A lanky Japanese guy, whippet-thin and wired, presides behind a homemade plywood table in the middle of the noise. Kids are lined up two, three deep along the perimeter of the stall, whooping and hollering. At the moment, the biggest crowd surrounds a little stall just inside the old arch. The place is so jammed you wonder how they ever got along without it. The first thing you notice are the people. The Roadium's arch now frames an open-air bazaar piled high with cheap Chinese toys, one-size-fits-all Sri Lankan socks, used car batteries, secondhand tool chests, last year's Barbie dolls and canned peas with last week's use-by date. With the drive-in theater gone, the stuff of dreams has been traded for just plain stuff. Street corners are outposts in a new crack economy, boulevards battle lines dividing endless variations of Bloods and Crips, usually from one another, always from themselves. The dull blur of south county towns the Roadium served-Torrance, Lawndale, Hawthorne, Gardena, Carson and Compton-are staging areas in a decade-long descent into what feels at times like a war zone and at times is. By the summer of 1985, though, the drive-in, its dreams and innocent magic are relics of a long-gone past. The Roadium was graced by a grand arched gate that, in its day, promised entry to whatever secret kingdom Hollywood could conjure.
#Nwa straight outta compton movie
It came in the sunken heat of summer at an abandoned drive-in movie theater called the Roadium. There was no salute, no blast of trumpets or heavenly choir. The beginning of the end came unannounced. The beginning of the end of life as we know it occurred here, on a beaten patch of asphalt out in the vast, flat no man's land of greater Los Angeles. No One Was Ready for N.W.A's 'Straight Outta Compton.' But It Sold 3 Million Records and Transformed the Music Industry.īy TERRY MCDERMOTT of the Los Angles Times It gives a full break down of the world's most dangerous group. This is an incredible article that first appeaered in the April 14th Sunday edition of the Los Angles Times.
By TERRY MCDERMOTT of the LA Times 4/14/02
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