Source: Ben Gabbe / Getty
Yesterday (Oct 25th) marked the 15th Anniversary of a Hood Movie Classic and fan fave. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen I’m speaking of none other than “Paid In Full”
I know I can’t be the only one who knows this movie from beginning to end, Scene by Scene, Line for Line and word for word, but here is something I bet we didn’t know.
It’s hard to forget the scene where Mekhi Phifer’s emotional performance as Mitch, Portraying real-life drug dealer Richard Porter, takes an troubling turn after his brother is kidnapped. While opening up to Ace (Wood Harris), Mitch is vulnerable as his world begins to crumble around him.
In a interview Mekhi revealed his flawless acting skills helped him create the touching scene.
“I actually wrote that scene, it wasn’t in the movie,” he said in 2014. “When I was researching the character, I [spoke] to Rich Porter’s sister and one his best friends named Jay Black. They told me about little man, what happened, how they [got] the finger and how they went to the McDonalds to trade for the ransom but by that time, the kid was already dead. But in the [script], it was really just me saying to (Harris), ‘Yo A, you got the keys? Okay, one love,’ and that was it.”
Mekhi went on to say he wanted to show Mitch’s ups as well as the downs of his short life, while showing us just how much that life effects those around us. In reality, it was Porter’s 10-year-old brother who was kidnapped and killed in Dec. 1989. Porter died one month later; his body was found with bullet wounds in the Bronx.
“I wrote that scene since it needed a character ark,“We didn’t want to glorify drug dealing, but show the realness of it and how it hurts people and hurts families. I just felt like in the scene beforehand, he’s telling A, ‘I love the game, I love the hustle,’ So he’s feeling all good and then, boom his little man is gone. It puts him into a tailspin and you see what happens.”
Source: vibe.com
