Question: One day I was driving around with my dad in Plainfield, N.J., and he mentioned how bad the schools were there. He told me the high school was almost taken over by the state, like in the movie Lean on Me. Is that movie based on actual events and, if so, did it really happen in New Jersey?
Answer: The movie Lean on Me (1989) was inspired by Principal Joe Lewis Clark's campaign to reform crime-ridden Eastside High in Paterson, N.J., in the early '80s. Clark became Eastside's principal in 1983 and within two years had turned it into something resembling a model school. Lean on Me, which starred Morgan Freeman as Principal Clark, was shot on location at Eastside High.
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Question: How can people in the movie business have the same name? Like there's a director called Morgan Freeman as well as an actor; isn't there some kind of rule that one of them has to change his name?
Answer: Two actors who are members of the Screen Actors Guild cannot use the same professional name. That's why you have one actress named Vanessa Williams and another named Vanessa L. Williams though, confusingly, both the Vanessas were in Soul Food: Vanessa L. was in the 1997 movie and just-plain-Vanessa was in the cable series. Fortunately, they didn't play the same character. I put in a call to the Directors Guild of America, and they have a similar rule: As long as a DGA member is active (which does
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Talk about getting lucky! Silver-screen Virgin Steve Carell is in negotiations to replace Jim Carrey in Universal's Bruce Almighty sequel for, oh, heaps more than the half a mil he raked in for his breakthrough flick. According to Variety, in Evan Almighty, the Daily Show vet will reprise his role of the news anchor he portrayed opposite Carrey in Bruce. Morgan Freeman is likely to play God again, but Jennifer Aniston is highly unlikely to sign on at all. Speaking of our old Friend....
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The Electric Company is coming back to juice a new generation of early elementary-school kids into mastering reading skills. Executives at Sesame Workshop in New York City are hoping to relaunch the landmark literacy series in the fall of 2007, after a near 30-year absence from public television.
Karen Gruenberg, the Workshop's executive vice president for content, promises a series that will call upon "today's artists and the best in pop culture" to lure at-risk kids to the screen. Just as the original series featured Bill Cosby and bits of sketch comedy, Gruenberg says humor will be an essential part of the new series. "If we don't [have humor], we will have completely missed the mark," she says.
Equally electrifying is news that DVD sets of the 1971-77 Electric Company — featuring Rita Moreno, Cosby and a pre-stardom Morgan Freeman — will be released later this year. As many parents will recall, before there was
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