Interview with S. Leigh Savidge, Oscar nominee for 'Straight Outta Compton'

A. My company, Xenon Pictures, Inc. was the first distributor of independent films geared to African-American audiences here in the U.S. We'd been in business for two years when NWA was formed and Ruthless Records released Straight Outta Compton on vinyl. So I started to see how this music and it's embrace by teenagers and music fans of all races and creeds was starting to affect the buying habits of U.S. consumers and, by extension, the opportunities for African-American performers here. It was clear to me that the music represented an inflection point in U.S. history and therefore the story behind the music needed to be told.

Look at the Gallery: Academy Awards, Oscar 2019 - images

Q. What about the production? What was the hardest part of the project?

A. Xenon Pictures, Inc. sold the original draft of the screenplay for Straight Outta Compton into New Line Cinema in 2006. As part of that transaction, we had executed a "shopping agreement" with Eazy E's widow, Tomica Woods Wright whereby she would put Ruthless's music publishing rights with my screenplay. What that meant was that she endorsed Eazy's portrayal and the tone of the story in my draft. It was a packaged deal. But both studios, New Line and later Universal who bought out New Line's interest in 2014 felt that they needed the full support of Ice Cube and Dr. Dre to promote the film; and both of them insisted on having their characters have equal weight and screen time as Eazy's character. So this is where the major difficulty in getting the film made lay. Tomica had to be persuaded to lend her music rights to a film that was essentially the same but was redrafted to be more about the relationship between Eazy, Cube and Dre than about Eazy and Ruthless with Cube and Dre as supporting characters. Resolving those issues took eight years, multiple writers and ultimately a new studio to step in. Once those issues were resolved, the production proceeded fairly smoothly.

A. Since 1940, only 600 people have been nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. So, yes, it feels great to be one of those people. 

Q. What is the situation of audiovisual productions in Los Angeles?

A. The major change in the business is that two companies whose roots are in technology, Amazon and Netflix, have become major players in the creation and distribution of filmed content globally. They are embracing content and therefore offering opportunities to content creators that might not interest other studios. With both companies, their approach to the market is as much data-driven as anything else. They are looking at what consumers in their networks are embracing -- at what appears to be over-indexing in their networks-- and making their content creation decisions based largely on that. The other big change is the proliferation of digital channels that are showing content. This has resulted in opportunities for new content creators who operate in both the shortform and longform spaces to get their shows shown.

A. Wow. Tough question. There's the best stuff from the Italian neorealistic period: The Bicycle Thief and 400 Blows of Truffaut. Fellini and  8 1/2. Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood. Cinema Paradiso.