Once he healed, Jackson kept auditioning, while his peers kept landing major projects.
The video was an all-night shoot: off-camera, Jackson and Flav hung out together, drinking and smoking weed. 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. 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. 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. Jackson had to play his character, a thug looking to collect a gambling debt, with a conspicuous leg brace and cane.
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). For the rest of his life, he would have a couple of extra screws in his right leg. After his right knee was surgically repaired, he spent ten months on crutches and a year and a half in physical rehab.
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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. “A guy on crutches pulled the emergency cord,” Jackson said. (Fortunately, he was wearing a backpack, which protected him from a massive head injury.)Īs 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. As the train accelerated, Jackson lost his balance and fell onto his back, getting dragged along the platform. Then the subway started moving out of the station, pulling Jackson along with the train. 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. 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. On December 14, 1988, Jackson was riding the subway, just like he did most days. That’s what it says in the credits: Black Guy.”
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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. 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. He feels he’s a leading man now,” Lee wrote in his journal in April 1988. “Fish has decided that he no longer wants to play supporting roles after School Daze. 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. Lee’s third feature film was Do the Right Thing, set on a single block in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.
Jackson needed only to walk down a staircase to descend into his bad habits.
The friends nicknamed the subterranean apartment the Cave, and it soon became party central. “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. “The actors from New York are more about work, which is the way it should be,” he opined. Lee preferred actors based in New York over those from L.A. 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!” “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. “Spike was like our savior when we were all struggling actors in New York,” Jackson said. At the time, Lee filmed his movies once a year, always in the summer, hiring mostly the same cast and crew. Jackson called the annual experience of working on the director’s movies. Spike Lee’s Summer Film Camp.” That’s what Samuel L.
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