50 Cent: A Life Story at the Age of 30

Posted on August 19, 2005

AllHipHop.com interview rapper 50 Cent, whose new autobiography From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens (MTV Books) has great buzz. Most of his fans know his story: a poor kid from South Jamaica, Queens, he's inducted into the world of drug dealing as a boy; he's arrested many times, is shot and miraculously survives, and then is discovered by Dr. Dre and Eminem. Now he's a millionaire rap superstar at the age of 30.

AllHipHop.com: So what in your book will we get that we haven�t already heard on your records?
50 Cent: A lot. Like you know the book gives a lot more details about my upbringing. You know, what my lifestyle was like ahead of the actual music. And you know how when you tell a story, like I had a writer come out with me, actually Chris X wrote the book, right. Him and Terry Winters, the guy who wrote the screenplay, [they] went out on the road with me for three months.
AllHipHop.com: How�d you organize the sessions?
50 Cent: You can imagine if I asked you to tell me your life story you would start and skip over so many things and have to go back at different points and then you have to explain, well this happened between this time. And that�s kind of what happened because I ended up telling so many different stories and so many different things in pieces because it�s impossible for you to tell your life story in one shot and not miss something that you need to go back to make a reference to. So I did that over and over with them until they got the best story. Now Terry had to modify it for the screen. It�s impossible for you to make a film that can actually show your life, 29 years of your life in an hour and a half. You got to pick scenes and develop things and make for an interesting film as opposed to an actual book. The book kind of gives you, you know, like the actual play-by-play. This could have easily been 300 pages instead of 20 pages for the book. Do you know what I mean?

The book is selling like wildfire. His life story is so interesting that the film version is coming to theatres in November called Get Rich or Die Tryin�.