John Singleton To Produce Hip-Hop Angel Drama 'Straight Outta Heaven'
The CW has reportedly bought a TV series about angels who rap.
According to Deadline, the broadcast television network now owns Straight Outta Heaven, a "rapping angels" TV show from Boy N The Hood director John Singleton and his producing partner, Dallas Jackson.
The hour long drama is being described as "Touched By An Angel-meets-Ghost with an urban twist," and "a faith based, hip-hop-infused guardian angel drama."
"John and I have similar genre taste and recognized a need on network television for the underserved urban youth audience and faith-based audience," Jackson said. "The CW is the perfect home for this new kind of hero we've created whose superpower is faith."
This marks the second collaboration between Singleton and Jackson following their BET drama Rebel, which shot a pilot this past summer. Singleton also has FX drama Snowfall, which was just ordered to series.
Singleton also celebrated the 25th anniversary of his seminal film Boyz In The Hood this year. During a presentation at the Academy Of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences, Singleton spoke about creating the film while still attending college at USC as a 20 year old, and how he views the movie today.
"I look at it as a time-capsule of what I was thinking and feeling at the time. I wrote the script when I was 20 years old. I went and saw Do The Right Thing in the summer of 1989, I came of the theater, and I was so enamored of Spike Lee, he was like my cinematic big brother. I'd met him two weeks before I started USC film school, when he came out with She's Gotta Have It in 1986. I saw him in L.A. He moved people out of the way and he shook my hand. I told him, 'I'm going to USC in two weeks: watch out for me.' I went to school for four years repping black cinema. I was one of the only black filmmaking students in a predominantly white film culture. There was continuing marginalization: 'Oh, there's only going to be one Spike Lee,' and that kind of thing. But I was like, 'I'm the next John Singleton, I'm not the next Spike Lee.' My thing was, 'I'm going to get out of school and be a first-round draft pick, just like in the NBA or NFL, but in film: I'm gonna come hard.' So the question was how to do that? Coming after Do The Right Thing, something clicked. In any type of writing program, they say to write about what you know. When you're a certain age you only have a limited amount of life experience. I only knew about what I saw growing up in the hood, so I went and hung out with my folks on Vermont Avenue and decided to figure out this story. That's where this came from: me trying to make an identity for myself as a filmmaker repping Los Angeles, and using a certain part of L.A. as an identity."