Will the Latest Basquiat Biopic Hew to History? Al Diaz Has His Doubts

December 2, 2025Uncategorized

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1602978" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/Al-Diaz-with-some-his-art-at-the-show-An-Empire-Fallen-at-One-Art-Space-in-Manhattan.-Photo-by-Jamie-Lubetkin-e1764607859557.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A man in a dark gray button down shirt stands smiling with his arms folded in front of a display of artworks" width="970" height="642" data-caption='Al Diaz with some of his work in “An Empire Fallen” at New York’s One Art Space. <span class=”media-credit”>Photo by Jamie Lubetkin</span>’>

Three or four years ago, director Julius Onah posted on social media that he was making a film called Samo Lives. Al Diaz saw it and thought, Here we go again. “It’s called Samo Lives. Do you understand what that implies?” Diaz asked. “Samo wasn’t his nickname. Samo was more than just a phrase for ‘same old shit.’ Samo was the ultimate inside joke. Let’s get that really understood.”

Diaz, now 66, is the other half of one of the most influential creative partnerships in downtown New York history—the graffiti duo that became the launchpad for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s meteoric rise to art world stardom. Without Samo, there likely would have been no Basquiat as we know him. And without Al Diaz, there would have been no Samo.

As filming of Samo Lives was nearing completion, Diaz spoke with Observer at length about Basquiat, Samo and Hollywood. Seated on a bench amid his latest show of downtown expressionist art at Van Der Plas Gallery, the Lower East Side gallery that represents him, Diaz was thoughtful and measured as he considered how Hollywood writes, or rewrites, history. He said that while Onah and actor Danny Ramirez (cast to play Diaz in the film) met with him, they didn’t bring him on board as a consultant and have not revealed how he and Samo will be portrayed.

In September, Samo Lives was filming in Tompkins Square Park, just blocks from the public housing complex where Diaz grew up. As cameras rolled on a scene with Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Basquiat and Antony Starr as Andy Warhol, Diaz appeared to take a measure of the project. “They said this was going to be about the origins of Basquiat or something. The origins of Basquiat? I don’t think so. I mean, first of all, they have Andy Warhol hanging out in Tompkins Square Park. When did that ever happen?”

Production wrapped in October, with Jeffrey Wright—who famously played Basquiat in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biopic—joining the cast alongside Dane DeHaan, Kathryn Newton and others. The film marks the first time Basquiat’s story will be told by a Black director, with Onah stating that “the complexity and richness of his experience as an artist and child of the African diaspora has yet to be dramatized in the manner it deserves.”

To understand what’s at stake for Diaz and the history of downtown art, you need to understand what Samo actually was—not the mythology, but the reality. And on this point, Diaz is unequivocal. “There is a real lack of understanding of what Samo was,” he said. The oversimplified version—the one that’s been repeated in countless articles and documentaries—is that Samo stands for ‘same old shit.’

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Here’s the real origin story, as Diaz tells it: In 1977, Basquiat and Diaz began going to a friend’s place in Tribeca to smoke weed with her parents. After a while, this became routine, and the duo referred to it as “doing the samo,” for “same old shit.” The phrase became part of the local teenage vernacular. The conceptual leap came in January 1978, after Basquiat wrote a satirical short story for the high school newspaper they founded, the Basement Blues Press, about a guy selling religions out of a kiosk. Up for sale in this kiosk was a “guilt-free do whatever you want now, pay later” religion called Samo.

Diaz, who had been an established graffiti writer since 1971 under the tag BOMB-1, suggested starting a graffiti campaign around Samo. They began writing slogans on public walls:

“Samo as an alternative 2 God”… “Samo 4 the so-called avant-garde”… “Samo as an end 2 mind-wash religion, bogus philosophies & nowhere politics.”

“We were writing on the streets all the time, and our messages were getting more and more sophisticated and philosophical,” Diaz said. They spread the Samo gospel across Tribeca, Soho, the West Village, Chinatown and the East Village. By December 1978, when the Village Voice published an exposé revealing the artists behind Samo (paying them $50 each for an interview), their hype campaign had already succeeded spectacularly. Diaz said he felt the joke had run its course, but Basquiat wanted to use Samo’s 15 minutes of fame to promote his art career. He did, and soon, Basquiat was the toast of the art world.

Which brings us back to Samo Lives. Diaz reached out to Onah and the two met up in a lower Manhattan diner to discuss the project. He also met with Harrison and Ramirez, but the talks ended when Diaz asked to be paid as a consultant on the film. “They never answered me about consulting. I didn’t get any call back with a response. And then the next thing I know, they were just shooting,” he said.

Diaz insists his frustration isn’t about money, though economics are no doubt part of it. It’s really about accuracy. About who controls the narrative when that narrative is fundamentally about a collaboration that lives on only through one surviving partner.

If the film’s premise celebrates Basquiat’s true origins, it would seem to hinge on a historically accurate portrayal of Samo. And Samo can’t be accurately portrayed without Diaz. “If they were doing a historically correct thing, they would have wanted somebody who could steer them the right way,” he argues. When Diaz went to his copyright lawyer to see if he could block the film’s use of the Samo name, he learned he couldn’t prevent its use in a film—only on commercial products. “I do have some copyright privilege, but apparently not when it comes to film.”

And the title itself is misleading, Diaz argues. “If they’re calling it Samo Lives, that refers to a completely different thing than the career of Jean-Michel Basquiat after Samo, right? It sounds like it focuses on one aspect of what he did. And that was a thing that he and I did together.” He added that he suspects the filmmakers “just seized on that word. It’s very superficial… It just sounds like they don’t really know what the history of the thing was.”

Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat used composite characters—amalgamations of real people compressed into fictional stand-ins. Benicio Del Toro portrayed Basquiat’s best friend, a Diaz-like character, but hardly a true representation of the Samo partnership. Diaz called that film “a decent work of fiction.” Samo Lives could be heading in a similar direction. “It’s a Hollywood production, so it’ll probably have some bullshit added to it to make the story sellable, whatever Hollywood requires. I don’t have great expectations.”

What would a historically correct Basquiat film look like? “The fact that there’s already a biopic that’s a work of fiction is enough,” Diaz argues. “You can’t fiction it again. The answer to that film would be to do something that’s actually historically correct.”

But there’s a deeper issue at play: the tendency to airbrush Basquiat’s collaborators out of the picture, to simplify a complex web of downtown relationships into a lone genius narrative. At the same time, Diaz is candid about why he and Basquiat eventually parted ways: “Jean-Michel was not a good friend. I grew up in the projects, where you had to depend on your friends. You learn who your friends are. That’s a different value system than someone who goes through friends every three years. That was his pattern. That’s his friend history.”

Another persistent misconception is that Basquiat was a graffiti artist. “As it is, he’s mislabeled as a graffiti artist… Samo was not tagging. We were making social commentary. We were looking to write for anybody to read it, not just for other graffiti writers.” Traditionally, graffiti is “an insular subculture. This is not for your mom. This is for your friends. In Samo, we were doing it for people, including moms. Samo had nothing to do with the graffiti subculture. It got painted with that brush later.”

After the Village Voice article revealed their identities, Basquiat “ran with it. He was like, ‘I’m the guy, I’m the guy.’” Diaz acknowledges there’s no knowing what would have become of him without that boost. “That’s the thing that made him, but he might have found other ways to build his career. He was smart and very good at self-promotion.”

Samo Lives remains in post-production with no announced release date, and Diaz continues making art on his own terms. He recently closed a solo exhibition at One Art Space on Warren Street, featuring new paintings and sculptures. It’s the kind of steady, unglamorous work that doesn’t fit Hollywood’s narrative of the tortured genius burning bright and fast.

Perhaps the real legacy of Samo is not merely as a stepping stone to fame, but as a discrete moment of creative collaboration that challenged the commodification of the avant-garde. As Diaz wrote in the original Samo pamphlets: “Samo as an end 2 mass produced individuality.”

The irony, of course, is that Hollywood is now mass-producing Samo itself—turning a punk rock critique of the art world into a marketable biopic title without the input of the man who created it. “Samo was all about hype. About creating a brand out of thin air and promoting it to the masses. And it was very successful. I guess it’s not surprising that it is now being consumed by Hollywood hype,” Diaz said. Forty-seven years after the partnership last prowled the streets of Lower Manhattan, Samo has a life of its own—just not the one Diaz imagined when he and a 17-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat first picked up spray paint cans and decided to sell the world a religion.

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