Earlier this week, an editorial by former hip-hop journalist Dee Barnes on “Straight Outta Compton,” the Universal Pictures-backed biopic on N.W.A., reminded the world of her brutal assault at the hands of Dr. Dre in 1991, which was completely omitted from the film.
Despite debuting at No. 1 at the box office, pulling in $56.1 million and garnering critical acclaim, the film’s positive opening was haunted by criticism about the film’s omission of Barnes’ assault and other infamous situations involving Dre’s alleged violence against women.
But, as the Los Angeles Times reveals, the infamous altercation actually appeared in an earlier screenplay for the film by Jonathan Herman, who has been tapped to pen the next reboot for “Scarface.” According to the report, Herman included a scene that featured the assault that took place at a party in Hollywood in 1991.
In the draft, Dre’s character, “eyes glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness, contempt” looks at Barnes and approaches her, before saying, “Saw that [expletive] you did with Cube. Really had you under his spell, huh? Ate up everything he said. Let him diss us. Sell us out.”
“I just let him tell his story,” Barnes’ character replied, “That’s what I do. It’s my job.”
“I thought we were cool, you and me,” Dre responded. “But you don’t give [expletive]. You just wanna laugh at N.W.A, make us all look like fools.”
The conversation continued with Barnes throwing her drink in Dre’s face before he attacks, “flinging her around like a rag-doll, while she screams, cries, begs for him to stop.”
It was one of the several scenes excluded from the film, including a scene that involved Dre getting shot four times in the leg, his house catching fire during a barbecue, and a graphic flashback of his younger brother in the fight that claimed his life.
On The Breakfast Club earlier this month, Ice Cube, one of the film’s executive producers, and director F. Gary Gray talked about the challenge of cramming 10 years into a two hour film. “You try to make a movie that tells the origin and tells the story. We’re trying to cram 10 years into two hours, but you can’t get everything in,” said Cube. “You just gotta tell the story and tell what happens in a comprehensive way and it’s still a movie, [so] it still has to adhere to the laws of cinematography and film.”
In the essay published on Gawker, Barnes penned her thoughts on the film after watching it.
“When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, “Uhhh, what happened?” Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history,” Barnes wrote.