*In the N.W.A biopic “Straight Outta Compton,” Jerry Heller is depicted as the typical conniving music manager out to line his own pockets and cause discord among his artists. In a recent interview with Grantland, Heller said he was never consulted about the film, he denies claims of mishandling money, and he shares what he really thinks about Ice Cube and the rest of N.W.A.
“Not one of them understood anything except what they wanted to understand, and that was making money,” Heller says. Only Eazy and I understood the importance of what we were doing. Eazy was a true visionary.”
Heller also revealed that he was never consulted to offer his side to the film. Andrea Berloff, one of the film’s screenwriters, said “I was given a list of people that they recommend I speak with, and he was not on it.”
The biopic does offer a quasi-sympathetic portrayal of Jerry, played by Paul Giamatti. But by the end of the film, “he has met his inevitable fate: reduced to a whimpering louse, abandoned by our heroes and shamed for his sins.”
Heller met Eric ‘Eazy-E’ Wright in the spring of 1987. Wright was a local thug looking to get into the music game with his friends, Andre “Dr. Dre” Young and O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson. Heller said, that’s when his own life really began.
“You were the first white guy I ever really talked to who wasn’t trying to collect rent or arrest me,” Heller quotes Eazy as saying in his book, “Ruthless.”
“I think that N.W.A picked up where Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have gone if they hadn’t been assassinated,” Jerry says. “I think that they did more for race relations in this country than any other entity in history.”
After N.W.A broke up, first Cube, then Dre dissed Heller in their music. Cube’s “No Vaseline” track viciously attacked Heller for being the “Jew” that “break[s] up my crew.” A verse that still hits a nerve.
“I think it’s one of the most vitriolic attacks on the Jewish people that I’ve ever seen,” Heller says. “And yeah, it hurt me. I don’t have the kind of respect for him except that he knows how to make money.”
As the article reports, Heller hasn’t seen MC Ren or Yella since the ’90s. He has no relationship with Eazy’s widow, and he says he that on the few occasions he runs into Dre “we say hello to one another. There’s no animosity between us. What happened, happened.”
As for Ice Cube, Heller says, “We were never friends. Even when we were in the group. He was younger than the other guys. And I was older. He lived at home with his mother and father, who were professional, educated, very bright people. He went to Taft High School in the Valley. We were never close.”
In the film, the scene where Eazy fires Heller is said to have gone down exactly as depicted.
“Eazy told me, you know, ‘Jerry gone.’ I didn’t believe him,” Ice Cube has said. “I thought I’d never see [Jerry and Eazy] part. We was all ready to fuck with Eric and go back after Jerry was out the picture.”
The end of the film suggests that Cube, Eazy and Dre were considering reuniting N.W.A – until Eazy fell ill.
“I believe it would have happened,” Cube says of an N.W.A reunion. “Because everybody was sick of feuding by that time. When I saw Dre in the hospital” — to visit Eazy after he was diagnosed HIV-positive — “that’s how I knew that this could have really happened. Because at the end of the day, we was all back. Right there. And trying to put all that shit aside. It was just all about our friend and his suffering.”
Continue reading the lengthy article here, where Heller says, between the lawyers and accountants, that he personally never took a dime that he didn’t earn, saying “Hey, man. If we were such bad guys, how come you never sued us?”
“Straight Outta Compton” arrives in theaters August 14.
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