Production
Originally, Tupac Shakur was set to play Sharif and rapper Spice 1 to play Caine, but they were later fired with director Allen Hughes claiming that Tupac was causing trouble on the set. Six months after the firing, Shakur assaulted the director, resulting in Shakur being found guilty of assault and battery. Tupac did not want to play the role of Sharif, not being a Muslim. Tupac wanted to play O-Dog. They were later replaced with Larenz Tate and Tyrin Turner, respectively.
The movie featured realistic dialogue, and is known for its crude and profane language. The word "fuck" and its derivatives are used 300 times in the 97-minute film. This was a record up to that time and the film still holds one of the highest fuck per minute rates at 3.07 times per minute. The movie was slightly edited for an R-rating; edited scenes included Samuel L. Jackson's character's killing of the man in the poker scene, the shooting of the red-sweatered gang member by A-Wax, and Caine's death at the end. The director's cut was first released on laserdisc, then released on DVD in 2008. The film's first DVD release was the R-rated theatrical version. The director's cut has since been re-rated R for strong bloody violence, drug use and pervasive language (instead of strong violence, drug use and language). Several additional scenes were also added, including a scene showing Caine and O-Dog breaking into a car in the garage, the funeral of Caine's cousin, and a scene after the funeral. But according to the Hughes brothers, a prison riot scene, which was cut by the studio to avoid an NC-17 rating, has not been restored.
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)