NEW JACK CITY
Was a 1991 crime-thriller/Neo-noir film starring Wesley Snipes, Ice-T, Mario Van Peebles, Judd Nelson and Chris Rock. Snipes stars as Nino Brown, a rising drug dealer and crime lord in New York City during the crack epidemic. Ice-T plays a detective who vows to stop Nino’s criminal activity by going undercover to work for Nino’s gang.
The story revolved around the 20th anniversary of the 1967 riots in Detroit, and in its wake, the rise of crack cocaine gangs in the mid-to-late 1980s, like Young Boys Inc., and the Chambers Brothers.
New Jack City was produced with an estimated $8,500,000 budget. The film initially premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 1991, before being released nationally on March 6, 1991; it grossed $7,039,622 during its opening weekend. It became the highest grossing independent film of 1991, grossing a total of $47,624,253 at the US box offices.
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BLACK CAESAR
Believe it or not, Black Caesar was originally intended to be a Sammy Davis Jr. movie. Davis’s agent had offered $10,000 to the writer, Cohen to draft a screenplay, and it was the combination of the singer’s small size and fabled mob connections that gave Cohen the idea to rework Little Caesar, one of the first great gangster pictures, for a black cast and audience. The agent never came through with the money, though, so when American International Pictures asked Cohen to contribute a story for a blaxploitation onslaught, Cohen had no compunctions about using the script himself. It was all for the best, really, because Fred Williamson, Sammy’s vastly cheaper replacement, has much to do with why Black Caesar works as well as it does. Also in the movie Check out James Brown’s soundtrack hit “Boss” and tell me you can’t break your neck bouncing your head to that!
