Woods-Wright also signed on as co-producer on the film. She took her shoes off by the end of the meeting she was crying.' And she told us so many stories about Eric. 'The first hour, she seemed sort of guarded, but after a while it just became this love-in. Straus says one of the writers invited her to meet. And I think that experience, like, sort of frayed her a little bit.' 'I think a lot of people had come at her, right after Eazy died - she'd inherited a lot of money. 'She had a reputation of being guarded,' says Straus. Straus says the key was getting Eazy-E's widow, Tomica Woods-Wright, to release the rights to N.W.A's music. But the whole venture took more than 11 years, says executive producer Bill Straus, who began his career as a production assistant on Ice Cube's movie Boyz n the Hood. Dre eventually joined Ice Cube to produce the movie. 'And I'm like, 'We're not messing it up, we're gonna enhance it.' I just told him that we're not gonna be wack.'ĭr. 'He was like, 'Don't touch our history, don't mess with our legacy, don't mess it up,'' Ice Cube recalls. Now a Hollywood actor and screenwriter, Cube says he also had to convince Dr. 'Then you had calls and threats from Jerry Heller to Suge Knight, so it just was a mountain.' 'It was hard to get the financing that we needed, to license all the music we needed, to also get a studio behind the movie that wouldn't treat it like a typical hip-hop biopic,' he says. Ice Cube, who is also one of the movie's producers, says getting Straight Outta Compton made was rough.

The film also includes the group's musical beefs, their business dealings with manager Jerry Heller and menacing incidents involving former bodyguard Suge Knight, who co-founded Death Row Records with Dr. The movie includes vulnerable moments of brotherhood and friendship, and a moment during the 1992 LA riots depicting the truce between the Bloods and the Crips gangs. 'We just wasn't five guys crying wolf or complaining about our little incidents with the officers, but that it was an epidemic and it was everywhere.' 'This song was bigger than N.W.A at that point - it was an anthem,' Ice Cube says. 'We always saw ourselves as street reporters,' he told NPR, noting that 'F** tha Police' continues to be used during protests against the police, from Los Angeles to Ferguson, Mo. Ice Cube, born O'Shea Jackson, was just 16 when he joined N.W.A to write what he called reality raps. And Charnas says their songs are still relevant today.

The former writer for The Source magazine says N.W.A's diatribes against police brutality put West Coast rap on the map. 'This kind of counter-cop resistance music existed before N.W.A, but N.W.A gave it its name,' says Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. The song had earlier prompted the FBI to write an angry letter to N.W.A's label, Ruthless Records, which in turn used it to generate publicity. One scene re-enacts a 1989 concert in Detroit as the band performs their song 'F*** tha Police.' The scene shows the cops descending onto the stage, inciting the audience to protest.

Nwa straight outta compton