Tonight’s After Dark: ‘New Jack City,’ the Gangster Classic That Became a Westwood Flashpoint

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On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.

First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”

The Bait: What Happened to Westwood?

“They closed the movie because they don’t want Black people in Westwood.” That was 18-year-old Ava DuVernay speaking to the L.A. Times in March 1991.

Then a UCLA student, she had just watched hundreds of people tear through Westwood Village after being turned away from an opening-night screening of Mario Van Peebles’ “New Jack City.” Before the riot broke out, the theater was accused of overselling tickets.

Jacob Elordi at 20th Century Studios' 'The Dog Stars' World Premiere held at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on August 20, 2026 in London, England.

Screened at the since-demolished Mann Westwood Fourplex on Gayley Avenue — just one block from where the Directors Village and Bruin Theatre stand now — the New York City crime thriller features swaggering performances from Wesley Snipes, Ice-T, Allen Payne, Chris Rock, Judd Nelson, and Van Peebles himself. Not to mention, needle drops from 2 Live Crew and Color Me Badd running alongside some of the most gloriously heightened gangster theatrics of the early ’90s.

Mario Van Peebles, Judd Nelson, Ice-T, 1991. ©Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection

Westwood was the perfect place for “New Jack City” to screen, and the Village was routinely compared to New York’s Times Square in terms of popularity back then. But the theater ultimately turned hundreds of frustrated moviegoers away, and escalating police response and racial tensions already simmering in Los Angeles resulted in chaos that night.

At the height of the roughly two-and-a-half-hour melee that followed, as many as 1,500 people surged through Westwood Village, smashing windows, looting stores, and vandalizing cars. A hundred cops responded, 21 shops were damaged, and nine people were arrested, and in the aftermath, “New Jack City” was painted as something much more dangerous than a movie.

Mann Theaters pulled Van Peebles’ movie from its programming, and going forward, local Westwood theater operators agreed to warn police when they were going to show potentially “dangerous” titles: an agreement many saw as the businesses and their community leaders effectively promising to alert authorities about minority-made films.

“They’re using [‘New Jack City’] as an excuse,” DuVernay said of the city’s response to the riot that ensued. “They’re afraid this place is attracting too many Black people, basically.”

Years away from making history with “Selma” as the first (and to this day only) Black woman to direct a Best Picture-nominated film, DuVernay was already witnessing and speaking out about a much bigger crisis than the “New Jack City” incident.

Five days earlier, on March 3, 1991, LAPD officers had beaten 25-year-old Rodney King after a traffic stop roughly 20 miles away in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Lake View Terrace.

A precursor to bodycam footage, the assault was captured on videotape by George Holliday, a Los Angeles plumber who recorded the incident on a Sony camcorder from his second-floor apartment balcony. The footage was later broadcast around the country, sparking a national debate about police brutality and racism in the U.S.

The City of Angels had not yet reached the most explosive riots associated with the Rodney King case, which came after four LAPD officers were acquitted of assault by a white judge in a Simi Valley court. (Notably, two of the LAPD defendants were later convicted of violating King’s civil rights in Los Angeles federal court and went to prison.)

But the fuse was already burning thanks to preexisting tensions involving not just the predominantly white police force but also tensions between Black and Korean people. The seismic event known as the Los Angeles riots occurred from April 29 to May 4, 1992. The unrest left 63 people dead, injured roughly 2,000 more, and caused about $1 billion in property damage, according to concurrent reporting by the Los Angeles Times.

The strain underlying that conflict had been wearing on Westwood specifically for years. In 1988, 27-year-old Japanese American graphic artist Karen Toshima was killed by a stray bullet during a gang confrontation on Broxton Avenue, shocking Angelenos who had treated gun violence as a problem largely confined to poor parts of the city.

Toshima’s death prompted a huge public response and more policing in Westwood, while the media coverage itself fueled anger that comparable killings in South and East L.A. had received demonstrably less attention.

NEW JACK CITY, Vanessa P. Williams, Allen Payne, Wesley Snipes (center), Michael Michele, Bill Nunn, 1991, (c)Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection

Three years later, on March 16, 1991, another killing fell along a similar racial fault line.

Just eight days after the “New Jack City” riot, a 15-year-old Black girl named Latasha Harlins entered a South Los Angeles convenience store to buy a bottle of orange juice. Korean shopkeeper Soon Ja Du accused Harlins of stealing it, and after a physical confrontation, shot Harlins in the back of the head as she turned to leave. The shooting was recorded on the store’s security camera footage. That killing, and Du’s later probation sentence requiring no prison time, was a key turning point before the 1992 uprising.

Still, some blamed Westwood’s decline on “New Jack City.”

The contradiction was obvious: How could a movie the majority of rioters didn’t get to see possibly be responsible for inspiring vandalism and violence? Westwood’s inability to resolve that question at the time reflected a much bigger problem — and ultimately helped dismantle one of the things that made Westwood Village remarkable in the first place.

At its peak, Westwood was one of the rare places where Angelenos who otherwise lived separately encountered each other in a jovial setting. UCLA students poured in from campus, while wealthy Westsiders shared sidewalks with moviegoers and shoppers who visited from all over the city. Major premieres, midnight screenings, restaurant openings, record store concerts, and more turned those few blocks into a sacred town square.

No single riot emptied Westwood. Competition from other commercial districts, the broader decline of the theatrical market, and traffic and parking headaches all played their parts. And though one could reasonably blame what happened on the night of March 8, 1991, on the Mann Westwood Fourplex, which also canceled the film’s planned screenings that weekend (that place is a Whole Foods now, by the way), “New Jack City” did not do this.

NEW JACK CITY, Tracy Camilla Johns, Wesley Snipes, 1991, (c)Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection

Three decades removed, Westwood is still a cinematic ghost town that passionate film lovers are trying to revive. It’s tempting to romanticize what the area used to be, but its history was never uncomplicated. In fact, its tendency to become chaotic and contentious is precisely what makes the memory of it so exciting to preserve — and important to protect.

In March 1991, the Village had 10 movie theaters. Today, there are four.

To remember what catching a flick in Westwood actually felt like, I’m kicking things over to my buddy Jim Hemphill, who interviewed Van Peebles about “New Jack City” last year and was a Westwood regular during its glory days.

Jim is also sick and just got back from London, where he was interviewing Ridley Scott about “The Dog Stars,” so everybody please be kind to him… and each other. (Note: The above history was heavily informed by John Ridley’s 2017 documentary “Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992.” Watch that, too.) —Alison Foreman

The Bite: “New Jack City” Still Totally Rocks

I wish I could have seen “New Jack City” in Westwood, but when it opened in 1991 I was still a dewy-eyed young film student in Chicago and thus had to settle for the Burnham Plaza multiplex as my venue of choice. (Just so those of us in Chicago didn’t feel too left out of the Westwood chaos, there was a shooting at Burnham on opening night, but I was on my way home from the theater by the time that went down.)

Whether you saw “New Jack City” on the big screen when it came out or caught up with it at home or in a revival theater later, the movie was and is an all-time banger: an exuberant blend of visceral action-movie thrills and righteous sociopolitical rage. Mario Van Peebles would go on to make equally great, if not better, movies (his “Baadasssss” remains the single greatest film about filmmaking ever made), but he never made one with more kinetic flair.

As for Westwood… sigh. Film historian Thomas Schatz just published a book called “Power Surge” that argues for the 1990s and early 2000s as a golden age for American movies, and I count myself lucky to have lived through that era in close proximity to the greatest film viewing hub in the country right before it disappeared. There’s no way to describe the excitement that came with discovering great movies in the palaces that adorned Westwood’s corners. Seeing “Boogie Nights” at the National and the two “Kill Bill” flicks six months apart at the Village remain three of the all-time great moviegoing experiences of my life.

I laughed when recently listening to an episode of Matt Belloni’s “The Town” podcast where, in a discussion about IMAX screenings, Belloni’s young producer Craig made the assumption that before IMAX it didn’t really matter what screen you saw a movie on — that all theaters were the same. Poor Craig clearly wasn’t alive in the era when we SoCal cinephiles would wait with bated breath for the L.A. Weekly to come out so we could see if our prayers had been answered and the latest Scorsese, Eastwood, Bigelow, or Singleton movie was opening on one of the big Westwood screens, or if we’d have to mope at a multiplex like the Galaxy or the Beverly Connection.

I still remember the orgasmic excitement I felt when seeing that I’d be able to catch Coppola’s “The Rainmaker” at the National — and the crushing disappointment of Spike Lee’s “Clockers” dropping at AMC Century City. But it wasn’t just the size of Westwood’s screens or the decibels of its sound systems (though both were important); it was that sense of community Ali describes. Going to Westwood on a weekend to see a movie meant you were hanging out with Angelenos of all ages and from a diverse array of backgrounds, and you were all there for one thing: to see a great movie and maybe have a drink or dinner afterward to talk about it.

The American Cinematheque reviving the Village is a step in the right direction, especially given their superb programming (which, incidentally, included a rip-roaring screening of “New Jack City” a while back). But it’s doubtful the neighborhood will ever return to its glory days, if for no other reason than that some of its most glorious venues were long ago demolished. (The Mann Festival is now an indoor rock-climbing facility — is nothing sacred?!) Still, I’ll take what I can get, and hope that reopening the Village is only the beginning. —Jim Hemphill

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