during the audition he had to stop to say “let me do this again.” You could see the look on his face of “Man, I screwed this up.” Martin came in…Martin may have auditioned before him, because the late George Jackson, God rest his soul, and Doug McHenry, they were the producers. Jackson McHenry Productions had a bungalow on Warner Bros.’ lot in Burbank, [California]. So I was at both of those auditions—the ones in Burbank, and the ones at SIR Studios [in New York City]. So I saw all of the auditions. Martin came in and destroyed it. He took the words that I had on the page… I want to get in touch with Doug McHenry to get the Warner Bros. archives to release some of those auditions, man.
From Vivica Fox to Big Daddy Kane to…I can go on and on. Vivica Fox, man, actually…she auditioned for both Celina and Keisha. She killed it! It was just that she was on her soap opera at the time, called Generations. She wasn’t really that known. I told George, “This woman is incredible!” She had the New York accent and everything; she just didn’t get [the parts].
Getting back to Martin Lawrence, he came in and killed that audition. The person taping had to shut the camera off; everybody was on the floor [laughing]. But what happened was, his mentor Robin Harris died [in March of 1990]. Martin, he didn’t take it well. So he opted out of the movie. He stepped out of the movie, and that’s when they gave the role to Chris Rock. So when people talk about that New Jack City [“Suspicious Minds”] episode on Martin, he never forgot that movie, man!
Chris Rock may have not given a good audition on New Jack City, but once the cameras started rollin’ on April 16, 1990—either a Monday or Tuesday, he destroyed it. That guy became iconic. Once we got to the scene where him and Ice-T’s [character “Scotty Appleton”] is on the staircase, when he’s trying to take the turkey back from the crackhead girl, he’s looking up to the sky. He says, “You know what? It keep callin’ me, it keep callin’ me, it keep callin’ me! I want to get away from it!” … Mario Van Peebles, we used to [review the] dailies at Magno Screening Room. I remember when the lights went up, people were cryin’, man. They were cryin‘ and applauding his performance. So what he became…he doubled down, man. He took it somewhere else. From the day we started shooting, the six o’clock in the a.m. call time at the Arthur Ashe Tennis Courts in the Harlem River Projects in Harlem, [he showed up]. Then, we went across the bridge, ironically, where we shot the “say a prayer before I start scramblin'” scene of him and Ice-T—that was on the same block where Larry Davis had shot the cops, on Woodcrest Avenue. It was crazy, man. It was really, really crazy. Chris Rock, to me, is a lot like a modern day Jack Lemmon. Jack Lemmon could do Some Like It Hot, and then he could turn around and do Days Of Wine And Roses with Lee Remmick. This dude…if you give him the right script, and the right vehicle, he could do damage as a dramatic actor. He’s incredible. One of my favorite films of 2014 was Top Five. This dude’s talent is limitless.
When I think about 25 years, I think about a guy like Chris Rock, who started off…he can never live down “Pookie.” He made that. When you go on the New Jack City Twitter timeline and see so many references to “Pookie,” that’s how great his performance is. So that’s what it means to me…to look back over the tunnel of 25 years of when that movie was released, to today, it’s crazy. I can’t even really put it into words.
Ambrosia For Heads: New Jack City opens with “Nino Brown” dropping the man from the bridge and then a pan of the building with I Corinthians 6:9 painted on the side. That verse is again recited at “Pookie’s” funeral. “Nino” dies after being shot and falling in a similar way as his victim in the beginning. Can you explain the significance of the verse and what it foreshadowed for the film?
Barry Michael Cooper: You’re very perceptive. Originally, this is what happened: when I got hired to write New Jack City, I was doing my thing with Spin magazine as an investigative journalist. The first story I did was the crack-story [Crack, a Tiffany Drug at Woolworth Prices], which was the first national piece on crack cocaine—before Time, Newsweek, New York Times, anybody. I lived in West Baltimore, [Maryland] at the time. I lived up around this area called Mondawmin Mall—which is not far from where the [2015] riots originated. I’m out jogging on the track at Frederick Douglass High School, a block from me. I’m joggin’ and these kids was like, “Hey! Hey! Hey! There’s Fat Albert!” I [dismiss it]. They’re kids, man. I’m on my last lap, my 40th lap to eight miles. [Laughing] I’m coming around and this kid goes, “Look at you, you fat mothafukka!” I’m like, “You know what? They need spankings.” [Laughing] I went over to the kid, I said, “What’s your problem? What are you doing right now? I oughta come over there and [kick] your ass.” They couldn’t have been 15 years old. He said, “Stay right there. I’m gonna go home and get my shyt. Stay right there, you talkin’ all that shyt…” I thought to myself, “A gun?” I ran like Usain Bolt up the staircase. That very night, I saw on the news, where two kids were murdered a few blocks away from me near Fulton and North Avenue. [I saw that the crack trade and violence] was an epidemic. Long story short, I contacted a guy who I consider a mentor, an editor at The Village Voice and Spin magazine. He also produced Sugar Hill. His name is Rudy Langlais. I said, “Rudy, there’s an epidemic. There’s kids killing kids down here in B-More. It’s crazy. I don’t know how they’re getting access to these guns.” I wrote the story [for the February, 1986 issue of Spin], won some awards. I was on the loading dock, at a place called Lexington Market, here in Baltimore. I got a call. My supervisor said, “A guy called from the Howard Bloom Agency in New York”—a publicist in New York, I took the call. He said, “A guy named George Jackson wants to speak to you.” I’m still a little confused as to what’s going on. I take the call. The guy says, “I’m a big fan of your work; I saw the Baltimore piece. You need to be writing movies.” I said, “Who are you?” He said, “My name is George Jackson, and I work for Indigo,” which was Richard Pryor’s company. I still think it’s a joke [until it becomes clear we knew some of the same people in Harlem, which notably included the onetime Bad Boy Records artist Loon]. He and Rudy brought me on. Initially, “New Jack” was the Nicky Barnes story—[written by] Thomas [Lee] Wright. He wrote it for Francis Ford Coppola, for Paramount. That actually was supposed to be part of The Godfather, Part III; Eddie Murphy was supposed to play Nicky Barnes. [Paramount President] Frank Mancuso, Jr., who had hired Eddie Murphy and given him that huge contract—Eddie Murphy was the first actor to get $15 million for a film. [Mancuso] said, “We hired you to do comedies. You’re not doing this.” So the script went into “turnaround”—so they sold it to Warner Bros. Quincy Jones and Clarence Avant from Grio Productions, they bought the script, and it landed in George Jackson’s lap, who said, “[Barry Michael Cooper] is the guy who should write it. He’s from Harlem. He knows the streets, and a he’s a really visual writer.”
So long story short, when I was thinking about “Nino Brown,” I was thinking about the dudes I grew up with—but not one in particular. I was also thinking about myself—”how would I be as a dude sellin’ drugs?” I used to see dudes…there used to be a spot—which is nothin’ but million-dollars condos now, but a block on 123rd Street—known as “23rd Street,” between Seventh Avenue and Lenox Avenue. The hawkers would be outside saying, “Dust! Dust! Make ya’ head bust.” When the cops would roll through they’d yell, “Ness! Raise up!” They was callin’ the cops “Ness” back then. I used to carry a little reporters notebook with me. I know it was God’s will. I would just watch people and take notes. Then I learned the different [grades of cocaine]—”rock” was the bargain basement, “fishscale” was in the middle, and “flake” or what they call “the Perico,” the best cocaine. There was a block on 129th Street, between Eighth and St. Nicholas, where we would score. I would watch when raids would come to the block—they’d call it “a sweep.” [Police cruisers would block both ends of the block]. They’d put flares down in the middle of the street and the cops would say, “Look at all the roaches runnin’!” Dudes would be trying to swallow the bags and run. I watched all of that. I never sold drugs, but I was out there. I had a weird life, ’cause one foot was in the library—at [Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture], the other foot was in the streets.
So creating “Nino Brown,” it was an amalgam of these guys. It was watching the original [1932 Howard Hawks-directed] Scarface with Paul Muni, which is what Mario watched—his shots and [lighting], and some of it was straight-up [Bram Stoker’s] Dracula. When you look at Wesley closely, or look at a few of his close-up-shots—when he says, “Cancel that bytch. I’ll buy another one,” and they zoom in for that extreme-close-up shot, read the frame and look at his eyes. He’s wearing eyeliner like a pharaoh. He did that purposely. There’s a lot of Horror film elements to this. “Nino’s” mansion was like Transylvania. There was a reason for that.
So that passage from I Corinthians 6:9…George Jackson came to pick me up one day. We were going to a meeting at Warner Bros. I had just finished reading my scriptures for the day. He said, “What is that? You read The Bible?” I said, “Everyday. I don’t follow it, but I’m trying to learn it. That’s how I was raised.” So we turned to [that verse] and he said, “Man, look at that!” He never forgot that passage! To be honest with you, when I saw that spray painting [of I Corinthians 6:9] on that wall on Woodcrest Avenue in the Bronx, I was shocked. I looked at George, I said, “Yo!” He said, “I never forgot that passage.” That’s what [the whole premise is]: Idol worship—trying to replace God with a false god.
