by Ice-T
For me, it’s why you see progression in music, whether it’s the Beatles or hardcore hip-hop; part of that transformation is that groups start to travel, start to grow as artists, start to change their perspectives.
When we’d to go Germany or Italy or Japan, these kids used to line up to take pictures of my sneakers. It wasn’t enough for them to see your look; they needed to have a blueprint. At some of these shows, these suburban kids would look like they were from L.A. I remember one time I was playing in Memphis, and I saw this kid in the crowd who had on a khaki shirt that said, ROLLIN’ 60S CRIPS COLORS. As in Colors—the movie.
Shit. I was like—What the fuck does this white kid know about the Rollin’ 60s? Dennis Hopper’s flick had a lot to do with spreading that gangsta “chic.” You can’t believe how many people would hit us up with that gang sign that the Mexican kid did in the movie, which was made up—but these kids all over the Midwest copied it, thinking that made them look badass. You start to realize that this gang shit is soaking in. You’d even start seeing the Crip Walk done in places that had never seen a real live Crip. That bugged me out. Some kid from a nice suburb with a mom, dad, dog, and two-car garage tying a bandanna around his head and claiming a set that’s three thousand miles away from his house. Okay, son … you’re Eight-Trey Gangsta and you’re in fuckin’ Kentucky!
It was one thing when the fans just had our album covers, but once Yo! MTV Raps hit, the kids emulated everything we were doing in the videos. A lot of them got obsessed with the mimicry. Rappers were often yelling at the kids saying, “Yo, don’t be us, be you!” But you can’t preach to a fan who’s set on living out a fantasy life because he thinks it’s cool.
I used to have all these white kids from Newport Beach come up to my house in Hollywood and hang out with all my gangbanger friends from South Central. That was a trip. See, the bangers got along with the white boys because the white boys were surfers. Straight-up. They didn’t front like they were hip-hoppers, or pretend to be gangsters. They’d all sit around smoking and I’d hear my hustler friends getting at them, “Just be a surfer, man. That’s who you are, ya dig? Don’t come up here trying to look like me. You know, your weed is better than my weed anyway, so we cool!”
That’s basically the gangster code. Just be yourself. Just be you, dog. The easiest way to get your card plucked around a gangster is to be a fake. If we feel like you’re trying too hard, if you’re trying to act like you’re from the street, you’re in trouble.
9.
CHUCK D ONCE SAID, “Ice-T is the only person who does things that completely jeopardize his career just to stay awake.” Once I get something going well, I’ll risk fucking it up just for the action. I’m not a cat to stay on cruise control. I hate the idea of being in a comfortable groove. I’ll have my rap game going good, and say fuck it, now I’ll do a hard rock record. I’ll get that rock thing going good and say, fuck it, now, I’m gonna act.
No, I never think about it as jeopardizing my career. That’s just how I’m cut. Even in school, I always loved going against the grain. I loved doing shit that everyone told me not to do. Right now, I’m thinking I might branch out into standup comedy. Who knows? I like to keep shit moving. Chuck could be right … maybe I do it to keep myself awake.
I’ve always been theatrical, and ever since my first music video for “I’m Your Pusher,” I felt I could hold my own in front of a camera. We came up with this concept for the song, with the music becoming the “dope.” We were acting like drug dealers on the street, but we were pushing our outlawed music. “I’m Your Pusher” got a little airplay because I had a singing hook. But after I realized how easy getting airplay was, I intentionally never did it again. I never used a singing hook in any of my rap records.
Acting was foreign territory for those of us in the hip-hop game. In their video for “Follow the Leader,” Eric B and Rakim took it up a notch with acting, and other rappers were doing it, too—the music video became more skits. Guys like Kurtis Blow and Run-DMC had played themselves in Krush Groove and Tougher Than Leather. But nobody had done any serious acting. Probably because no serious directors or producers were looking at rappers.
I’ve always liked to be on the cutting edge. I liked that I was the first to do shit. First to bring hardcore cursing to a rap record. First to really rap about the L.A. gangster life. But I never actually dreamed I’d become the first rapper to get a starring role in a major Hollywood movie.
When the opportunity knocked, to be honest, I thought it was a bullet in my head. For real. Krush Groove and Tougher Than Leather had come out, but these were rap movies.
It’s funny how my acting career got started. I was in this club at the same time as Mario Van Peebles. Mario said he overheard me talking shit in the bathroom—I don’t remember this exactly, but apparently I was telling someone: “The problem is, if they could put me under a microscope and find one molecule of me that gave a fuck, then they’d have a chance.”
Mario apparently heard that and he said on the spot, “Okay, whoever said that is going to be the star of my next movie.” That movie would be New Jack City. Then he figured out it was me, and he came over and found me at the other side of the club.
“Ice,” he said, “I’ve got a movie role for you.”
I was busy talking to some chicks so I figured that was just bullshit he was spitting to be introduced to the girls. So I introduced them, nodding, but Mario kept staring at me.
“No, I’m serious, Ice. Here’s my number, call me tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” I said, still brushing him off.
“Player, I’ve got a movie set up at Warner Brothers. Call me tomorrow and let’s talk about it. If you’re into it, we’ll get you the script.”
The next day I called his number, and it was serious business.
“Ice, listen. This role is yours if you want it.”
“What are you talking about, Mario?”
“Just come down to Warner today.”
I drove to Warner Bros., sat down in Mario’s office, and they gave me the script.
“What’s the character’s name?”
“Scottie. Scottie Appleton.”
Just skimming through the script, I could see that my character was damn near on every page. “Yo, Mario, this is a starring role—I can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Who else you got for the picture?”
“Let’s see.… We got Chris Rock,” he said. “We got Wesley Snipes …”
Those are box office names now, especially Chris, but at the time they were not big movie stars. Wesley had only done one film, Major League, and Chris was known for being a player on Saturday Night Live, certainly not the huge box-office draw he is now.
I took the script home and read it closely. Didn’t take me more than a page or two to grasp who the character Scottie Appleton was.
“This dude is a cop! What the fuck? They want me to play a cop? And hold up. What’s this shit? He’s got dreadlocks!” At the time, I was still rocking a perm. I still looked like a straight-up West Coast pimp. I couldn’t picture myself playing a New York dude in dreads.
Mario had a producing partner named George Jackson, and George started leaning on me. “Ice, you can do this. You can pull this off, we need you.”
They’d done their research, saying they had a movie that needed young black actors, and there weren’t that many bankable black actors under thirty years old. Damn near none. So they made what was then a risky decision: Maybe some of these rappers and R&B singers, with their existing fan bases, will translate into box office.
That’s why in New Jack City you see Christopher Williams, Teddy Riley, Flavor Flav, Troop. It was a form of hedging their bets. They decided to cast the movie using musicians whose careers were hot, give it a hot soundtrack; that way, if they couldn’t sell the movie, they could make their investment back on the soundtrack alone.
I’m usually pretty self-assured, make decisions quickly, and don’t
question myself. Most aspects of my career, I’ve trusted my gut instinct alone. But this movie role had me confused as fuck. I didn’t know what to do. I put off giving Mario an answer for as long as I could.
How could I take the role of a cop? I’d been a criminal. I’d been representing the criminal life in my music. How could I flip the script now and play Jake on screen? What would my core fans—what would my closest friends—think of that switch? I started to survey all the people around me, people whose opinion I trusted most.
“Yo, I got offered this movie role,” I said over and over. “But here’s the thing: they want me to be the man.”
I thought my old crime partners might start laughing. Or snap my head off. But they all had the same response. They got these puppy faces, turned real quiet for moment, then asked me, “Word? Ice, could I be in the movie?”
I checked with the hardest cats I knew, my crime partners who were behind those big walls. And even cats locked up in the pen weren’t fazed by the fact I’d be playing an undercover cop.
“Dig, Ice,” they said. “If I was out on the street, you think I could be in the movie?”
That shocked me, to be honest. None of them were tripping on me playing police. Their reaction was more like the excitement of little kids who found out one of their buddies won free tickets to the Super Bowl.
“Nigga, you made it! You get to be in a movie!”
All the girls I knew in the ’hood were looking at it a little differently. They saw it as a major responsibility. “Ice, baby, you better do this. You better take this opportunity, because if you do the movie, you’re going to keep it real. You ain’t like these other motherfuckers who get over and stop talkin’ about shit.”
So after that consensus. I jumped. I called Mario and told him, yeah, I’d play the part of the undercover narc in his movie.
WHEN WE STARTED SHOOTING New Jack, a lot of times I found myself switching between being an actor and a technical consultant. Wesley was constantly asking me for advice. He knew I was a real street cat. “Shit,” he’d say, “I got Ice here—we gonna do this correct!”
A lot of times it was the lingo—getting the street slang up-to-date—or a subtle gesture, basically how we would roll on the street. Everybody in the movie knew what they were doing as actors. No one was off-beat. Sometimes they needed a little help with the swagger.
The trick I learned is that when you’re making a movie—and later on doing television—it’s got to feel real but not be real. The art is to be able to eliminate the trivial, repetitive details of reality for the sake of telling the story. For instance, you can’t solve a crime every week in forty-two minutes like we do on Law & Order. You have to accelerate the pace. That’s why when you see me playing Fin on SVU, damn near every time I pick up the phone or get handed a piece of paper—Boom—the answer is there: “Liv, the DNA results just came in. It’s a match.” Come on, the answer is never that easy in real life. But we have to sacrifice the mundane reality in order to get the story’s pacing right.
I knew Mario wasn’t trying to make a documentary about the drug game. There are a lot of details that we put into New Jack for excitement and drama, but the film was as close to real as we could make it. The basis of the story was true: There really were crews who took over entire housing projects in New York City, crews who had teams of naked chicks up in fortified apartments cooking that powder into rock. In the movie, we just had sexier girls; flyer-looking lawyers; hipper-talking cops.
New Jack was a hell of a shooting experience. But I won’t front. Most of us were really nervous. Judd Nelson was a lifesaver. He was an actor with real established credibility and he told me, “Yo, everybody fucks up. If you’re worrying about fucking up, you’re not gonna be able to do the scene. Just do it. Don’t trip.” He really relaxed guys like me and Chris who hadn’t been in films before.
The part of Gee Money was famously played by Allen Payne, who’d been on The Cosby Show, and now stars on House of Payne. What people don’t know is that Gee Money was originally played by Oran “Juice” Jones, who had the hit “Walkin’ in the Rain.” We were doing our daily read-throughs of the script. Everything was going smooth, and one day we came in and Oran was gone—just vanished—and Allen Payne was standing there, wearing all the same clothes, same Gee Money jewelry, reading like he’d been there every day. Chris Rock and I looked at each other like “What the fuck just happened?”
Since Chris and I had a lot of lines together, and we were buddies in the movie, we quickly became friends in real life. That day, after they switched Juice and we knew he got fired, when we finished the read-through, they said, “Okay, Ice, Chris, that’s a wrap. You guys can go home.”
Both me and Chris, in unison, shouted: “No, we’ll just stay! We’ll stay. We don’t want to leave. We’ll stay until everybody’s done for the day.”
Then Chris turned to me and whispered: “Hell no! I know they got that nigga Sinbad downstairs running through my lines in the script.”
“Goddamnit,” I said, “They probably got Chuck D down there with a dread wig on. I’m not fuckin’ leaving!”
Me and Chris and Wesley remain good friends today. I haven’t seen Judd in a minute—but we’re all kind of like alumni. We cut our teeth as actors in that film. Almost all of us look at New Jack City as being the breakout role of our acting careers.
People still stop me in the street and say “New Jack City!” or “Scotty!” They still walk up to Wesley and shout, “Nino Brown!” in his face. And as much success as Chris has since had with his groundbreaking standup concerts and hit movies, people will still call him “Pookie!” For a relatively small movie, it had a big impact. Of course, we didn’t think about that during principal photography. Nobody ever thinks that their very first movie will still hold water twenty-five years later.
New Jack City, along with Scarface and King of New York, had the biggest impact of any movie within the rap game. Decades later, you still see the ripples. You’ve still got cats rhyming about Nino Brown. You’ve got Lil’ Wayne—whose real last name is Carter—calling his album The Carter, after the housing project in the movie.
The first few days on location was a pretty daunting experience. You start seeing your daily scenes in the rushes, and those images are raw. You don’t have the benefit of music, effects or editing tricks, so you’ve got to imagine the potential of how this scene will fit in the finished movie. Honestly, while we were filming New Jack, I didn’t ever think I pulled it off. Even after we wrapped, I didn’t think I did it.
That made me pretty nervous and unsettled. Then I went to see the movie when it first opened, not at some red-carpet premiere, but just a regular screening at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Bought a ticket, some popcorn and a soda like everyone else. And then I sat in the rear of the theater—lay back in the cut—behind some guys who looked like they were from the streets. My first moment on screen, they started heckling me.
“Aw shit, look at Ice-T in that fuckin’ hat.”
“Motherfucker looks stupid in them dreads …”
But about ten or fifteen minutes into the movie, these same dudes were calling me “Scotty,” not “Ice-T.”
“Don’t do it, Scotty!”
And I bust out laughing.
That’s when I said, Oh shit. I did it. I made them believe in the character. I never went up to say hi to these dudes who’d been heckling me. I just wanted to get a sense of how a real audience would react.
Funny thing is, I’d fought Mario and the producers on how they wanted me to look. They wanted Scotty to have dreads and wear hats and shit. They said one of the reasons they insisted on me having dreadlocks is this: “You’ve got an existing image; you can’t look like Ice-T. Everyone knows Ice-T. We have to break that, give you another vibe, otherwise the audience won’t allow you to be the character.” That was a great lesson about acting, and it worked.
At the time, the movie created a lot of controversy. It got great revi
ews from critics like Roger Ebert. But there was major static, too. People don’t remember this much today, but at the time, there was a lot of controversy surrounding New Jack City.
The film came out about six months before John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood and, for a time at least, there was a sense that these “ ’hood movies” were going to create a wave of rioting. That black folks couldn’t see an action-packed movie about their own lives without going buck-wild. True, there were some disturbances and violence when our movie opened in big cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit.
But if you check the facts, only ten of the approximately eight hundred theaters screening the film experienced problems. The violence did get a lot of media play, especially after one screening in Brooklyn, where some dudes from rival housing projects busted shots at each other, killing one man and wounding a woman. Actually the most widely reported incident occurred in Westwood Village in Los Angeles. Mann’s Theater sold out tickets for the film’s opening night and a mob of pissed-off kids, frustrated that they couldn’t get inside, started smashing store windows and vandalizing cars.
To me, the idea that the content of New Jack City had these kids wilding out is total bullshit. If a dude is going to shoot another dude at the movies, that’s been in his heart long before he sits down in the fucking theater. And more than likely, they already have some existing beef.
The onscreen violence in New Jack City was much more realistic—much less of a cartoonish, shoot-’em-up kind that was in a lot of Sly Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Bruce Willis movies. And if you go back and watch it today, New Jack was one of the earliest, strongest anti-drug movies. In fact, it was almost preachy and heavy handed in its anti-drug message. One of my major scenes has Scotty saying: “A drug dealer is the worst kind of brother. He won’t sell it to his sister. He won’t sell it to his mother, but he’ll sell it to one of his boys on the street.”