John Singleton, born January 6, 1968, in Los Angeles, was 23 when his debut Boyz n the Hood reached cinemas in 1991; at 24 it made him the first African American, and the youngest person ever, to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar. He liked to cast musicians: Ice Cube, Janet Jackson, Q-Tip, later Tyrese, Snoop Dogg and Ludacris. The most important of them, for him, was Tupac.
“Poetic Justice”
After Juice (1992), Tupac was seen as a real acting talent. Singleton first offered the male lead in his second film to Ice Cube, who turned it down. So Tupac played Lucky, a mail carrier who accompanies the grieving poet Justice (Janet Jackson) on a road trip from Los Angeles to Oakland, in Poetic Justice (1993). Reviews were mixed, but Tupac’s quiet, vulnerable performance stood out.
It was not a frictionless partnership. In a statement after Tupac’s death, quoted in German, Singleton described it roughly like this: Tupac both rebelled against and respected his direction, “we argued first, then we got it done.” The original source of that quote can no longer be traced, so it is only summarised here.
Roles that never happened
Tupac was originally meant to star in Singleton’s next film, Higher Learning (1995); in the end, Omar Epps played it. Singleton had also originally written Baby Boy (2001) with Tupac in mind for the lead, in the finished film a large Tupac mural hangs in the main character’s room.
The Tupac movie
In 2013 Singleton was announced as writer and director of a Tupac biopic. In April 2015 he left the project over creative differences with the production company Morgan Creek and said he planned a competing film. It never happened; the biopic All Eyez on Me was released in 2017, directed by Benny Boom.
John Singleton suffered a stroke in April 2019 and died at the end of that month in Los Angeles, aged 51.
His name is often misspelled “Singelton”; the address john-singelton redirects here. The story that Singleton and Tupac once raced each other in New York could not be verified.