Director Allen Hughes has received the blessing of Tupac Shakur’s estate to helm a five-part docuseries based on the late rapper’s life.
As part of the deal, Hughes (“Menace II Society”) will have full access to Pac’s released and unreleased material, Deadline reports. The announcement says the series will be “the first definitive, comprehensive project on Shakur with the full cooperation of the estate.”
Hughes worked with Pac in the early ’90s, directing a video (with his brother, Albert Hughes) for the hit “Brenda’s Got a Baby.” However, as noted by Variety, the two got into a fist fight in 1993 that resulted in the rap icon being jailed for 15 days.
https://twitter.com/2PAC/status/1126934770888454145
Hughes discussed the assault last year during an interview with JOE TV, saying: “What the beef was over … [Shakur] experienced massive fame [at the time] because of [his role in the film ‘Juice’ and his second album, and his diet — few people know this — consisted of weed, chicken wings and Hennessey. Not a great mix! And that was it. On one level, Tupac was one of the sweetest people I ever met. He apologized in Vibe magazine [a few] months before he died. I didn’t really come to peace with it until I was done with ‘The Defiant Ones.’ ”
Tupac was fatally shot on September 7th, 1996, in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was 25 years old. His murder remains unsolved.
As noted by Complex, in a 2018 interview with The Wrap, Hughes spoke about how Pac’s estate was hesitant to clear footage for his HBO doc “The Defiant Ones,” which chronicled the lives and careers of Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre.
“The Tupac Estate was—and I know them, they’re all old friends—but there was some stuff with him at the gun range that they were precious about,” Hughes said, when asked which footage was the hardest to obtain. “My original cut is not the way it [eventually aired]. The family and the estate were really sensitive about taking things out of context when it came to weapons in his hands, you know? He was at a shooting range and it was pretty explosive in the original cut, and they were very, very, very adamant that we not do it that way.”
Hughes will executive produce the untitled Tupac series with Lasse Järvi and Charles D. King. Tom Pellegrini will produce.
