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Making Beat Street

I was the first professional journalist to travel to the South Bronx to document an explosion in youth culture that had been going on for a decade while being completely ignored by the media.

After publishing some landmark articles in the Village Voice, I began work on a film script. Since I’d gotten most of my hip hop history from Afrika Bambaataa, the first hip hopper to come downtown, I concentrated on the Black Spades involvement, and failed to mention the Ghetto Brothers or their peace council.

I’d seen The Warriors but had no idea the film was based on a real event. When I asked Bam why the gangs had broken up into crews, he attributed it to the girls getting sick of the violence. In reality, Benjy Melendez played the key role in bringing conga drums back into the streets. I wish Bam had clued me into Benjy’s importance in laying a foundation so hip hop could emerge.

I got played by Harry Belafonte, who bought the rights to my script, and then pressured me to turn over my interviews with hip hop’s founders to the Schomberg Library in Harlem. I was so naive. I had no idea how valuable those transcripts were or how inclusion at the library would soon be broadcast all over the internet, drawing historians to reap the benefits of my research for free without ever having to speak to me. Once Harry got control of those interviews, he didn’t need me anymore.

Recently, Belafonte sold his archive to that library for millions, so maybe Harry sits on their board of directors. When he pressured me to turn over the material, I had no idea I’d been soon fired off my own film project. But revealing me as the true instigator only took spotlight away from Belafonte, who never understood hip hop, which is why Beat Street put more effort on staging the African dance numbers than the break dance battles.

Back in those days, I never met an art director who comprehended graffiti had a unique style. Their attempts to hire airbrush professionals to replicate graffiti were always an utter fail. Imagine if Phase 2 had been supervising the graffiti in Beat Street. Instead, like me, Phase was cut out of the film entirely.

Belafonte had been deluged by chuckleheads claiming they knew the real history of hip hop, and how it came out of Brooklyn, or Queens, or Manhattan, or any damn borough but the Bronx. According to these fools, Phase was a faker and I didn’t know what I was talking about. I heard similar stories when I later published Art After Midnight. One reviewer claimed Jean Michel Basquiat had zero talent and implied I was only promoting him because we were friends. The publisher seems to have bought into that lie because they soon shredded all copies, which is why the book is so hard to find.

When the Schomberg held a 30-year anniversary for Beat Street, they failed to even invite me. Then I noticed that the gifting of my archive had been credited online not to me but to my editor at St. Martins, so I asked the library to return my transcripts and take my name off their website. A reply from their lawyer claimed they never got any transcripts from me.

I put the original script on Smashwords (Looking for the Perfect Beat), and still hold out hope someone will produce the real story with my original title and script.

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My homage to Samo in Beat Street

Just a curious question that recently dawned on me after watching the Basquiat film. Seeing that you were the original writer of “Beat Street,” was the Ramo character a not-so-thinly veiled reference to Jean-Michel and his SAMO moniker? If so, what a prophetic ending! –James

Great question, James. I don’t know how I came up with the name Ramon, I knew I had to switch up all the names and was looking for something original that had style. In my original script, a central character catching on fire in a subway tunnel was named Ramon, and his tag was DJ Ramo.

In dropping the “n,” I must have been thinking about Jean-Michel’s tag, Samo. So I guess it is sort of a nod in his direction. The climax in my script involved Ramon catching on fire in a subway tunnel. It was a depiction of what happened to Ali when he was painting one night with Futura 2000. A spark by a passing train set off a can of spray-paint whose nozzle was hissing. Ali was covered by flaming paint and barely survived. While in the hospital, he gave a famous interview to the New York Times about the dangers of graffiti writing. In embellishing his story, he claimed to have been abandoned by Futura while on flames.

Futura actually put out the fire and took him to the emergency room. After the story was printed, however, no one would believe Futura’s version and he was forced to join the Navy to get a ticket out of town for a few years. My original script was called Looking for the Perfect Beat and was very, very different from what eventually came out. In fact, the main characters’ names were almost all that survived. Someday, maybe Looking for the Perfect Beat will actually get produced.

Henry Chalfant was a super cool dude, one of the first photographers to document NYC graffiti. Manny Kirchheimer was the first filmmaker, and his film “Stations of the Elevated” is online. While I was working on Beat Street, Henry was just completing Style Wars, which was largely the work of Tony Silver. Tony I didn’t like so much. It was Tony’s idea to build Style Wars around Cap.

Belafonte and his crew already had my script, a realistic portrayal of a budding rap group trying to make a record. Slice of life and It also had a Romeo-Juliet style story concerning a South Bronx rapper hooking up with a girl from a privileged background.

But when Belafonte got a sneak preview of Style Wars, everything changed and my script was tossed and they began writing a new one using my characters names, and it was all about Cap, who they renamed Spit.

Cap was never mentioned in my book or my script. But when I asked Phase 2 who were the current kings, Cap was the first name he mentioned. “You have to give him props, because he’s so up,” said Phase.

Graffiti was divided into crews and crews had conflicts that sometimes included dissing each other’s work. Sometimes it involved tag rights, like the conflict between Snake and Snake-1. Snake 1 began adding “king of all snakes” to his tag.

Cap was not the loner they portrayed him as. He was in the Morris Park Crew, some of whom were dust heads. Instead of asking Phase or Tracy about Cap and his crew, Silver focussed on the younger writers in opposing crews building Cap up as the evil villain of graf, dissing the most sacred rules. Some of those kids were scared to death of Cap in real life, but in the film they talked big shit about how somebody was going to cap Cap. I imagine some of that drama could have been coached and encouraged by Tony.

Eventually, Cap was run out of the crew so demonized was he by Style Wars and Beat Street.