Universal(LOS ANGELES) — Hip-hop journalist Dee Barnes has criticized the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton for omitting any mention of Dr. Dre’s 1991 altercation with her. Dre pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery in the incident and later settled a civil suit brought by Barnes. But it turns out that the infamous incident was in the movie’s original script.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Jonathan Herman’s original screenplay include the scene. Quoting from the screenplay, the paper describes a scene in which Dre, “eyes glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness, contempt,” confronts Barnes verbally. Things escalate to the point where he begins “flinging her around like a rag-doll, while she screams, cries, begs for him to stop.”
According to the paper, the original script was 150 pages and the film’s original cut was three and a half hours long, and the scene involving the attack on Barnes was just one of several that were excised from the finished picture. Other scenes that didn’t make the film were ones in which Dre is shot four times in the leg, another where his house catches fire during a party and a flashback of his younger brother’s death in a fight.
On Tuesday Gawker published a long piece in which Barnes recalled the attack and criticized the film for its omission saying, “I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up,” but calling the film a work of “revisionist history.”
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