(nyt) In Brooklyn next Monday the studio is expected to begin shooting “Notorious,” a film biography of Mr. Wallace who, when he died at 24, was the champion of East Coast rap whose rivalry with the West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur, shot to death six months earlier, helped drive an ugly East-West feud. No one has been charged with either killing, and the death of Mr. Wallace, also known as Biggie Smalls, remains the subject of high-stakes litigation. His family has accused the Los Angeles Police Department of harboring rogue officers who were supposedly involved with the murder. No trial date has been set, but lawyers for the Wallace family, in interviews last week, said their principal case, one of two related suits in the Federal District Court here, may go before a jury later this year. That would be just one more complication for a film that, its makers say, will avoid any overt attempt to assign blame for Mr. Wallace’s death while getting to the bottom of his character, his art and his considerable appeal. “We want the movie to be an anthem for a generation,” said Peter Rice, the studio’s president. Music biography is one of Hollywood’s more difficult forms. In the best of circumstances it requires filmmakers to make tough choices about story structure and the re-creation of a familiar persona. Should the film tell a whole life (as with Édith Piaf and “La Vie en Rose”) or just part (as with Mozart and “Amadeus”)? Should the star impersonate the performer closely (as Jamie Foxx did with his portrayal of Ray Charles in “Ray”) or depend on a looser interpretation (following Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line”)? Fox comes to “Notorious” with at least a small edge, in that a crucial executive supervising the picture, Zola Mashariki, grew up in Mr. Wallace’s Brooklyn neighborhood and knew him.

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