Spike Lee’s Summer Film Camp.” That’s what Samuel L. Jackson called the annual experience of working on the director’s movies. At the time, Lee filmed his movies once a year, always in the summer, hiring mostly the same cast and crew. “Spike was like our savior when we were all struggling actors in New York,” Jackson said. “Every summer we knew we were going to go to Spike Lee’s Summer Film Camp, and make enough money to get us through to Christmas.” Lee would recruit his cast some months before with rat-a-tat phone calls. According to Jackson, they would clock in under a minute and run along the lines of: “Sam! ’Sup? How ’bout the Knicks? Do the Right Thing, this summer!”
Lee preferred actors based in New York over those from L.A. “The actors from New York are more about work, which is the way it should be,” he opined. “Give me actors like Bill Nunn and Sam Jackson any time.” As it happened, Nunn had recently moved into the basement of Jackson’s brownstone on W. 143rd Street. The friends nicknamed the subterranean apartment the Cave, and it soon became party central. Jackson needed only to walk down a staircase to descend into his bad habits.
Lee’s third feature film was Do the Right Thing, set on a single block in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Four months before the shooting started, Lee planned to cast Laurence Fishburne as Radio Raheem (a character with few lines, but an imposing presence with his boom box), Nunn as Mister Señor Love Daddy (the neighborhood’s radio DJ), and Jackson as Buggin’ Out, an excitable local. Then Fishburne dropped out. “Fish has decided that he no longer wants to play supporting roles after School Daze. He feels he’s a leading man now,” Lee wrote in his journal in April 1988. So Lee moved Nunn into the role of Radio Raheem, bumped Jackson up to the vacant spot behind the DJ’s microphone, and shifted Giancarlo Esposito into the part of Buggin’ Out.
The movie shot on location in Bed-Stuy; Lee hired the Fruit of Islam, the Nation of Islam’s security wing, to clean out the local crack houses. Jackson said that the neighborhood’s drug dealers held a grudge. When he wandered off the movie’s set and went to a local store, the greeting was: “You acting motherfuckers came in here and ruined our business, we’re gonna fuck you up.”
Jackson wouldn’t back down. “There were some guys they could intimidate, but there were others of us that were like, ‘You know, I just happen to be an actor, but I used to be the same kind of guy you are.’” Veteran actor Ossie Davis, also in the cast, defused more than one confrontation. “We were all pretty crazy during that time,” Jackson said. “Ossie was sort of our balance.”
Jackson spent most of the shoot inside the booth of FM 108 We Love Radio, isolated from the rest of the ensemble, appearing in the background of shots, watching wistfully through the window like a little kid who can’t go out and play until he finishes his homework. Jackson always brought a book to the set: sometimes he’d kill time by reading, sometimes by taking a nap. “Half the time I’d be in there sleeping, because I’d been up pretty much the night before, fucked up, hanging out with my friends,” he said.
When the movie wrapped, Jackson kept hustling, auditioning all over town, accepting any role he was offered. His technique: “I go to the audition, act my brains out, and get picked.”
Jackson had racked up small parts in enough films that his friends nicknamed him “King of the Cameos.” He was a master of making a big impression in a small amount of screen time, even if many of his parts were conceived as generic types—most obviously in the case of the 1989 movie Sea of Love, where his role was actually billed as “Black Guy.” Jackson scoffed, “That was the character name. That’s what it says in the credits: Black Guy.”
On December 14, 1988, Jackson was riding the subway, just like he did most days. As he was getting off his train, exiting the middle door of the last car, he saw that a woman had dropped some of her possessions, so he stopped to help her pick them up. “Very un–New York–like of me,” he noted. While he was leaning over, the subway doors closed on his ankle: most of his body was on the station’s platform, but his right foot was trapped inside the subway car. Then the subway started moving out of the station, pulling Jackson along with the train. As the train accelerated, Jackson lost his balance and fell onto his back, getting dragged along the platform. (Fortunately, he was wearing a backpack, which protected him from a massive head injury.)
As the subway entered the tunnel, Jackson resigned himself to his impending death and the knowledge that it was “going to be a sad Christmas.” And then, just before he smashed into the wall by the tunnel, the train stopped. “A guy on crutches pulled the emergency cord,” Jackson said. He was lucky to be alive, but he was nevertheless hobbled: he suffered a complete tear of his ACL and a partial tear of his meniscus, plus lots of cartilage damage. After his right knee was surgically repaired, he spent ten months on crutches and a year and a half in physical rehab. For the rest of his life, he would have a couple of extra screws in his right leg.
Professionally, the injury took Jackson out of commission for months, but he still participated in the 1989 edition of Spike Lee’s Summer Film Camp (also known as Mo’ Better Blues). Jackson had to play his character, a thug looking to collect a gambling debt, with a conspicuous leg brace and cane. One day, a crew member told Jackson about a job she was doing on the side: the music video for the rap group Public Enemy’s single “911 Is a Joke.” They hadn’t found anybody to play Flavor Flav’s dad in the video— could Jackson come to the Bronx that night? “I had no idea what it was—I just showed up,” Jackson said. His job in the video was basically to stand in the background, wearing black sweats and holding a glass of wine in his hand, looking concerned about his wife, who needed an ambulance. With his trademark clock around his neck, Flavor Flav seized the foreground, rapping about the deficiencies of emergency services in Black neighborhoods and mugging for the camera. The video was an all-night shoot: off-camera, Jackson and Flav hung out together, drinking and smoking weed.
Once he healed, Jackson kept auditioning, while his peers kept landing major projects. “You feel like you’re on the same level talentwise and you go to an audition and you know you rocked it, but you didn’t get it, and you wonder why,” Jackson said. “I would go to an audition and my eyes are a little too red or I smell like that beer I drank before I went to the audition, or whatever, and I didn’t get the job.”
The writer and film producer Nelson George ran into Jackson on 57th Street around this time; Jackson accosted him, trying to see if George could get him any work. “This was the height of the crack era in New York City,” George said. “I didn’t really know at the time that he had a drug problem, but he didn’t need to tell me. I could see: he looked feral.”
“I was a fucking drug addict and I was out of my mind a lot of the time, but I had a good reputation,” Jackson insisted. “Showed up on time, knew my lines, hit my marks.”
Jackson’s wife, LaTanya Richardson, knew her husband had a problem, even if she didn’t know the full extent of it: she referred to their brownstone on 143rd Street as the “Villa in Hell.” Jackson was gone a lot of the time, and when he was around, he admitted, he was “always isolated, snappy, and irritable.”
Jackson didn’t think he was smoking crack, because he bought powdered cocaine and cooked it up himself: he enjoyed the hands-on rituals of drug preparation before getting high. “People who smoke crack buy rocks. I thought I was freebasing, but as it turns out, it’s the same thing.”
In the early summer of 1990, Jackson spent the day at the bachelor party of a friend, writer-actor-director Ruben Santiago-Hudson (who had been part of the touring company for A Soldier’s Play). All day long, Jackson celebrated his pal’s impending wedding by guzzling tequila. Stumbling home that night, totally smashed, he thought, “I need some coke so I can even my shit out.” With the wrongheaded certainty of the addict, he executed that plan: “I went by the spot, copped, went home, cooked the shit, and passed out before I had even smoked it, drunk. That’s when my wife and daughter found me on the floor.”
LaTanya and eight-year-old Zoe woke up the next morning to an undeniable problem: Sam was unconscious on the kitchen floor, still clutching his cocaine. Richardson made some phone calls and within 24 hours, Jackson was in a rehab center in upstate New York. “I threatened to leave him if he didn’t see the rehab through,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t leave this boy I admired so much. But I resented him too. I hated it when he slurred his words. A wife hates to see her husband be weak.”
Jackson spent 28 days in rehab and loathed every single day. In group therapy, his fellow addicts kept messing with his head, and the counselors were in full-time tough-love mode, “which was not working for me.” But he learned about how alcoholism runs in families, and he finally acknowledged his relentless need for excess. If there was a six-pack of beer, he could never have just one: he needed to drink them all. “I never thought I was an alcoholic; I just drank all my life,” he said. “But I was a blackout drinker: I would wake up in places and not know how I got there.”
He worried that he wouldn’t be fun if he got sober; he worried that he wouldn’t be able to perform without substances in his body. But he also recognized that he needed a change: “I figured that if I tried this other way for, you know, 28 years and it hadn’t worked, why not give this a try and see what happens?” And he learned to pray for the strength he needed to not drink or take drugs: “I found the humility I needed to get down on my knees.”
The whole time Jackson was in rehab, he was making phone calls to Spike Lee, who was in pre-production for his next movie, Jungle Fever. There was a crucial supporting role that Jackson very much wanted to play: Gator Purify, a crack addict whose habit tears his family apart. “I’ve done all the research, so I know I’m gonna be good,” Jackson assured Lee. “Just hold on.”
Lee was, understandably, doubtful—and Jackson’s counselors in rehab were dead-set against him taking the role. They thought that handling drug paraphernalia and discussing the joys of crack would inevitably trigger him and send him right back into his addiction. Jackson’s counterargument: for eight weeks of work, he would be paid roughly $40,000. He told them, “I will never come back here, if only because I never want to see you again.”
Less than two weeks after Jackson left rehab, he was working on Jungle Fever. Skinny and detoxing, he very much looked the part of a strung-out addict—so much so that his first day of shooting, when he went to the craft services table to get something to eat, security guards tried to chase him away, thinking that he was a local crackhead.
What Jackson brought to the role, beyond firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be high on cocaine, was the knowledge of how addicts alienate everyone around them. In his own life, he had made everyone in his house afraid to speak to him, and he had drained every ounce of money and goodwill from his own friendships. “The few friends that I used with, we were all kind of looking at each other strange too, because we were using each other up,” he observed. Because Jackson made Gator funny and personable, it was easy to imagine the character before he was in the grips of his addiction, and to see the personal connections that he was exploiting.
The heart of the movie was Gator’s relationships with his indulgent mother (Ruby Dee) and religious father (Ossie Davis). Gator dances for his mother to charm cash out of her—but late in the movie, when he dances for his father, it’s confrontational, a menacing, shoulder-shaking shimmy. Jackson said, “I wanted him to look at me and actually see all the things in me that frightened him about himself as the good reverend doctor: the womanizer, the abuser, the self-righteous monster. That dance that I thought of at that moment was what I figured the personification of evil was for him.”
Gator succeeds in provoking him—so well that his father shoots him. That scene was intensely cathartic for Jackson: “When my character died, it was almost like I was killing off that part of my life,” he said. His death scene was the final scene Lee shot for the movie.
Once Jackson was clean, he realized how much he had been cutting himself off from his own talent: Gator was the best work he had ever done. He was finally able to move beyond the “bloodless” performances that Richardson had warned him about because he was no longer numbing his own emotions. Jackson said it was “like the petals were closed and, all of a sudden, the sun hit the flower and opened it up.”
In May 1991, Jackson ran into Lee, who was heading to France a few days later: Jungle Fever was debuting at the Cannes Film Festival and the buzz around the film was excellent.
“Probably gonna get an award at Cannes,” Lee told him.
Jackson knew that they didn’t give out awards for supporting actors at Cannes. “But I’d still love to go with you,” he told Lee. “Are you gonna take me?”
The answer was no: Lee was bringing over an array of collaborators, including Wesley Snipes and Anthony Quinn and Stevie Wonder (who did the movie’s score), but there was no budget to buy Jackson a plane ticket. A week later, Jackson got a call with the news from France: while Jungle Fever had not received any major overall awards (Barton Fink won the Palme d’Or), the jury had been so impressed by Jackson’s performance, it created a special award for Best Supporting Actor just to honor him. Jackson was ecstatic—and pissed that Lee hadn’t brought him to Cannes. Lee accepted the award on Jackson’s behalf, although it took him most of a year to deliver the hardware.
From the book BAD MOTHERFUCKER by Gavin Edwards. Copyright © 2021 by Gavin Edwards. Reprinted by permission of Hachette Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved.
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