The biggest question, however, was how the film would address a well-known incident in the history of N.W.A — Dr. Dre’s physical assault of female hip-hop journalist Denise “Dee” Barnes.

The answer was easy: the altercation with Barnes was completely omitted from the film.

While “Straight Outta Compton” opened last Friday to critical acclaim and hit No. 1 at the box office over the weekend by pulling in $56.1 million, the positive debut has given way to criticism about why the film ignored the assault of Barnes and failed to acknowledge other storied instances of Dre’s alleged violence against women.

Barnes’ run-in with Dre, however, was included in an earlier version of Jonathan Herman’s screenplay for the film.

In the scene, the fictional Dre, “eyes glazed, drunk, with an edge of nastiness, contempt” (per noted from the script) spots Barnes at the party and approaches her.

“Saw that [expletive] you did with Cube. Really had you under his spell, huh? Ate up everything he said. Let him diss us. Sell us out.”
“I just let him tell his story,” Barnes’ character retorts, “That’s what I do. It’s my job.”

“I thought we were cool, you and me,” Dre fires back. “But you don’t give a [expletive]. You just wanna laugh at N.W.A, make us all look like fools.”

The conversation escalates, Barnes throws her drink in Dre’s face before he attacks her “flinging her around like a rag-doll, while she screams, cries, begs for him to stop.”

It’s one of a handful of scenes that doesn’t make it into the film. Director F. Gary Gray has said the original script was a lengthy 150 pages and the film’s original cut was three and a half hours long.

When asked about the “glaring omission” by a viewer at a pre-release screening, Gray said they discussed it at the beginning and confirmed a number of narratives were left out because they wanted to focus tightly on the group.

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“There are so many things that you can add or subtract. Cube always said, ‘You can make five different N.W.A movies.’ We made the one we wanted to make.”

Other scenes that were left out from earlier versions of the story: Dre being shot four times in the leg, his house catching fire during a wild pool party, a jail scene and a graphic flashback of his younger brother in the fight that claimed his life.

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