"Can't change the world if we can't change ourselves . . ." -- The Notorious B.I.G.

NOTORIOUS charts the remarkable rise of Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace - who, in just a few short years, shot from the tough streets of Brooklyn to the heights of hip-hop legend. Peeling back his mythic image eleven years after his tragic death, NOTORIOUS reveals the tumultuous and all-too-brief journey of a blazingly talented, fiercely determined young man whose unforgettable rap stories of inner city street life, with their raw truth and vivid rhymes, became emblematic of a whole generation's brutal reality and its dreams of escaping it for something bigger. 
The story follows the young Biggie (portrayed by Wallace's real-life son Christopher Jordan Wallace as a youngster and Brooklyn rapper Jamal Woolard as an adult) from his surprising youth as a Catholic school honor student whose proud mother (Angela Bassett) tries to keep him off the street corners to his years as a tough teenage drug dealer, and then to his life-changing move into young fatherhood, as his girlfriend Jan (Julia Pace Mitchell) gives birth to his daughter, prompting him to go on a mission to provide for his child by any means -- legal or not.  But everything changes when a "freestyle" rap tape that Biggie created just for fun ends up with B.I.G. Daddy Kane's DJ Mister Cee (Edwin Freeman), and eventually in the hands of ambitious rap impresario Sean "Puffy" Combs (Derek Luke), whose marketing savvy and production genius transform Biggie into a cultural sensation almost overnight. 
Now, with his career taking off into superstar territory, Biggie finds himself with "mo' money, mo' problems" and is under all kinds of new pressures.  His managers, Wayne Barrow (C. Malik Whitfield) and Mark Pitts (Kevin Phillip), attempt to keep the young man's feet on the ground and mind in the studio, as he juggles the demands of recording, fatherhood and marriage to fellow Bad Boy artist Faith Evans (Antonique Smith) not to mention his complicated friendship with fellow Junior M.A.F.I.A. member Kimberly "Lil' Kim" Jones (Naturi Naughton) and the increasingly heated rivalry with West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie.) 
But just as Biggie starts to come into true manhood and solidify his musical legacy as the creator of one of hip-hop's greatest bodies of work, fate has other plans. 
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents a Voletta Wallace Films/By Storm Films/State Street Pictures and Bad Boy Films production, NOTORIOUS, directed by George Tillman, Jr. (SOUL FOOD, MEN OF HONOR), from a script by Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker

"I GOT A STORY TO TELL" -- -DEVELOPING NOTORIOUS
The extraordinary life and legacy of Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace, along with his untimely death at the age of 24 at the height of his creative power just as he was getting started, have long made him one of music's most enigmatic icons.  Known as a raw, impassioned poet of the streets who gave a resounding baritone voice to the inner city voiceless and whose powerful influence continues to be heard across the whole spectrum of contemporary hip-hop music, Notorious B.I.G. (also known as Biggie and Biggie Smalls) has become a lasting legend. More than a decade after his death, kids are still memorizing every word on his records, artists are still inspired by his swagger, style and ability to capture the drama of urban city life in whiplash wordplay, and the world is still riveted by a story rife with music, glamour, danger and improbable dreams realized.   
But who was the real man - the son, father, husband, friend and artist - behind that legend?
NOTORIOUS, a film sparked by a trio of producers who knew Christopher Wallace intimately - his mother, Voletta Wallace, and his former managers, Wayne Barrow and Mark Pitts -- tackles that compelling question and explores the profound importance of Biggie's music at the same time getting to the heart of his humanity. In the decade following Biggie's still unsolved murder, numerous people approached Voletta Wallace, as well as Barrow and Pitts, with plans for making a movie about the rapper's volatile and vibrant life.  For all those years they said "no" - wanting to assure that any film about him would be as authentic and true to raw reality as The Notorious B.I.G. was in his own storytelling. 
Their hope was that one day they would be able to make a movie that would not censor or sensationalize Christopher Wallace's life, but rather unfold the full complexity of the man - the  good and the bad, the beauty and the brutality - and ensure that the whole scope of his journey from the streets to manhood was preserved respectfully and artistically. Wallace, Barrow, and Pitts were finally able to do that by producing NOTORIOUS themselves. 
"People listen to his music and that's what they know, but that's not the only thing we wanted people to walk away from with this movie," Barrow says of the threesome's hopes for the film.  "We wanted audiences to walk away with a picture of exactly what Ms. Wallace raised her son to be:  Christopher Wallace, the man."
Wallace was born on May 21, 1972 and grew up in one of Brooklyn's poorest and toughest neighborhoods, Bedford Stuysvesant.  He revealed a talent for rapping at a very young age and was already recording by the time he was a teenager.  Although he was a smart and accomplished student, at the age of 17, attracted to the fast cash and high lifestyles of the drug dealers he saw around him, he dropped out to lead a life on the streets.  Becoming a father only heightened his ambition to make ends meet by whatever means necessary. But when a demo tape he made fell into the hands of rap's rapidly rising producer, Sean "Puffy" Combs, those means changed radically. Combs signed Biggie instantly and made his rocketing success the cornerstone of his new Bad Boy Records. 
First known as "Biggie Smalls," then as "The Notorious B.I.G.," Wallace won a massive following by spinning funny, gritty tales of the real violence he'd encountered on the streets, painting a sometimes shocking, but always deeply true, portrait of inner city America.  His rare mix of complete street credibility and undeniable commercial appeal reinvigorated the entire hip-hop world, raising the bar on its lyrics and helping to make the culture profoundly relevant again.  After racking up a number of hits and becoming the biggest solo male act on both the pop and R&B charts, it seemed that The Notorious B.I.G. was just beginning an incredible and unprecedented career.  But on March 9, 1997, as Wallace was leaving a Vibe Magazine party after the Soul Train Music Awards, he was shot and killed by an unknown assailant. 
While Wallace would be cut down, his music would not.  Shortly after his death, his second album was released and instantly went No. 1, and he became the first artist ever to have two posthumous No 1 hits.  Since then, his influence has continued to resonate across the music industry, kept alive by the many artists whose careers he helped to jumpstart, from P. Diddy to Jay-Z, and the broader future for hip-hop he helped to forge. 
Those were the facts, but the filmmakers wanted to dig much deeper into the life and times of Christopher Wallace to get to what really drove him. To create a full-fledged, no-holds-barred portrait of how The Notorious B.I.G. came to be the man he was, the team brought in a screenwriter who already knew every piece of his remarkable story: Cheo Hodari Coker, the author of Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G. and contributor to Rolling Stone, Spin, Los Angeles Times, and VIBE, was the last person to interview Wallace, speaking at length with him the night before he was murdered. 
Coker says that his many long interviews with Biggie left him with the indelible impression of a young man who had already lived a lifetime. "Christopher Wallace only lived to be 24 years old, but they were an epic 24 years," he says. "For me the biggest challenge was doing service to his career as a musical legend, while also capturing the nuances of his personality. He was funny. He was playful. He was a joy to interview because he was so open."
Not only did Coker have the benefit of having done more than five hours of one-on-one interviews with Wallace, he also, in the year's following Biggie's death, amassed dozens of conversations with many of the principal figures in Wallace's life, including Voletta Wallace, Mark Pitts, Wayne Barrow, Faith Evans, James "Lil Cease" Lloyd, DJ Enuff, DJ Mister Cee, Sean "Puffy" Combs, Damien "D-Roc" Butler, and many of the other real life people featured in the film.
All of this went into carving out a view of Biggie that melds each of the disparate elements of his life -- the rough code of the streets, his intimate relationships with family and friends and the transcendent power of his music - into a kaleidoscopic portrait.   
"Biggie was a genius at encapsulating entire moments of his life into a three and half minute song, and that's the same trick I hoped to pull off in 119 pages as a screenwriter," Coker says. "I wanted to pick vivid moments that would symbolize and summarize all the years of his life, and fit them all together visually the way Biggie did it musically for 'Ready To Die' or 'Life After Death.'" 
Coker also had the advantage of being able to pull from stories that Wallace had confided to him during their interviews, adding subtle nuances and details to the screenplay.  For example, Coker always loved the tale of how, in his lean early days, the rapper didn't want his mother to know he was dealing drugs, so he would hide all of his designer clothes--the Izod and Le Tigre shirts, his jewelry and other spoils -- in a footlocker on the roof of his 226 St. James apartment building -- and change into 'fresh' clothes for Fulton street as soon as she wasn't looking.
"It's just another little thing that makes it clear that Christopher Wallace and The Notorious B.I.G. were two completely different people," Coker comments. 
Screenwriter Reggie Rock Bythewood, who penned Spike Lee's critically acclaimed GET ON THE BUS as well as writing and directing DANCING IN SEPTEMBER and BIKER BOYZ, also came on board to deepen the character relationships, and add his own probing view into Biggie's life, influence and appeal not only to hardcore hip-hop fans but to anyone who heard his full story. 
"I wanted to go against the grain of what is usually looked at when you make a movie about somebody's life," Bythewood explains.  "The questions I wanted to ask were:  what were his flaws as a human being?  How did all that feed into his music and the choices that he made?" 
He continues: "I think what makes Christopher Wallace so interesting is that sometimes he seems to represent the worst of what people think about young black men; yet on another level, he symbolizes the best of young black men - as dutiful sons, attentive fathers, loyal friends. I hope the film's exploration of that duality will challenge's peoples perspectives - both on Christopher Wallace and on ourselves." 
Both Coker and Bythewood ultimately came to see Wallace as a kind of chameleon who repeatedly and successfully changed colors, while trying to be all things to all kinds of people. Each of his identities became integral to the story - from "Chrissy Pooh" the apple of his mother's eye; to "Big Chris" the adolescent crack dealer; to "Biggie Smalls" the corner freestyle rap king; to "The Notorious B.I.G.," the music superstar; and finally full circle back to Christopher Wallace, the grown businessman looking out for his family and the future of hip-hop.
Bythewood summarizes:  "Who he was for Lil' Kim was totally unique from who he was for Faith, and how he was with each of them was also different from who he was to his mother.  That was his appeal as a person, and it was also his genius as an artist. In his records, women would hear one thing, the gangsters another thing, the hip-hop critics something else, and the average person listening to the radio would hear something else. But I think all of them agreed that he was one of a kind and that's what we set out to capture."

SOMETHING BIG:  BUILDING THE TEAM
With a screenplay bristling with all the intense situations and colorful personalities that surrounded Christopher Wallace on his journey, the filmmakers next set out to find a director who could bring it to life with both honesty and creativity.  The bill was tough to fill.  They were looking for someone who was already a fan of the Notorious B.I.G., who understood the rhythm and flow of his rhymes, and who would have insight into where he was coming from and how he accomplished so much in so short a time.  They found that combination in an unexpected person:  George Tillman, Jr., the director best known for the family-oriented comedy hits SOUL FOOD and BARBER SHOP. 
Tillman might not be known as rough-hewn urban director but he had a vital, long-time personal relationship with the Notorious B.I.G.'s music, vividly remembering driving out to California for the first time with his friend Robert Teitel (who would go on the become his producing partner) with only a few hundred dollars and "Ready To Die" in the tape deck. Driven by his love for the man and the music, he jumped at the chance to prove that he could take on this story in the spirit that Biggie would have appreciated. "If you listen to his rhymes, Biggie told stories, and as a filmmaker, what I am is a storyteller so I related to that. I wanted to tell his story in the way he liked stories to be told," Tillman says. 
Tillman - and Teitel, who accompanied him on their first pitch meeting and soon joined the producing team -- won over the producers with their passion and their vision of the story as a larger-than-life tale of a profound coming of age.  They wanted to make a hip-hop movie with a difference:  one that would be as much about the human condition and emotions behind the music as the music itself. 
Explains Tillman: "For me the greatest story about Wallace is not just that he became one of the biggest rappers of all time -- what really excited me was the personal journey he took, as a young man who, after becoming a father himself, was able to use the love of his family to become a better person. I saw in him the story of an African American man who didn't finish high school or college, who had kids at a young age, yet who figured out how to grow beyond what was expected of him and move ahead on his own terms.  That's the one journey he had fully completed before his death.  And that's the story I wanted to tell:  how Biggie, in the short course of his life, became a full man."
Adds Teitel:  "We saw NOTORIOUS as the American dream. It's about a kid who didn't come from much, who was raised by a single mother, who not only created this lasting music, but was a part of changing the culture and making hip-hop a part of the American fabric." 
"They gave an amazing pitch," Wayne Barrow calls. "George gave us, beat by beat, exactly each character moment throughout the film that he wanted to capture. He had dug so much deeper than the norm, he made it clear this story really meant something to him." 
In turn, the producers assured Tillman and Teitel they would be given ample creative freedom in recounting Wallace's life without interference and second-guessing. "I have to give a lot of credit to the people around Christopher, because they let us tell the real story, flaws and all," says Teitel. "We always knew if we didn't, the audience would not buy it."
But before they could tell a story that humanized Wallace, the filmmakers had to find a human who could play a man whose charisma and talent were larger than life; someone who could embody the twin personalities of Biggie and Christopher; someone who, most of all, could bop like the massive cultural icon he was yet also mirror the man's inner sensitivity and humor.   
The key to everything for Tillman, the key to telling a story deeper than the one the audience thought they knew about who The Notorious B.I.G. was, would hinge on total authenticity.  "Audiences want honesty and authenticity," summarizes the director.  "The most important things I was looking for in NOTORIOUS were the kinds of real performances that let the audience really get a look behind the surface." 

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
GEORGE TILLMAN, JR. (Director) is a successful writer, director, and producer. Tillman's first success SOUL FOOD, which he wrote and directed, put him on the map and earned four Image Awards wins including Outstanding Motion Picture. The film spawned its own series on television and ran for a successful 5 years. Tillman followed up by directing MEN OF HONOR in 2000 which starred Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr.
In 2002 Tillman got his first producer credit on a feature with the wildly successful BARBERSHOP starring Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer. He followed up this success with BARBERSHIOP 2: BACK IN BUSINESS. The film won Queen Latifah and Cedric the Entertainer Outstanding Supporting Actor and Actress awards at the BET Comedy Awards.
Other credits as producer include the third installment of BARBERSHOP, BEAUTY SHOP featuring Queen Latifah, ROLL BOUNCE starring Mike Epps and Bow Wow, and this holiday's NOTHING LIKE THE HOLIDAYS which features Alfred Molina, Debra Messing, and Freddy Rodriguez.

REGGIE ROCK BYTHEWOOD (Writer) a Bronx native and a graduate of Marymount Manhattan College for acting, founded a New York based theatre company called The Tribe. He wrote and directed two plays for them called The Harlem Cowboy and The Arm Wrestle.
Bythewood moved to Los Angeles in 1990 to pursue a career in screenwriting and got one of his first gigs writing for the hit TV series "A Different World." From there Bythewood went on to write for "New York Under Cover" where he became the show's supervising producer.
His first film as director and writer was the acclaimed TV movie DANCING IN SEPTEMBER and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy. Other credits as writer/director include BIKER BOYZ starring Laurence Fishburne, Djimon Hounsou, and Derek Luke.

CHEO HODARI COKER (Writer) Former Los Angeles Times reporter Cheo Hodari Coker is a well regarded entertainment journalist, author, and screenwriter. The 36 year old scribe has written cover stories, major features, and reviews for Premiere Magazine, VIBE, Essence, Details, XXL, Rolling Stone, The Face, and the Village Voice and has been interviewed for VH-1's "Behind The Music" and BET's "American Gangster".
Born in New Haven, CT, Coker's fascination with hip-hop began at an early age. Isolated in the "cow town" of Storrs, CT (home of the World Champion UConn Huskies basketball), Coker would clamor for the DJ Red Alert tapes his cousins left behind when they visited from Northern New Jersey.
By the time Coker had graduated cum laude from the Hotchkiss School in 1990, and was an English major at Stanford University, he had given up his dreams of being a lawyer, and aspired to be the next Nelson George.  By his sophomore year, he had stopped writing for the Stanford Daily and started freelancing for The Bomb, RapPages, and URB. By his senior year, he was skipping classes to fly around the country to interview Ice Cube, Ice-T, KRS-One, the Wu-Tang Clan, Warren G and Outkast for The Source and VIBE. Few of the magazines he was writing for knew they were sending records to his dorm room.
Coker realized his dream of writing for Rolling Stone the summer after he graduated, reviewing the record of a fledgling Brooklyn based rap star called The Notorious BIG. "Ready To Die" was one of the best records Coker had ever heard, and he had to meet the man who made it. He got his wish in September of 1994, interviewing the rapper for the very first time on his stoop at 226 St. James place in Brooklyn. His six hours of interviews with the Notorious BIG that day, and the night before Wallace was killed later became the basis of Coker's 2004 book
Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G.
Coker sold his first screenplay "Flow" (co-written with veteran screenwriter Richard Wesley) to New Line Cinema and John Singleton in 1997. He's since written "Legend: A Bob Marley Story" for Warner Brothers, "Living For The City: The Marion Barry Story" for HBO, "Greenlight" for director Antoine Fuqua and adapted Claude Brown's seminal coming of age tale "Manchild In The Promised Land" for producer Rudy Langlais. He is currently writing a film set in the world of the Low Rider car cruising for producer Brian Grazer.
Coker lives in Los Angeles with his Pediatrician wife, Dr. Tumaini Rucker Coker and their 3 year old twin boys.


READ MORE: WHY YOU TRYING TO PLAY ME:  CASTING "NOTORIOUS"

READ MORE: LIFE AFTER DEATH:  THE FILMING OF NOTORIOUS

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