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At the Movies with Notorious B.I.G.: dream hampton on It Was All a Dream
Notorious B.I.G. in It Was All a Dream Since its inception in 2012, Blackstar Film Festival has become one of my favorites. In a recent interview in Essence, founder Maori Karmel Holmes said, “When I started the festival, I didn’t realize that it was going to be an annual event, and I was mostly interested in seeing films that I knew existed in the world but hadn’t been shown in Philadelphia. I was also interested in a specific kind of film, mostly experimental, largely made by independent filmmakers and wanting to put them together in a way that would put artistic films next to social justice documentaries and next to some repertory work—so it was kind of like a curatorial project for me.”
The breadth of that curatorial project continues to grow year by year, growing to include a lab for Philadelphia filmmakers and the magazine SEEN Journal. Through these endeavors, Maori and her team continue to platform and prioritize filmmaking by Black, Brown and Indigenous filmmakers. That community spirit is palpable each day at the festival. Before or after watching a particular film, it was wonderful to be in the lobby of the Kimmel Center, communing with folks about what we’d just experienced. I also appreciated the emphasis on masking and taking care with regard to COVID, and the incorporation of wellness and yoga. It’s a festival born in Philly and feels part of the city in a way that only a festival that cultivates deep relationships with its residents can.
The programming this year was robust, featuring over 90 films. I was especially excited to see dream hampton’s It Was All A Dream. (Inspired by the Black feminist thinker & critic bell hooks, hampton’s name is spelled in lowercase.) A cultural critic in her own right, I became familiar with her writing for publications like VIBE, The Source, The Village Voice, etc. As a baby writer, it was important for me to study her work along with that of the cohort of women of her time—Kierna Mayo (who appears in the film), Mimi Valdes, Danyel Smith, to name a few. In addition to her writing, hampton is also a filmmaker, executive producing Surviving R. Kelly for Lifetime and directing Freshwater, a rumination on climate change in her native Detroit.
It Was All A Dream was captured during the early ’90s, as hampton studied film at NYU and worked at The Source, with voiceover pulled from articles she wrote at the time. We often see dream herself on screen, having hard-hitting conversations about misogyny in the business, observing the East Coast West Coast beef in its early stages and smoking weed with friends who also happen to be the next superstars of rap.
The title works on different levels—a reference to Notorious B.I.G.’s hit single (a close friend of dream’s and a subject in the film) “Juicy,” the name of the filmmaker and of course a reference to memory. At times, the film feels like a reverie. A daughter of two Gen X parents from the Towns, I’m heir apparent to the world the film portrays, which in a lot of ways has ceased to exist. Whatever Giuliani couldn’t snuff out himself has since come to an end, and the trajectory of hip-hop has followed in the footsteps of the metropolis it was invented in. The same forces that have aided and abetted gentrification and displacement of Black working class New Yorkers also targeted drill shows and surveilled rappers. How can hip hop truly thrive in these conditions? It’s a fate that ultimately doesn’t feel final, but it is where we are.
The screening of the film at the Suzanne Roberts Theater exploded at the sight of a young Biggie rapping the lyrics to what would become “Come On,” rapping along with him. The song would be released posthumously, as Biggie died at the age of 25 in 1997. Youth is another theme in the film, which opens with the line, “Let me tell you something about hip-hop myth and lore, about kamikaze capitalists who just happened to be teenagers.” Bringing to mind how so many of our culture bearers were in their teens and early 20s while creating the nascent building blocks for a genre that would go on to be a global phenomenon, dream’s film is a time capsule, an interrogation of an art form in its infancy. In this interview we discuss the genesis of the project, the film as a eulogy and being confronted with your younger self.
Filmmaker: You start the film off by saying “I had fantasies, too.” I was wondering if you could talk about coming to New York City, and to NYU to study film. What was the ecosystem like there at the time? Was it supportive to whatever film fantasies you had, and what they were?
hampton: (laughs) I definitely had dreams of what my life was gonna be as a filmmaker, and some of those have come true. But it is really about what I thought the project of hip hop was gonna be. I thought it was gonna be this tool for disrupting the status quo. I didn’t know that we were gonna get so folded into the mainstream.
Filmmaker: Did you meet your DP at NYU at the time or how did that come about?
hampton: We all had different roles. There are times when I’m shooting, times when Emir’s shooting—Emir Lewis, one of my producers on this. Back then he had graduated from Hampton University. He was a couple years older than us and would hang around campus and edit people’s projects. Emir cut my first film. I Am Ali, a scripted film with Anjanue Ellis-Taylor in it. But he also had a camera and I must have been asking him,“Come to the studio with me and Mobb Deep, or me and Biggie.” When I found the footage in the storage space and saw that I had things I didn’t realize that I had—I knew I had Biggie and Snoop, but I forgot about Guru and Mobb Deep—I sent him those boxes. He’s now teaching editing at NYU, so it was very full circle—we ended up making our first assemblage back at NYU.
Filmmaker: Was that the genesis of this film? You found some footage in a storage closet?
hampton: My daughter was moving across the country. We had shared a storage space, then I had to move that stuff out and came across these two boxes of footage that I knew I had. It’s not like I didn’t know it—I moved it from place to place, but I hadn’t opened the box and gone through it in decades. So, I saw it in June of 2023 and sent it to Emir in New York. It wasn’t always temperature controlled, it wasn’t always stored in the best conditions, which speaks to some of the degradation and the quality. But I knew that if we were gonna at least even transfer it—forget making a film, to hold onto it for another 30 years—that we should digitize and do all the things, ’cause it was in all kinds of states.
Filmmaker: I know that there’s a long intimate relationship between writing and film for many Black women writers and filmmakers like Toni Cade Bambara, etc. Can you talk to me about how one medium informs the other for you?
hampton: I think that my writing is pretty visual. I’m a visually oriented person. I’m a big time reader—used to be, at least, my brain has been rewired by tech. But I used to read a good hundred books a year, way more than I wrote. Even at the height of my writing career, I didn’t write as much as some of my peers who wrote all the time. I’d have done seven or eight pieces in a year. So, I was a film student who was writing and became known for that. Toni Cade Bambara is absolutely a novelist, and a writer who was also a filmmaker. You don’t have to choose one or the other.
I remember Julie Dash was screening Daughters of the Dust. Arthur Jafa and I were really good friends back then, and me and Greg Tate went to support AJ at the screening. It was my first time meeting Julie. I introduced myself and said, “I feel like I’m not being focused on film. ’cause I have this writing thing that’s happening.” And she was like, “It’s good to have something to fall back on given how long it takes to set up film projects.”And I don’t even look at writing as something to fall back on. It is just another skillset, you know? But I’m not a hybrid. I’m not a writer-director. Either I’m writing, which I did some in the nineties, or I’m directing, which is a whole ’nother muscle. You write, as my friend Greg Tate said, with your ass, which means that you sit still, whereas production is all about having a million things in your head. And I’m really good at that and being a traffic cop, for lack of a better analogy.
Filmmaker: Can you tell me a little more about that kind of Black film milieu that you were in at the time? Especially in the early ’90s in New York City?
hampton: It wasn’t happening in New York City, it was happening in LA. There was this moment in Hollywood. It comes in waves; all these different kinds of films that were inspired by hip hop were happening. I remember Sanaa Lathan saying that Brown Sugar was partially inspired by me. She had also followed Kierna Mayo around at the time. Chris Rock did CB4 and he had this feminist hip hop writer in there, and that was supposed to be a sendup of me. All these things were in conversation with one another. Biggie’s first song, “Party and Bullshit,” was on a soundtrack to a movie called Who’s the Man?, you know? These films don’t hold up in the same way. They’re not as iconic as some of the Blaxploitation films. I wonder if younger generations even go back and watch Who’s the Man? I know that folks will always go back and discover Julie’s work, even then she was an outlier.
Filmmaker: In the film, there’s this shot of you and you’re like “I’m working on a documentary,” which I love. You know, like, I’m doing this thing! What was the scope of the project at the time that you were working on it?
hampton: First it was a Source documentary, and they kept kicking me out of the room when things got good, so then it became a film called And It Don’t Stop. I told my neighbor, my good friend Big, “I’m gonna get an F in my documentary class. I’m supposed to turn in a 45 minute piece.” And he was like, “Yo, just film me, Ma!” (laughs) So then I started filming him, then I got uninterested. They died and things happened and I just put everything away.
Filmmaker: I wanted to talk more about your relationship with Biggie, as it’s very palpable in his music that he’s a cinephile—the Frank White references and such. Could you talk about both of y’alls relationship to cinema…together?
hampton: Well, we used to talk about books all the time. He was a Charles Dickens person. I remember when Ntzoke Shange’s The Love Space Demands, this book of poetry, came out, reading it with him. What he used to do a lot is come to class with me when I had some of those survey classes in cinema studies that were in big rooms. He would come and watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with me. He watched Battleship Potemkin with me, Jules and Jim.
Filmmaker: Oh wow. Taste! Okay, French New Wave! (laughter)
dh: I would have to write these essays and we would smoke weed and I’d be like, “Yo, what if I say this about that movie?” He was my first reader too. I used to run my articles by him, but also some of my essays for class. He was a real friend.
Filmmaker: I love that. I was curious about the way you cultivated your eye. There were all these b-roll moments. I love the moment two girls walking into frame before it cuts to you interviewing people on the street. Tell me about editing and putting certain things together. I’m obsessed with the Nate Dogg moment of him singing, I was so moved by that.
dh: I’m so glad you said that because that’s mislabeled. It’s not Nate Dogg, it’s a Death Row singer, and we still don’t know who it is. I’ve asked a couple people who were down with the label back then. I’m moved by that moment too, because it really speaks to how Dre used to produce, and how much soul music and traditional R&B, composing on the piano, was his process. But the eye stuff, it’s funny. I’m just happy that I had the sense to keep the camera rolling to get some of these moments to choose from when it was time, like that Brooklyn b-roll when we were in front of the projects. ‘Cause you get to see Brooklyn in the nineties.
Filmmaker: Yeah. Was the process like, you would have an assignment for The Source and you would be like, “Come on camera person,” or “Lemme grab my camera,” or..?
hampton: No, no. I was doing my documentary. I later did a cover story on Snoop for The Source, but that was a separate trip. The first time I met Snoop, it was as a documentarian, not as a writer. I had done a piece on [Lady of] Rage for an issue of Vibe, so Rage was the one who invited me to that studio session. And I was like, “Well, will you tell the guys that I’m gonna be shooting? And particularly tell Dre?” Cause I had already written an article calling [out] Dr. Dre for attacking Dee Barnes.
Filmmaker: That gets into what I wanted to talk about, because with this film coming out now, I’d be remiss not to ask about the current reckoning with misogyny in hip hop. How does it feel to be working on this film, whether it was putting it together or screening it now while these conversations are back at the forefront?
hampton: I mean, we had to make a decision: Did we leave Puff in or out? In the end, it would’ve been untrue to keep him out. I never was gonna have a whole bunch of him, ’cause the story I was telling, he’s not central to it. But it’s also true that Snoop, during his time when he was hanging out with Bishop Don Juan, talked about being an actual pimp at the time. It’s also true that these stories are constant, that both Kim and Faith came out and said that Biggie was abusive to them. I don’t need celebrities to look at these questions—they’re in my neighborhood, in my family, in my friend circle, you know? But you’re right. There’s a reckoning happening. And I think so many of us who have been witness to this business and this industry and this genre of music—I don’t call it a culture, I think that it’s a genre in black cultural music—that we thought [the reckoning] was never coming. It’s almost like the R. Kelly thing: If you’re being so obvious about it, what is there to call you out on? But it wasn’t like I wasn’t shocked. I was shocked when Cassie told her story, that was shocking to me. I hadn’t witnessed that with Puff. You know what I mean? But that’s how intimate partner violence works. It happens in intimate spaces.
Filmmaker: Something that struck me was this notion of self-preservation, what that looks like for you then and now. I also wondered if the camera ever operated as a tool of self-preservation. We know hip hop, especially at the time, to be a very male space. I was wondering if the camera was a tool in terms of, “I can be safe in this space because the camera’s rolling”?
hampton: Well, I didn’t feel unsafe in the spaces. I should say that. It would be revisionist for me to act like I felt unsafe. It definitely gave me a reason to be there. In some cases, like with Onyx, I didn’t know them, so for me to have the camera in the space was a reason. It explained why I’m there—I’m working. I’m actually not here to be a groupie or any other idea you might have about why I’m here. I felt the same way as a journalist often. I don’t know if that means safety though. You know? Because Dee Barnes had a camera.
Filmmaker: I also love that roundtable moment with the other women rappers. It shows that these conversations have been longstanding, that they don’t just come up out of nowhere. Were there more of those moments of what these conversations on the ground were like at the time?
hampton: Everything we could that had women in it, we put in there, because we didn’t have that much, sadly. There are more conversations between me and Kierna, they’re just not that legible. That video quality was so bad, but I included it because it was more evidence that, look, we were out here. You know what I mean? These conversations aren’t new. All of us, when we arrive in our feminism, our anti-homophobia, our anti-cisheteronormativity, we think that it’s new. It’s like when you meet a new vegan or whatever, it’s like, OK, baby. (laughter) There have been vegans for thousands of years in India.
In the ’80s, Black women’s literature was just everywhere. It wasn’t something you had to have a grad degree to be studying. It was on tables in New York City. It was part of the street culture to walk around with a book and be discussing it with friends. That’s what I’m saying about me and Biggie talking about the new Ntozake book. So, I very much knew that I wasn’t inventing the wheel, but I do look at younger women sometimes now thinking they’re asking these new questions about hip hop and not realizing that Joan Morgan, Kierna Mayo and myself were all asking these questions in real time. We didn’t wake up 30 years later and be like, “Wow, that was really sexist.” We were asking then, “How can we be dancing to ‘Ain’t No Fun’?” at the same time that Pac is facing a sexual assault charge for this exact same description. We understood very much that what we were living was a contradiction inside of a contradiction, which I don’t think is just a hip hop thing. I think that’s about being involved with cishet men in many communities.
Filmmaker: Talk about the title of the film. There’s obviously a lot of interpretation of the title, but the film also felt like a eulogy. You have the title card at the end, that says RIP with all these names on them—Big, Prodigy and Guru, people of that nature. I was wondering if you could talk about that framing or how to represent people who are no longer here with us and how that shaped the film.
hampton: I’m so glad that I captured them in that era when they were really reaching for something. We all were in our twenties. I was dealing with this with my last film, Freshwater. It’s like this question about memory. What function does it have? How real is memory? The shiny things that we put on,whatever it is—the days that you used to be at church every Sunday with your grandmother or your family reunions, high school, whatever. When a moment is passed, sometimes we do the opposite. Sometimes we only remember the terrible things about high school. It is still a memory. It’s this edit that we’re doing. We’re constantly editing our history, and what I’ve seen in a larger context with this 50th anniversary [of hip-hop] is a very packaged version. I knew something different and thought that my offering might be valuable in some way.
Filmmaker: I heard Emir say you guys had much more footage. How did you shape this film and say, “Okay, that’s enough”?
hampton: It could have just been Biggie, ’cause I had so much footage with him. I’ve shot him the most over the years. I mean, with any story, it’s all about editing, taking stuff out and maybe sometimes bringing something back in. That’s where you shape your story, whether you’re writing or making a film. It’s all about those brutal and ruthless choices. And also the feedback I was getting was, “We want more of you.” Which was annoying. I wanted this to be total verite. I didn’t even want to have a voiceover. Then I came up with the solution, through my editor David Feinberg, of reading articles that I’d written at the time.
Filmmaker: What was that process like? Cause I know I go back and read something I wrote and I’m like…(laughter)
hampton: I don’t read my… girl. No. (laughs) David Feinberg, he wasn’t familiar with me or my work. So, he went on my site and started reading old articles that I still haven’t read and started pulling. He’s like, “This would be good here.” That’s why he got a producer credit too, and not just an editor credit, ’cause he really leveled up the film in that way by solving this question of, we need more dream in it.
Filmmaker: How does it feel? Have you seen the film with an audience?
hampton: I sit outside. Which today was hell, because I was watching all these people come super late or leave, but I hear that the reactions are there.
Filmmaker: Do you struggle with seeing your younger self?
hampton: Absolutely. It’s awful. [laughs] But I do look and sound like my daughter, so that’s sweet. But I did it already. I can’t do it again. I did it a million times in the edits [laughs].
Filmmaker: To wrap it up, what was the objective with making this project, and do you think there’s a through line thematically with all your work?
hampton: Well, in the past couple films, I’ve definitely been looking at this question of memory. With Freshwater, obviously I’m a Black feminist, which means, particularly, I’m a Black feminist from this generation. I really consider it the era of crack, but it’s also the era of hip hop. So, this is a post Black Power moment, a hyper capitalist moment when we’re letting go of the politics of respectability. All of these questions existing in that same world are themes in my work, but every project I’m approaching differently. One of the weirdest compliments I would get about this was, “They’re also human.” And I’m like, “Yeah. What did y’all think they were?” But I know that’s how celebrity works, to really strip people and dehumanize them, which is sad. But “human” means to be complicated, to be flawed, to sometimes be abusive. It means all these things, you know?
