Dr. Dre Prepping Marvin Gaye Movie

• Hip-Hop legend Dr. Dre is working on a movie about the late singer Marvin Gaye. That’s the word from Variety, which reports that Dre has already cleared one major hurdle that has evaded others before him — he has secured the rights from Sony/ATV Music Publishing to use Gaye’s music.

There have been multiple prior attempts to bring Gaye’s story to the big screen — F. Gary Gray, Cameron Crowe, James Gandolfini, Scott Rudin, and actors including Jesse L. Martin and Lenny Kravitz have all attempted to make a Gaye biopic, but until now, none had been authorized by Gaye’s family. The most recent project to get the sign-off from the Gaye estate was with Jamie Foxx, who landed the rights for a limited series in 2016 but that project has seen no movement since then.

Dre, whose real name is Andre Young, has previous experience in the movie industry, both in front of the camera, in films like Training Day and Car Wash, as well as producing. His most recent film credit was the 2015 hit Straight Outta Compton, which chronicled the rise of his seminal hip-hop group N.W.A and was produced by Dre and fellow N.W.A member Ice Cube. The movie also scored an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Gaye, whose body of work includes the hits “What’s Going On,” “Sexual Healing,” and “Let’s Get It On,” to name a few, became one of Motown’s most successful artists before he was fatally shot in 1984 at age 44 by his father following a family dispute in their Los Angeles home.