The Fresh Prince of Belles-Lettres? Will Smith Has A Memoir.


Years later, when his old man is confined to a wheelchair with heart disease, Smith admits that, like Richard Widmark’s character in “The Kiss of Death,” he considered pushing him down a ladder: “My 911 call would have been Academy Award level. A rare dark glow of a man whose psychological adaptations are kindness and popularity, and a desire to make sure everyone around him is having a good time.

In the rap world where he made his name, these traits weren’t always appreciated, and Smith’s reputation as “soft” and “honey gum” is still debated. It had its fair share of violence, both inside and outside the home, but it was strictly middle class. In an early meeting with an angry television executive, he and his entourage were so sure a fight was going to break out that his manager lifted a five-pound snow globe in self-defense.

He recounts how he learned to appeal to white sensibilities at Catholic school, until his family pulled him back after a racist incident at the football awards banquet; and getting into what Anne-Anne calls “hippie hopping” at Overbrook High, a predominantly Black high school. Smith’s collaboration with Jeffrey Allen Townes, aka DJ Jazzy Jeff, a nerdy boy from another neighborhood who survived non-Hodgkin lymphoma, was so successful with a hit song before graduation that Smith decided against college. “We were looking for our voice,” she writes of their intense early partnership, “but we found ourselves.”

Scenes from tours with Public Enemy and 2 Live Crew are gorgeous 3D postcards from the genre’s rosy dawn, including bickering with local law enforcement in the South, blowjobs on stage, and a stuntman “hanging” every night in the Ku Klux Klan. hood. Smith squandered his earnings and neglected to pay taxes, but got a lucky second opportunity to star in the custom-made sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” alongside Townes from Obi Wan Kenobi, Quincy Jones.

While Smith claims she didn’t read a book cover until she was “well into her 20s”, she’s confident she’ll turn $10 million back on her literary confidence (thanks in part to Anne-Anne) and her manager’s intuition. Early project “8 Heads in Duffel Bag” instead cast Paul Poitier in John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation” for $300,000. Eventually, she falls in love with “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho and “Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell, adoring magical realism and mythology.

Smith’s own hero’s quest is, at first, more money (“making all the money for the weekend”), more fame, more global records, a home as majestic as he saw growing up in “Dallas” – whatever. his second wife, the awesome Jada Pinkett, doesn’t want to come with a stallion to breakfast like Sue Ellen Ewing does.

As the book progresses and Smith’s reputation becomes more stratospheric and snowglobe-like, the air thins out; begins to pant and turns inward. “Am I addicted?” Meditation wonders through a period of introspection that includes a trip to Trinidad, the therapeutic identification of a person named Uncle Fluffy, and more than a dozen ayahuasca rites. He’s not addicted to drugs, booze, or “sex like a ghetto hyena”. Smith is a workaholic and a win-aholic, the most virtuous and therefore the invisible of flaws.

It’s probably not good for her to write a chart-topping book and get it out to the public. But one day at a time.



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *