‘It’s been called the greatest hip-hop movie ever made’: How we made classic graffiti Wild Style | film

Frederic Brathwaite also known as Fab 5 Freddy, concept, actor, music director

I was part of the Fabulous 5 New York graffiti artists, who were primarily known for graffitiing entire subway cars on the Lexington Avenue line. Lee Quiñones was the Michelangelo of the group. I was running with Jean-Michel Basquiat and wanted to bring graffiti art into art spaces. I thought an underground independent film could tell our story the way we wanted it to.

At an art gallery in Times Square, I met Charlie Ahern, who had made the underground kung fu film, The Deadly Art of Survival, on Super 8. Charlie liked the idea of ​​the film and I explained to him that we could tell the story of an emerging new culture: graffiti, break dancing, rap. We wanted a film with a narrative feel but a documentary, so, along with real rappers from the Bronx, we had graffiti artists playing themselves, but as characters. Lee became Zorro, a kind of masked superhero. We wanted the second stage – a giant graffiti writer who was making flyers for hip-hop concerts – to represent the relationship between graffiti art and hip-hop. However, he preferred to remain in the shadows. Charlie said: “Fred, you can do it!” So I became an actor, relying on Phade, the club’s promoter, in the second phase.

Charlie insisted that we make our own music. I knew Chris Stein and Debbie Harry from Blondie because they had bought artwork from me as well as Jean-Michel, so Charlie, Chris and I reached out to record the score. Everyone said that Patty Astor, who plays Virginia the reporter, looked like Debbie Harry, and Blondie let us use their song “Pretty Baby” for Virginia’s grand entrance. Blondie was very supportive. When I heard Debbie sing “Fab 5 Freddy Tell Me Everybody’s Flying” in Rapture I thought: “This is me!”

Although Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was a hit, most rappers have yet to make records. They’ve been on mic for a long time, so we edited out the music scenes but kept their meaning. The film depicts what was a very underground culture in a few ghetto neighborhoods: the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. I never imagined it would become such a huge global thing.

Charlie Ahern, writer, director, producer

One of Lee’s murals is featured in the book The Deadly Art of Survival, which she created for $1,000. I’ve been trying to contact him but he’s been out of reach. I think he thought I was a cop, or that it would lead him into situations where he would get arrested. So when Fab 5 Freddy called me, who had seen my kung fu movie and knew me, it was perfect.

I wanted to make a movie that would be shown in theaters for teenagers: a love story about an outlaw who graffitied on the subway and was chased by the police. pink lady [artist Sandra Fabara] I was hanging out with all these young wannabe graffiti artists. I looked at her and thought: This is the character we called Lady Bug on Rose. I contacted Channel 4 in London and ZDF in Germany, sending each an envelope containing a Xerox machine for the Tube, a cassette tape for a hip-hop club, and a paper outlining the idea. Each of them sent me $25,000, which is my only source of funding.

When I went to a hip-hop concert in the Bronx with 10,000 kids, a gun went off and I thought we should do something like that in the movie. I saw some men leaning against the wall and asked them to be in scenery. I handed one of them a gun but he said, “That’s a little gun,” and he reached into his car and pulled out the sawed-off shotgun that you see in the movie.

When I approached [rapper] Starsky was busy at a jam, smoking a joint, led me to the theater and said without taking a breath, “This is Charlie Ahern. He’s my film producer.”

Eventually I met Grandmaster Flash, who was already a star. I shot an amphitheater scene of him performing with his group, The Furious Five, but I couldn’t use it because the audio was distorted. I had to rerun the entire concert without Flash, who was away on tour so couldn’t appear again – so the film was never made for his live show. Shit happens.

When Wild Style opened in Times Square, I paid some kids $25 each to hand out fliers at their schools, so they lined up around the block at the first screenings. When it was shown in Japan, they thought it was a science fiction movie and that I had invented this new culture. It has been called the greatest hip-hop movie of all time. It was definitely the first.