Series chronicles Dre, Iovine’s unlikely alliance
NEW YORK — The Defiant Ones, a new HBO documentary series about two giants in the entertainment world, takes its title from a 1958 film classic about two prison escapees, one black and one white, who are shackled together as they make a break for freedom.
Airing Sunday through Wednesday at 9 p.m., the series tracks the lives of Dr. Dre, whose upbringing in Compton, California, inspired him to become a pioneer of gangsta rap, and Jimmy Iovine, a workingclass kid from Brooklyn, New York, who made his bones as a record producer working with John Lennon, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen.
This four-part portrait differs from the original Defiant Ones, whose fictional heroes are literally stuck with each other. The unlikely kindred spirits Dre and Iovine are bonded not by chains but by a mutual passion that cemented their relationship with Iovine’s Interscope Records, which soon after its 1990 launch was swept up in armed warfare between rap rivals, not to mention political and corporate assault.
“I hate to use the word ‘scary,’ but it got really weird,” he said. “Why did these two guys stay together under the most difficult circumstances in the history of entertainment?”
With remarkable finesse, the film laces back and forth between their wildly different origins, then follows their implausible association culminating in their 2014 sale of Beats Electronics to Apple for more than $3 billion.
“The biggest challenge was to blend these men, these cultures, these genres,” said Allen Hughes, who directed The Defiant Ones.
Hughes said his film is meant to speak to all audiences and musical tastes.
“We want to throw a gangsta party that everyone’s invited to,” he explained by phone from Los Angeles. “We had a rule in the editing room: ‘If grandma wouldn’t understand it, it’s gotta go.”’
With a bounty of archival footage and scores of new interviews, the film was several years in the making.
“I kept saying: ‘This thing won’t go away,”’ Iovine laughs. “I didn’t think it would be four episodes, man! I kept saying: ‘ONE!’ ”
Arriving for an interview last week, Iovine was sporting a white baseball cap on his shaved head and a designer T-shirt with woodcuts of owls, which might have symbolized his stature, at age 64, as an entertainment wise man, but which he insisted just means: “I love to shop and I liked the shirt, so I bought it.”
Only days earlier, Iovine previewed The Defiant Ones, which, despite eschewing the “he-didthis, he-did-that” biopic structure Iovine loathes, inevitably lays out his career as a half-century timeline of popular music.
Along with recalling his triumphs, was there anything that made him squeamish to revisit in the film?
“All of it,” Iovine says, as if by reflex. “It was so painful, man. Even having hit records is painful, ’cause you think you can’t do it again. Or Beats comes out with a headphone that does really well, but all of a sudden another company comes and challenges it.
“I never celebrated a success. There are no victory laps. There’s no rearview mirror in my car. I’m always moving forward.”