WHERE OLDSKOOL LIVES

It is now well over 30 years old. Check out what the director and some of the stars of Hip Hop's most iconic movies remember about filming Wild Style. This column is from a 2013 Complex.com column written by Alex Gale Included are some of the classic scenes.

The best film ever made about hip-hop is also the first: Wild Style.

Released in 1983, Wild Style covered all four elements of hip-hop—graffiti, MCing, breakdancing, DJing—in the culture’s earliest days. It’s not a documentary, but at time it feels like one. The setting is hip-hop’s nursery, the South Bronx, at its run-down grimiest; the leads are played by real-life graffiti legends Lee Quinones and Lady Pink, then fresh-faced street kings; Fab 5 Freddy co-stars, and the Rock Steady Crew is shown busting moves; pioneering rappers and DJs such as Grandmaster Flash, the Cold Crush Brothers, Kool Moe Dee, Busy Bee and other old-school legends are captured performing in their prime.

The film is defiantly low-budget and raw, but that didn’t lessen its impact. It’s become a Magna Carta of sorts, a founding document for a culture that at that time was unknown beyond the streets of the five boroughs. The year the film was released, Run-DMC dropped their first single, “Sucker MCs,” and hip-hop quickly began exploding from a local sound to the global juggernaut it is today—which has only made Wild Style, with its pitch-perfect time capsule of hip-hop culture in its adolescence, that much more indispensable. Released independently in a handful of theaters, the movie wasn’t a box-office smash, but future generations of hip-hop fans and artists alike made sure it remained a cult classic. The Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill both used snippets of dialog from Wild Style for classic early-’90s albums while Nas, De La Soul, and AZ are among those who have sampled the movie’s angel-dusted soundtrack and score.

30 years later, a new, remastered Blu-ray and DVD re-release is in stores on Oct. 15th has Wild Style looking more vibrant and pristine than ever. To celebrate the film’s indelible legacy, we spoke to many of the players behind it—three decades later, every last one of them has become a legend in his or her own right. Here they break down the ins, outs, ups and downs of the first (and only) film to successfully capture hip-hop in its rawest, purest form.

THE PLAYERS:

Charlie Ahearn - Director/producer of Wild Style, co-author of Yes Yes Y’all
Lee Quinones - Legendary graffiti and visual artist from the Lower East Side, starred in Wild Style as “Zoro”
Fab 5 Freddy - Renowned visual artist and music-video director, former co-host of Yo! MTV Raps, co-starred in Wild Style as Phade
Lady Pink - Legendary graffiti and visual artist, starred in Wild Style as Rose
Grandmaster Caz - Member of influential Bronx rap group Cold Crush Brothers, plays himself in Wild Style
Grandmaster Flash - Legendary DJ, front man of influential rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, plays himself in Wild Style
Patti Astor - Renowned indie film actress, co-starred in Wild Style as Virginia, former owner of the influential Fun Gallery in New York
John “Crash” Matos - Legendary South Bronx graffiti artist, played unspoken part as member of Union Crew in Wild Style, also worked on animation and graphic design for the film
Chris Stein - Guitarist of Blondie, worked on the soundtrack and score of Wild Style

MIC CHECK:

Charlie Ahearn: I’m from upstate New York, Binghamton, but I came here in ’73 to be an artist. I wanted to be Sol LeWitt. Over a period of years, I, along with other people that I knew, were developing this idea that art should get out of the art world. It should be out there, which meant going into housing projects and doing projects related to people and communities outside of the art world. Friends of mine went up to the Bronx and started doing art projects there. I was going around with a Bolex camera and shooting. Like, I shot some kids breakdancing in this gymnasium and I’d come back the next week with a 16mm projector and project it up on the wall. So I was sort of doing an art project in a sense, and then these kids that came to see one of my screenings asked me if I would make a film about their kung-fu school. Of course, I said, “Absolutely,” and spent the next year making a martial arts movie in Super-8 called The Deadly Art of Survival.

Lee Quinones: At the time, I was intensely involved in the whole above-ground aspect of the graffiti movement. I was intensifying my efforts to do as many walls as I could outside—murals. I just felt I would have a much broader, powerful voice in something that actually stood there, as opposed to something that was fleeting, like a subway car. There were handball walls all over the city that were begging for something new and refreshing. They were the first of their time, mind you. Let’s just put that on the record:“Those are the very first full handball court murals that were being done—a shot heard around the world to bring the movement into a whole new context. People would crowd around those paintings when they were first done because they were so mysterious and fantastic.

HOW IT ALL GOT STARTED:

Fab 5 Freddy: We had seen the posters for Charlie’s movie in Lee’s neighborhood. It looked like it was the kind of independent, low-budget movie that I wanted our film to be. I knew it wasn’t a mainstream movie. It was screening at this very important art exhibit in the spring of 1980 called the Times Square Show. I went to the opening and I was just trying to meet people and make things happen to create a platform for what I had been talking about with Lee. I met Charlie and said, "Hey, I want to make a movie."

Lee Quinones: The light bulb started to glow in Charlie’s head through his conversations with Fab. He had that look in his eye, and I was like, “What’re you looking at me like that for?” But prior to me meeting Charlie and Fab [Five Freddy], a lot of people don’t know this, but I was already romancing doing a film on the whole situation. You know, by that time 1978, ’79, I had already reached a pinnacle of what I was doing. I felt like it was a compelling story that was yet to be told on film.

THIS IS HOW THE STORY GOES:

Fab 5 Freddy: The beauty of the movie is that it feels documentary-esque because things were very close to happening exactly how they were happened in the movie.

Charlie Ahearn: The night before I would direct a scene I would put three sheets in this electric typewriter to type up the dialogue for the next day to hand to people. Luckily, people didn’t use too much of it. It probably wasn’t that great, but the people that I was working with for the most part were so entrancing, they were so good.

Lady Pink: Charlie Ahearn’s script, we took it as just suggestions. We made up the dialogue as we went along mostly. A well-bred white guy trying to write slang was funny as hell, so we made up our own script.

John “Crash” Matos: He gave us a lot of leeway. Charlie was cool in the sense that we just stuck to who we were.

Patti Astor: Almost nothing was scripted; this was one-take filmmaking.

WORLD PREMIERE:

Charlie Ahearn: I showed it to people in the Independent Film Market in the fall of 82 from 16mm. That was definitely the first time it was shown to anyone. It was also shown in Montreal in November of 1982. I showed it to [noted film agent] Irving Shapiro, who ran it to films around the world. He suggested I show it to people at New Directors and they were very enthusiastic about it. They showed it in the spring, which a big deal. They made a 35mm print and we brought it to the Cannes Film Market—I wasn’t allowed to show it at the festival because I had already shown in Montreal, which I hadn’t known at the time. Shapiro put an ad in the back of the magazine there showing a breakdancer that attracted enormous amounts of attention. They didn’t know what it was, but it seemed fresh and interesting. At that moment the film was sold to Japanese television, which is where the film premiered in October of 1983. It was also sold to theatrical markets in Italy and Scandinavia, in countries around the world. It was already about to screen on German and British television. I knew at that point that the movie and subsequently hip-hop was going to go around the world and be a global phenomenon.

Lee Quinones: That film pretty much single handedly changed the world—who can deny that?

THE LEGACY:

Chris Stein: The film is awesome. I remember telling Charlie, as soon as this thing comes out Hollywood is going to copy it. Beat Street came out right after. It’s pretty bad.

John “Crash” Matos: [Beat Street] was a commercial rip-off.

Fab 5 Freddy: I was like, “Here comes Hollywood with their money thinking they know better than everyone.” There are some cool brothers behind that film, no disrespect to them, but some things are best done from within.

Grandmaster Caz: Wild Style puts movies like Beat Street and Krush Groove and all those movies that came after in a different perspective. This is the most authentic movie about hip-hop ever made. [Beat Street] was trying to be a hip-hop movie, but it was trying to be a movie more than it was trying to be hip-hop. I mean, what does Harry Belafonte know about hip-hop?