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From the 'Murder Rap' doc
Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (Notorious B.I.G.) will be the subjects of the latest scripted true crime series, which will air on the USA Network in 2017. According to EW, Anthony Hemingway (American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson) will direct the pilot of Unsolved, and serve as executive producer. Kyle Long (of Suits) will write the script, which will focus on the police investigations around the two murders.
While the show (which just got its pilot order) is scripted, it will "pull from the experiences of former LAPD Detective Greg Kading, who led multiple law enforcement task forces investigating the murders and penned the book, Murder Rap: The Untold Story of Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations."
Trailer for the 2015 documentary which the 2017 series will be based on.
Does that sound familiar? The book has already been turned into a documentary (trailer above, and Amazon Prime members can watch here for free). However, it's not the one being used as the source material for an upcoming feature film on the two cases—that one is based on Randall Sullivan's LAbyrinth. The movie will star Johnny Depp as LAPD Detective Russell Poole.
Which is the better book to adapt? According to the Guardian's Ben Westhoff, "If you ask me, if Johnny Depp wants to star in a glossy Hollywood adaptation of a Tupac and Wallace book, it shouldn’t be LAbyrinth. It should be Murder Rap." That book, which the new series will be based on, came out nine years after LAbryinth, and "systematically dismantled Poole’s theories... Kading concluded that Tupac was murdered by a Crip named Orlando Anderson—the same man Tupac beat up in a Las Vegas casino just hours before he was shot." (Poole thinks the entire thing was orchestrated by Suge Knight's wife and the head of Death Row Records' security to also kill Knight and take over the record label.)
Both Tupac and Biggie's murders remain unsolved.
