And the Run-D.M.C.-inspired soundtrack delivers. Like much of Singleton’s work, music is central to the message.
Apart from Franklin’s storyline, there is a Mexican wrestler working for a crime syndicate and a CIA agent who is working on a funding operation for Contra fighters.
Snowfall aims to show “how crack began.” But the characters are fictional. We just walked around the neighbourhood and I tried to absorb everything. When I went to John’s office for the first time I didn’t even read. For each audition he would wear Dickies work wear with long white T-shirts to “try to fit in as much as possible into the character. Idris, 25, says he auditioned for the role five times. How everything from the Black Panther movement to the formation of the Crips and the Bloods had an influence on the culture of Los Angeles. “What was really fascinating, especially coming from England, is the whole history of life here before and after crack. Boyz N The Hood introduced me to this world,” the actor says in an interview. “I grew up watching the movies of John Singleton. That includes British actor Damson Idris, who plays Franklin, a college dropout dealing marijuana and working at a Korean-owned convenience store. And like Straight Outta Compton, it takes place in the turbulent ’80s.īoyz N The Hood introduced the world to Ice Cube and Morris Chestnut in their acting debuts, and Singleton once more casts unknowns. Singleton looks at the beginning of the crack epidemic in East Los Angeles.
Luhrmann’s fanciful series looks at the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx. Snowfall, like Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix series The Get Down, is about history. “This time I wanted to show how Los Angeles had changed for better or worse.” “I was thinking about nostalgia and the fact even though there are other shows out there, there still wasn’t a lot about the history and the impact of this period,” Singleton says in an interview. But like Twin Peaks director David Lynch, he has had to up the stakes the second time around after a decades-long absence spawned more than a few fawning imitators. Singleton revisits familiar ground in his new television series debuting Wednesday at 10 p.m. In Boyz N The Hood, it was the opening sequence where two children engage in an expletive-filled verbal and physical barrage. And it seems the director hasn’t lost the propensity for shock. It has been 26 years since John Singleton was nominated for an Academy Award for the groundbreaking Boyz N The Hood, about growing up in South Central Los Angeles. In the premiere of Snowfall, an undercover officer, assisted by a prostitute, uses a straw to inject cocaine into an orifice not normally used for ingesting drugs.