Fox Searchlight will release Geremy Jasper's "Patti Cake$," about a young Jersey rapper, later this year.
Hillsdale's Geremy Jasper just knocked it out of the park at the Sundance Film Festival with "Patti Cake$," his film about an aspiring New Jersey rapper. After an overnight bidding war with other studios including Lionsgate and Amazon Studios, Fox Searchlight shelled out $10.5 million for the film, making it the second biggest deal at the film festival, Variety reported Tuesday.
Danielle Macdonald, an Australian actress who The Hollywood Reporter has called the "Hollywood's next big thing," has earned raves for playing the starring role of Patricia Dombrowski, or Patti Cake$, aka Killa P, aka "White Trish," a 23-year-old aspiring rapper.
In "Patti Cake$," director Jasper's feature film debut, Dombrowski was originally conceived of as hailing specifically from Lodi, though that changed further on in the project's development. "Raging Bull" actress Cathy Moriarty plays her grandmother, who calls her "Patti Cakes."
Actress Danielle Macdonald and director Geremy Jasper of 'Patti Cake$' at the Sundance Film Festival. (Rich Polk/Getty Images)Living in the shadow of her alcoholic mother's (Bridget Everett) own faded hopes for a music career, Patti works two jobs to help pay off her grandmother's medical bills. Eventually "Nana" plays a role in Patti Cake$' hip-hop group. Jasper told Deadline that the movie is "kind of a valentine to the women that raised me."
To prepare for the role, Macdonald visited New Jersey and was schooled in the ways of the native accent.
"She's trying to make it in a business that is all about image and she doesn't have the right image," Macdonald, 25, told Verge. "... We happen to be in industries that don't promote the body types we have."
A music video director (his credits alongside his wife, Georgie Greville, include "Dog Days are Over," for Florence + The Machine), Jasper grew up writing rap lyrics. He penned the songs in the film and taught Macdonald how to rap. He's referred to Patti as his "alter ego." He's also the former lead singer of The Fever, an indie rock band active in the early aughts.
"Writing rap lyrics is my secret superpower," he told IndieWire. "I've been doing it since I was eight years old. I was in a rap group in high school and made beats after college. If I had my druthers, I would have been in a rap group instead of a rock group, but I'm ridiculous, I sound f***ing ridiculous. Patti isn't ridiculous, not by any means, but that feeling of ridicule she experiences from everybody in the town for her rapping was definitely there for me."
In the film, Mamoudou Athie, who played Grandmaster Flash in Netflix's homage to early hip-hop, "The Get Down," plays a producer named Basterd, the Antichrist. Hip-hop legend MC Lyte also makes an appearance as a DJ.
Jasper, an alumnus of Wesleyan University, said he drew the atmosphere for the film from the time before he moved to New York, when he lived in his parents' basement in Hillsdale, a town where he felt trapped.
"I was 100 percent convinced I'd be stuck there for the rest of my life," he told IndieWire.
Jasper's Patti "battles an army of haters as she strives to break the mold and take over the rap game," according to the Sundance Institute. Starting in 2014, the film was refined in the institute's screenwriting and and directing labs, where Jasper was mentored by Quentin Tarantino.
The largest Sundance deal so far this year is Amazon Studios' $12 million for "The Big Sick." The romantic comedy, produced by Judd Apatow and directed by Michael Showalter, stars Kumail Nanjiani ("Silicon Valley") and Zoe Kazan in a script written by Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, that's based on the real-life story of how they met.