The classic 1990 movie Will Smith was almost sued into starring in: “Oh, we don’t like it”
By the time he made his big-screen debut in 1992, Will Smith was already famous, but he could have starred in his first movie two years earlier, and it wouldn’t have been through choice.
Having won a Grammy for ‘Parents Just Don’t Understand’ in 1989, he was already a known commodity as one-half of DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, but one of their follow-up songs ended up getting the duo into a little legal trouble that could have realistically changed the trajectory of Smith’s career.
After getting into trouble with the IRS, the rapper was staring bankruptcy in the face in his early 20s when the government demanded he repay almost $3million in taxes. Broke and wondering where to go next, a fortuitous meeting with Quincy Jones ended with the star landing his own sitcom, with The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air premiering in September 1990.
Six months beforehand, a low-budget comedy premiered in cinemas that would go on to recoup its production costs more than ten times over from cinemas, spawn a six-film franchise, win widespread critical acclaim, end up being selected by the National Film Registry to be preserved by the Library of Congress, and even make it into The Criterion Collection.
That film was House Party, and instead of starring Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin of Kid ‘n Play in the leading roles, New Line Cinema almost forced Smith and Jazzy Jeff into the picture. The latter’s 1988 track, ‘A Nightmare on My Street’, heavily sampled Charles Bernstein’s score from Wes Craven’s seminal slasher, A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The problem was that neither the Fresh Prince nor Jazzy Jeff had obtained the samples through the proper channels, with New Line suing them for copyright infringement. The Hollywood entity emerged victorious in the courtroom, and in addition to all copies of the accompanying music video being ordered for destruction, one of the terms of the settlement gave the duo the option to make two films for the studio.
If Smith or Jazzy Jeff agreed to star in a New Line picture, then their salaries would be deducted from the cost of the settlement they’d been ordered to pay, and the first one they were offered was House Party. “If you think about the premise of House Party, one dude was a DJ and the other was a rapper,” Jeff pointed out. “So House Party was set up for Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.”
“We weren’t thinking about doing movies back then,” he added. “They were like, ‘What do you think about this? And we were like, ‘Oh, we don’t like it’. And, ‘What about this?’ ‘Oh, we don’t like it. Ha! We out!'” First-time director Reginald Hudlin confirmed that they were under consideration for his debut flick, but he was never entirely sold on the prospect, and with good reason.
He knew that if Smith and Jazzy Jeff signed on to lead the House Party cast, they’d be doing it because of the lawsuit, and not because they had any vested interest in his movie. In another remarkable twist, Kid ‘n Play revealed that before it had been reworked as his showcase, they’d been offered the TV series that eventually became The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, with Reid joking, “Whatever happened to Will Smith? I never see that guy anywhere.”
