Arabian Prince worked alongside Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, MC Ren and DJ Yella on N.W.A‘s 1988 debut album Straight Outta Compton and appears on the cover art.
Dr. Dre, Ice Cube and Eazy-E‘s widow Tomica Woods-Wright teamed up with director F. Gary Gray to create a film with the same name of the album based on the group’s story. Arabian Prince is not portrayed in the film, which sat at the top of the box office for three straight weeks.
“A lot of the scenes in real life, I was there,” he says to VladTV. “I’m just not there in the film, which I’m like, if you’re gonna write me out of a movie, shoot some other scenes. Don’t write scenes where I was there.”
The rapper-producer also says that the group’s manager Jerry Heller, played by Paul Giamatti, was inaccurately portrayed in the biopic. He suggests another influential figure should have been highlighted.
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“I know they always say we didn’t have time to do it or whatever, somebody was very pivotal in the success and the sound of N.W.A was Donovan Smith who was our engineer who owned Audio Achievements, the studio in Torrence that we recorded at,” Prince says. “He’s nowhere to be seen. He was always there hanging out with us. Always like part of the family, part of that thing. [In the film,] it seemed like Jerry was there all the time. Jerry was hardly around with us in the studio or on tour. But that was part of the movie. I understand, you got a big star to play Jerry Heller, you gotta put him in the movie to build that story.”
He further explains other inaccuracies in the movie, including the roles of Suge Knight and MC Ren. Prince speculates on the reasoning for these discrepancies.
“I really just think that star power matters,” he says. “Dre’s a big name. Cube’s a big name. Eazy’s a big name and that mattered more than the full story.”
