SXSW: Snoop Dogg to Develop a 1980's Drama for HBO About the Effects of Reaganomics on Inner-City Life in Los Angeles
Snoop Dog (Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr.), 43, announced Friday during his SXSW Music keynote speech at the Austin Convention Center that he will be developing an HBO show with director Allen Hughes and writer Rodney Barnes about life on the West Coast during the 1980s, when gang violence first began to dominate the region's inner cities, particularly in his own neighborhood in East Los Angeles. Snoop Dogg grew up in Long Beach.
The show will center around a family living in inner-city L.A. and will explore the effects of Reagan-era social policies on the area according to Variety. As noted by the hip-hop legend, "HBO is the No. 1 network in the world as far as developing and having these types of shows come to life. This is a dream come true to be able to tell a story that's going to be told the right way on the right network."
As backgrounder for his upcoming project, Snoop Dogg explained [via The Daily Beast]: "Early in the '70s and toward the latter part of the '70s everything was beautiful because we had ways to have fun and communicate, and those who were underprivileged, the low economic side of life, the government would provide for us, which helped us get by. It was a society and we all needed it and we all had it and we all helped each other. Then when Reaganomics kicked in, certain things were taken away, after-school programs and things of that nature. Guns and drugs were shipped into the neighborhood. So it was a shift of having fun and playing football to selling drugs and shooting at each other. To me it was a system that was designed, because when the Reaganomics era began, that's when this began."
Snoop Dog said that while he was able to rise from that kind of life, countless others were not. Through the upcoming show, he plans to explore the stories of those who weren't so fortunate as him. His longtime manager Ted Chung is set to executive produce the project.