How one of the worst movies ever made gave Morgan Freeman his big break: “The money was stupid”
Overnight sensations don’t come along very often in Hollywood, and Morgan Freeman is almost the textbook example of the power of perseverance. He was decades into his career before he became a star, and he hasn’t looked back since.
The actor’s first taste of cinema came when he played an uncredited role in 1964’s The Pawnbroker, but it would be more than 20 years before anybody really knew who he was. In the meantime, he continued plying his trade on stage and screen with the children’s TV series The Electric Company, the highest-profile role of his professional life until the late 1980s.
Jerry Schatzeberg’s Street Smart was the 12th feature Freeman had appeared in, and he’d also gained extensive experience on the stage and small screen, but his performance as the vicious pimp Leo ‘Fast Black’ Smalls put the industry on notice that a formidable character actor with gravitas to spare had arrived on the scene.
He was on the cusp of turning 50 years old when Street Smart hit cinemas in March 1987, but when it went on to land Freeman his first Academy Award nomination in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category, it was the turning point he’d been waiting for. From that point on, he was an in-demand performer on an upward trajectory, and within the space of a few years, he was a reliable, dependable, and ubiquitous A-lister.
Christopher Reeve played the lead role in Street Smart as a struggling reporter who fabricates a story about local prostitution to try and revive his flagging reputation, only for the fictional pimp he’s created to be suspiciously similar to Freeman’s ‘Fast Black’, who believes Reeve’s Jonathan Fisher has been tapping his sources to gain information.
It was the breakthrough Freeman had always dreamed of, but it couldn’t have happened like it did without one of the worst movies ever made. Reeve had been defined by Superman ever since he starred in Richard Donner’s original almost a decade previously, and the vultures were circling around the star to get a fourth instalment into production at the exact same time he was eying Street Smart as his next dramatic turn.
Freeman explained to Film Freak Central that studio Cannon Films “wants to make Superman IV, and he doesn’t want to make it at all.” Unfortunately for Reeve, he was under contract, although it helped twist his arm that “the money was stupid,” according to Freeman. That could have been the end for Street Smart, but Reeve stood his ground and demanded the comic book adaptation be pushed back so he could shoot the hard-hitting drama.
“He had started to desire the old things again,” Freeman recalled of Reeve wanting to break out of his Superman box. “You know, that old passion started to stir in him again, and he wanted more and more to go against the popular grain, or rather, the cast that his popularity had put him in. So he started to desire more and more, weaker roles, I should say more human parts.”
Superman had come calling again, but Street Smart was a passion project Reeve had wanted to make for years. If Cannon had exercised its right to effectively force him into playing Clark Kent again, then there was nothing he could do about it, and the film that gave Freeman his big break would have fallen apart at the seams. Instead, “He held them up so he could do Street Smart,” and the future Academy Award winner finally got the leg-up he’d been craving for so long.
