Mark Curry posted a new video Tuesday laying out exactly what he wants from 50 Cent over the Netflix documentary “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” and it is not money. It is a production credit, and Curry says 50 owes him a favor.
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“I’m just trying to say you owe me a favor, and the way that you can repay this favor is by helping me do a documentary,” Curry said. “If you don’t want to help me do the documentary, just introduce me to somebody who could possibly help me do the documentary.”
Curry also said he posted his original contract on his page so people can read it themselves. “So once you look at that contract and you read it, then you tell me what you ain’t reading right,” he said, responding to people who assumed he went into the project without paperwork or a lawyer.
For anyone unfamiliar with why a credit matters more than a check here, Curry explained it himself. A production credit is your name in the official credits of a project in a producing role, and it is the piece of paper that proves you have done the work before. “The only thing I wanted was my production credit, because with that credit, I would be able to go into any film house or any kind of documentary, whoever wants to record one, and I would have a credit, which would help me do other things where I didn’t even need that,” he said.Curry says he built a large share of the project. “I ain’t gonna say I put it all together, but I did a majority of it. I’m talking about more than 40 percent of it,” he said.
He also described trying to build something bigger with 50 and getting nowhere.
“I talked to 50 Cent a few times. Again, things that we could do. We could do literary work. We could do books. We could do documentary. Everything I talked to him and his manager about: shot down. No callbacks.”
Curry pointed to 50’s publishing imprint specifically.
“I’m not asking you to put my book out. You say you have G-Unit Books. All right, well, we could put the book that I have out on G-Unit Books. Why we ain’t discussing those kind of things?”Curry says his agreement was never with 50 in the first place.
“My deal was with the people who originally put this documentary together, and then when they went and sold it, I was supposed to have been grandfathered into the deal, and I was supposed to get a production credit.”
Being grandfathered in means your original terms carry over when a project changes hands, so a sale does not wipe out what you were promised.
“That’s what I put everything together for, and you can’t come back later on and say, ‘Hey, we’re not gonna give it to you,’ after I already put everything together.”The backdrop is a Creative Arts Emmy. The Netflix docuseries, which 50 Cent executive produced, won Outstanding Picture Editing for a Nonfiction Program at the 78th Creative Arts Emmys over the weekend, and it debuted at No. 1 on Netflix with 21.8 million viewers in its first week. Curry appeared in it and has said he helped recruit other people who appear in it. He also says he received $69 tied to “Come With Me,” the 1998 Diddy and Jimmy Page record he helped write, because a sync license was not in place. A sync license is the permission and payment structure required when a song is used in film or television. Curry’s account of that licensing arrangement has not been independently verified.50 Cent’s public response has been a joke. On Instagram, he wrote, “Yo chill, what’s your Cash App, $Diddytouchedyourbutt.” Curry addressed it directly Tuesday and refused to play along.
“I’m not gonna sit here and joke about, ‘Diddy touch your butt,’ because we’re not gonna turn a joke into something that’s serious, because we do know whose butt Diddy did touch,” he said. “So we turning it into a joke, like, ‘Diddy touch your butt.’ Come on, man. Why would you say something like that? I’m talking to you about real serious business.”Curry spent a good portion of the video making clear he is not asking anybody for a bailout.
“I don’t need no handout. I don’t need no money from 50 Cent,” he said. “For the whole 55 years I’ve been living, I ain’t really ever missed a meal, and that’s because I know how to get up and go get what I’m looking for.” He closed by pointing to his own situation. “I got a job with benefits. I got 401(k), I got PTO, I got everything that a person could possibly need now.”
He said he plans to keep building either way.
“Whether I do it with or without him, it doesn’t matter. I’m gonna still get what I got to get.”50 Cent has not addressed the production credit claim itself beyond the Instagram comment, and Netflix has not commented on Curry’s account of his agreement.
