Entertainment

Criminal rags-to-riches movies used to revolve around bootleggers who embraced their first tommy guns like kids on Christmas morning. These gangsters, featured in '30s movies such as Scarface and Little Caesar, clawed their way to the top only to be undone by the message that came along with all Hollywood movies of the '30s: Crime doesn't pay. These anti-heroes didn't get third-act redemptions.

But today's hood mythologies are more likely to follow the course set by Marcus, played by and based on the life of Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson in the new movie Get Rich or Die Tryin'. Marcus follows in the footsteps of his slain coke dealer mom and rises through the drug ranks. But he dreams of something safer and more fulfilling: rapping. He's gunned down, has a son and makes the shift from dealing crack to rocking the mike.

And he does have a third-act redemption – plus a sneaker line, an autobiography (From Pieces to Weight), a movie, massive wealth and international fame.

"This is my way out," says 50 by phone. "Outside of this, I'd be in the same cycle as everyone else – in jail, or dead."

Of course, the path from selling crack to selling millions of albums doesn't always preclude death. Notorious B.I.G. could attest to that, if he were still alive; he made his own meteoric rise from slinging rocks to rolling with the ghetto fabulous, only to end up murdered in a case that still hasn't been solved.

But those who do make it to the other side, like 50, emerge with a life story tailor-made for a movie industry and audience that don't have much patience for bummer endings. Get Rich, like the stories of countless rappers who made it off the streets, offers the best of both worlds: The grit and titillation of a life of crime and the redemptive factor of a happy ending.

Still, it's not quite that simple. 50 has put street crime behind him, trading his hardscrabble life in South Queens for a swanky crib in Connecticut. But the streets are still a big part of his multiplatinum appeal, from the first-person accounts of mayhem in his songs to the glowering persona that helps marketers sell his image.

This tension between 50's past and present led to a recent flap over Get Rich billboards, which show the star holding a microphone in one hand, a gun in the other. Protests have led to the removal of billboards in Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

"Those people who say he glamorizes this or that, they already made a decision not to like me," 50 says. "People have already assumed who I am. That's why I felt like the book and the film would be important."

Which brings us to another advantage of surviving the streets: You get to participate in your own immortalization.

50 Cent had already built a street hip-hop reputation through mix tapes before Eminem and Dr. Dre welcomed him to their machine and helped make him a star. But now he's a bona fide media king who has told his story via two top-selling albums (Get Rich or Die Tryin' and The Massacre), a book and now a movie. You can't open a magazine or turn on the TV without seeing him; on the day of this interview, he had just done Live With Regis and Kelly, the morning after sitting on Letterman's couch.

At this rate, he may die of exhaustion trying to tell his story.

"It's been therapeutic," he says. "The whole idea of having a film based on my life story immortalized me. It will be here well after I'm gone."

Where the old gangster movies played like twisted, homicidal variations on the Horatio Alger stories, the 50 Cent saga flips the script. The records, book and movie don't exactly argue that crime pays: As the man said himself, he'd be dead or incarcerated if he had stayed his course on the streets.

Yet it's that street life that draws us in and gives the story its punch, just as it brings intrigue and exoticism to so much hip-hop. We wouldn't have heard of 50 Cent if not for his rap career, but we probably wouldn't care about him if not for his crime career. "It's all part of what made me who I am today," he says.

And all part of the complexity behind a redeemed gangster living the American dream by trading on his rocky past.

E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com