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The terrible movie that helped launch Morgan Freeman’s career
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The terrible movie that helped launch Morgan Freeman’s career

Overnight sensations don’t come along often in Hollywood, and Morgan Freeman is almost a textbook example of the power of perseverance. He spent decades pursuing his career before becoming a star, and he hasn’t looked back since.

The actor was first introduced to film when he played an uncredited role in 1964 The pawnbrokerbut it would be more than twenty years before anyone really knew who he was. Meanwhile, he continued to ply his trade on stage and screen with children’s television series The Electricity Companythe most prominent role of his professional life until the late 1980s.

Jerry Schatzeberg Street smart was the twelfth feature film in which Freeman had appeared, and he had also gained extensive experience on stage and small screen, but his performance as the villainous pimp Leo ‘Fast Black’ Smalls made it clear to the industry that he was a formidable character actor with reserve had arrived on the scene.

He was about to turn 50 years old then Street smart hit theaters in March 1987, but when Freeman earned his first Academy Award nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category, it was the turning point he’d been waiting for. From then on, he was an in-demand artist on the rise, and within a few years he was a reliable, reliable and ubiquitous A-lister.

Christopher Reeve played the lead role in Street smart as a struggling reporter who makes up a story about local prostitution to revive his bad reputation, only because the fictional pimp he created looks suspiciously like Freeman’s “Fast Black,” who believes Reeve’s Jonathan Fisher has tapped his sources to obtain information.

It was the breakthrough Freeman had always dreamed of, but it couldn’t have happened without one of the worst films ever made. Reeve had been defined by Superman since he starred in Richard Donner’s original nearly a decade earlier, and the vultures were circling the star to get a fourth installment into production at the exact same time he was watching. Street smart as its next dramatic turn.

Freeman explained Film Freak Central that studio Cannon Films “wants to make Superman IVand 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 Street smartbut Reeve stood his ground and demanded the comic book adaptation be postponed so he could film the heavy drama.

“He started longing for the old things again,” Freeman recalled of Reeve wanting to escape his Superman box. “You know, that old passion began to come back to him, and he wanted more and more to go against the popular current, or rather, against the cast into which his popularity had brought him. So he started doing more and more, weaker roles, I should say more human parts.

Superman had come around again, but… Street smart was a passion project that Reeve wanted to make for years. If Cannon had exercised his right to effectively force him to play Clark Kent again, 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 it Street smart”, and the future Academy Award winner finally got the edge he had been craving for so long.

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