January 08, 2009 @ 6:07 pm

A Ballad for the Fallen Soldier: NOTORIOUS

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VIBE goes behind the scenes of the most anticipated movie of 2009

Coogi sweater—check. Versace shade —check. White brim—check. Melon colored slacks— um, okay. It’s April 24, 2008, and Jamal “Gravy” Woolard is onstage at Manhattan Center Studios’ Hammerstein Ballroom, channeling the best rapper not alive.

He’s performing take after take of Biggie’s first major hit, “Juicy,” for Notorious (Fox Searchlight), a motion picture about the short life of Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace. In full costume, at 6-foot-4, and well over 300 pounds, Gravy’s Biggie is more than believable. Surrounded by part of Big’s real-life clique, Junior M.A.F.I.A. members Money L and Nino Brown, the scene feels like a resurrection. Derek Luke is onstage, too. Having morphed into a Versace-clad Puff Daddy, he does his best to approximate Puff’s particular style of dance, a sexy but unforced Harlem swagger that barely looks like work—when Puff did it.

Luke, a fine actor and a New Jersey native, is struggling. He’s too self-conscious to be a truly dazzling dancer. But the scene requires so much coverage—director George Tillman Jr. coaxes the crowd of extras to provide energy at least two dozen times—that Luke finally forgets himself and leans into Puff’s signature move, a deep shoulder lunge and bounce.

The probable source of Luke’s unease sees a take he likes and sprints onstage, too. When the crowd of overworked volunteers, most of them preteens or maybe even toddlers when Ready to Die debuted on Bad Boy Records in 1994, sees the real Diddy at the mic, shining like clean money, they erupt, chanting “Baaad Boy” at the mogul’s behest.
“Gravy’s killing it. If I tell you he’s killing it, then that’s all we need to say,” Sean Combs said later to MTV.com.

“People asked me years ago who you’d want to play me, and I said Derek Luke...so it was just destined. I got to see him do his thing—it was scary for me.”

It’s also Luke’s birthday, and with the film scene complete and blessed by Puff, Luke makes a quick exit to celebrate. Tillman moves on to the 1995 Junior M.A.F.I.A. hit “Player’s Anthem,” and on the third verse, Naturi Naughton, 24, in a revealing bodysuit, muscles her way through the thicket of men onstage and proceeds to put down a strong rendering of early Lil’ Kim. On the side of the stage where the real-life Lil’ Cease watches himself as portrayed by a tiny actor named Marc John Jefferies, there is a reunion going on.

Rube, June, and LD, cats who grew up with Big and used to post up on Fulton Street, are here.  So is DJ Enuff, who backed Big on his earliest promo dates. Deric “D-Dot” Angelettie,  one-time producer with Puff’s The Hitmen and “The Mad Rapper” on Big’s second album, is here too, having coached Gravy on Big’s studio habits and vocal cadences.  Damion “D-Roc” Butler, Biggie’s best friend for real, is of course locked up, serving out the last few months of his term in the notorious Lil’ Kim case.

James “Lil’ Cease” Lloyd, who used to iron Big’s shirts and run to the bodega for Phillies, is a grown man now, ordering a young kid— called Red because of his freckles like Malcolm X’s—to roll up. “This film brought all of us together again,” he says. “Kim is the only one who doesn’t want to be a part of it.” When Biggie’s protégé and sometime lover was approached by the film’s co-producers—Big’s mother, Voletta Wallace, along with Wayne Barrow and Mark Pitts, two of his former managers—she received the same $5,000 for life rights that everyone portrayed in the film got.

But when Kim showed up at the production office with her manager, Lance “Un” Rivera, to have a meeting with Tillman, she spazzed out at Naturi’s casting. “She’s too black,” Kim was heard saying. According to sources on set, Kim wanted Christina Milian instead. “Kim don’t look like herself! Look at her!” says Cease. “I told [Naturi] she was doing a great job and to not let that shit affect her.”

Obviously, no casting decision in Notorious was more important than the lead role. There was an open call and then months-long speculation about who had actually won the part. The blogosphere cast Big mimic Guerilla Black early in the process. Sean Kingston was also mentioned, and an excruciating online audition process only proved how hard it would be to find the right man for the job.

Until Jamal Woolard’s audition, that is. “He walked out the room,” Barrow remembers, “and Ms. Wallace turned to me and Mark and was like, ‘That’s my son.’” George Tillman, who directed Robert De Niro in Men of Honour (Fox, 2000), wasn’t quite convinced.

“We put him through a five- month boot camp,” says the director. “Had him working with an acting coach four times a week, got him a top dialect coach from Juilliard to bring his pitch down a bit. I was showing him tapes of Big, to get his behavior beats. Big had a fluid way of moving, he had asthma so that influenced his breathing. I gave him movies. He watched La Vie en Rose, Val Kilmer in The Doors, Dustin Hoffman in Lenny.”

Tillman says Woolard “connected to” La Vie en Rose (Picturehouse, 2007), the Oscar-winning film about the tragically self- destructive French vocalist Edith Piaf.  A Brooklyn native from the Lafayette Gardens housing project, 33-year-old Woolard spent the late ’90s trying to break into the business, but it wasn’t until he was involved in that hip hop rite of passage—a shooting, outside New York radio station Hot 97 [WQHT-FM]— that he finally got a name: the rapper who was shot in the ass. A bigger fan of Jay-Z than of Biggie, he released the mixtape Without a Doubt, channeling both Brooklyn MCs years before being cast in Notorious. But rapping well was only the first challenge he faced as an actor.

“I had to learn when to be Chris, when to be Biggie, when to be Notorious—when the swagger changed with his weight,” he says. “I had to learn how to treat your mistress, your bitch, your wife. Knowing when to be a thug, when to be a player. I read all the books, watched the DVDs over and over. I knew his music already, but I went back and really studied his ad-libs, his cadences, his sense of humor. I studied the performances, his moves, his breathing.”

For weeks Gravy immersed himself in Tillman’s Biggie Boot Camp. He had a baby on the way, and the offer from Fox wasn’t concrete, so he was putting in work for free.  Tillman remembers when Gravy became Biggie for him at last.

“Jamal was talking about the red carpet and the premiere, and I was like, ‘Don’t focus on the red carpet. We got a lot of work to do.’ And he got mad. He was like, ‘Yo, I need this shit! Y’all telling me I got the movie, I’m doing all this work, and I’m still living in the projects. I need this shit.’ And that was very close to the scene where Big’s telling Puff, Don’t gas me up, I need this shit. It mirrored that moment for me, and I was like, This is the guy.” 

Pick up VIBE's February issue to read the rest!

Article tags: Notorious B.I.G., Diddy, Lil Kim, Notorious, Tupac Shakur, Notorious09 

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