One of the reasons I love doing interviews with people about what they are passionate about is that when you see the fruits of their labor come to life it gives me a greater appreciation than I would’ve otherwise had . I recently had an opportunity to interview Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin, filmmakers and writers for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. We kicked it about the ups and downs of their journey and their new film project All Access. Read that here.
And since our interview two things happened.
1. They announced another screening of their film All Access, for Friday October 8, 2010, hosted by Ryan Leslie[One of their early collaborators from the Harvard days.] For info on the screening contact Felicia Gordon – Fmgordon [at] aol.com
2. A sketch they wrote called The History of Rap with Jimmy Fallon and Justin Tinmerlake became an instant viral hit. I reached out to Diallo, and he gave a little insight on how it came together. Watch below.
Diallo
“Jimmy came to us and said Justin’s going to be on the show, and I’d love to do the history of hip hop in like 2 minutes. At that point me and Bashir sat down like O.K. Jimmy how obscure can we go? He was like maybe A Tribe Called Quest. So we basically doing the big songs that broke mainstream. We decided on the songs got with Quest Love arranged the songs. We went into Jimmy’s office and rapped it I did Justin’s part and Bashir did Jimmy’s part. Jimmy loved it, he was through the roof! . He shared it with Justin and Justin loved it. We probably had about 4 hours to rehearse it, get it on stage and make it happen.”
4 hours!! Jimmy and Justin did a great job pulling it together in that short of a window. You can tell Jimmy has spent countless hours in front of the mirror pretending to be Run-DMC.
He also elaborated on the song selection( just in case you wanted to get technical)
If we this something we did just for the web we could not do the chronology of hip-hop without Public Enemyand De La Soul…but it wasn’t about that. It was for a broad NBC audience. Also for the 18-30 demographic that doesn’t remember stuff. You cant just drop Spoony G on them.