Gridlock'd (1997)

Roger Ebert called Gridlock’d Tupac’s best performance. In this dark comedy he plays Spoon, a heroin-addicted musician who wants to get clean together with his friend Stretch (Tim Roth), and keeps running into agencies, waiting rooms and forms. Tupac never saw the finished film.

Credits

The story

New Year’s Eve in Detroit: Cookie, the singer in Spoon and Stretch’s jazz trio, collapses from an overdose. While she lies in the hospital, Spoon decides to quit heroin and talks Stretch into joining him. What follows is a day of absurdities: to get into detox they need Medicaid, for Medicaid they need welfare, and every step needs a different form. Meanwhile gangsters and the police are after them, because they appear to be mixed up in a double murder.

Development and casting

Curtis Hall wrote the script in 1993 and drew on his own life: as a teenager in Detroit’s punk scene he had used heroin and, trying to quit, was sent from one office to the next. Tim Roth signed on first. Laurence Fishburne and others had passed on Spoon when, in late 1995, Def Pictures president Preston Holmes suggested Tupac. Tupac had just gotten out of prison and “no one wanted to touch him,” Curtis Hall told the Los Angeles Times. Holmes, who had known him since childhood, vouched for him, and Tupac and Roth clicked right away.

Roth later said Tupac asked him not to watch any of his films or videos beforehand: all of that was hype and performance, he just wanted to talk about the characters.

Death before the release

Tupac was due back in the studio after the weekend of the Tyson fight in Las Vegas to loop dialogue and see the film. Curtis Hall recalled Tupac telling him he was going to the MTV Video Music Awards and then to Mike Tyson’s fight, and would come in after that. On September 7, 1996, he was shot in Las Vegas; he died on September 13 (see Death). Afterwards some lines sounded like a premonition, such as Spoon asking Stretch whether he ever feels like his luck is running out.

Reviews

Reviews were largely positive. Roger Ebert gave three stars out of four, writing that the film was more cause to mourn Shakur’s death, since he “gives his best performance” here. Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised his “appealing mix of presence, confidence and humor”; Tupac himself joked that he and Roth were the new Danny Glover and Mel Gibson, only he was the Mel Gibson. Desson Howe of The Washington Post wrote that Shakur and Roth “seem born for these roles.” Variety noted his confidently relaxed screen presence and ready sense of humor. John Singleton said that in this film you only begin to see Tupac’s full potential as an actor. Germany’s film-dienst praised a black comedy full of irony and sarcasm with outstanding actors.

Soundtrack

Tupac saw himself as the soundtrack’s music supervisor, as he said on the radio in April 1996. The album came out on Death Row on January 28, 1997, and according to MTV News entered the Billboard album chart at number one, selling more than 150,000 copies in its first week. Its lead track was Wanted Dead or Alive with Snoop Doggy Dogg, alongside Never Had a Friend Like Me and Out the Moon (Boom, Boom, Boom). In the film, Tupac also plays bass while Newton sings. More in the discography.