Will Smith in Pursuit of Excellence

By Jean A. Williams

These days, the name Will Smith is synonymous with box office clout. But over the course of the last two decades, it's also been associated with music history, a hit TV show, and congeniality. Indeed, the 38-year-old superstar has so many more facets and colors to him than one would suspect. Smith is the proverbial diamond in the rough, still being polished to higher levels of brilliance right before our eyes.

Whenever the world failed to see and appreciate the full spectrum of his talents, Smith proved adept at ingratiating himself into the hearts and minds of even some of the most doubtful cynics. With his wisecracking ways and easy grin, he has disarmed countless in the "biz" who would have just as soon written him off long ago. His other, probably more potent, weapons of choice: a sharp wit, intelligence, growing business savvy and, oh yeah, actual talent. In his latest film, the period drama The Pursuit of Happyness, Smith again flouts people's limited expectations of him, taking on a dramatic role that is very dissimilar to others on his film resume. In Happyness, he portrays Chris Gardner, a struggling single father who becomes homeless with his 5- year-old son but later defies expectation to become a wealthy stockbroker.

Were someone ever to script Smith's own life story, they could very easily title it The  Pursuit of Excellence, for as he told USA Today while promoting Happyness, "I planned every movement of my career up until this point, starting with, probably midway through The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, when I started choosing movies. …What we call luck, what we call chance, is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. If you stay ready, you ain't gotta get ready."

How did Smith turn a lump of coal, essentially a first career as a light-hearted rapper, into a 100-carat show business career encompassing music, TV and film acting, and producing? It certainly wasn't as easy as it may have looked to the naked eye. It took a great deal of patience and an evolving maturity about the nature of success.

"I've developed a comfort in knowing that you can't manhandle the universe," Smith said to THE BLACK COLLEGIAN. "If you're doing everything right, then just relax. Inherent in the idea of doing everything right is that you're moving. As long as you keep moving, things are going to shake out. … Things are going to adjust."

Perhaps Smith knew this intuitively when he took the gamble of choosing a music career while famously passing up admission to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to pursue rap in the late 1980s. That's when he and childhood friend Jeff Townes formed DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince in their native West Philadelphia. Before too long, the pair had a formidable rap hit called "Parents Just Don't Understand," that would garner them the first Grammy ever to be awarded for a rap song in 1988.

In a cautionary tale that he relayed in many interviews, Smith squandered much of his early fortune from his music career on material possessions and also found himself in trouble with the IRS. As luck would have it, he was given a second shot at his throne when producer Benny Medina came calling in 1989. Medina had taken a liking to Smith and had him pegged for a part in a new sitcom based on Medina's own coming-of-age story in which he, a poor urban kid, was sent to live with a rich family in Beverly Hills. That upbringing was the Adam's rib for the hit TV series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, in which Smith starred for six seasons.

With his appetite whet by TV success, Smith sought roles outside the realm of the small screen. Some of his earliest film offerings, however, kept him in the vein of the Fresh Prince, where little stretching was required. He landed bit roles in 1992's Where the Day Takes You, with Dermot Mulroney and Laura San Giacomo, and 1993's Made in America, with Whoopi Goldberg, Nia Long and Ted Danson.

But Smith was determined to land roles much further outside the kingdom of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. "I'd been turned down for a bunch of movies," Smith says. "I read for Arsenio's part in Coming to America and I didn't get that. I had been doing a lot of those readings and people weren't feeling me, and I was starting to get nervous. Was The Fresh Prince going to be where I lived and died?"

Thankfully, the answer to his question would be a resounding "no." After some shrewd angling, Smith landed the kind of career re-defining role he sought when he was cast as a young, homosexual con artist pretending to be actor Sidney Poitier's son in 1993's Six Degrees of Separation.

In short order, Smith's critical success in Six Degrees of Separation led to a bevy of box office behemoths that anointed him as more of a "Fresh King" than a "Fresh Prince." First up was 1994's Bad Boys, in which he costarred with Martin Lawrence as a pair of rule-bending Miami cops. But the film that really sealed it for Smith was Independence Day, the 1996 alien-invasion smash hit that earned $816 million worldwide and is still one of the most lucrative feature films ever.

Later box office successes followed with Men In Black (1997), Enemy of the State (1998), Wild, Wild West (1999), The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000), Ali (2001), Bad Boys II (2003), I, Robot (2004), Shark Tale (2004), and Hitch (2005). Smith was nominated for a best actor Oscar for his performance as Ali. The honor that year ended up being awarded to Denzel Washington.

Proving ever adept at actual business aspects of show business, Smith threw his crown into the producing ring when he formed Overbrook Entertainment. The company has produced Ali, Showtime (starring Eddie Murphy and Robert DeNiro), and a TV show (All of Us) based on Smith's own extended family with wife Jada Pinkett Smith and their children, intersecting with Smith's ex-wife Sheree Zampino and their son, Trey.

These days, Smith commands $20 million per film and deservedly so. At press time, The Pursuit of Happyness opened at No. 1 at the box office, raking in $27 million over the first weekend of release. Smith's own son, Jaden, makes his feature film debut portraying Gardner's young son.

Smith says he was attracted to Gardner's rags-to-riches tale because of how the millionaire stockbroker's life reflects the American Dream. "To me, The Pursuit of Happyness is so connected to the idea of why America works," Smith said to THE BLACK COLLEGIAN. "This is the only country on the face of the earth that Chris Gardner can exist. … The hope for that doesn't even exist anywhere else on Earth. That you're homeless, you have $21, and without killing anybody, without oil, without an army, [but] strictly based on an idea that you have in your mind … you create a multimillion dollar empire."

The fundamental idea behind Gardner's life story is why so many people are attracted to this nation, Smith says. "The poor and tired and huddled masses, they're not just coming here for food and a house," Smith says. "They're coming because they have an idea, and their idea is being murdered in other places. … An idea can fill a spot in your stomach. You don't need food for a while if you've got the right idea. You can go without love for a while if you've got the right idea to hold onto. It is so connected to the center of the human spirit."

Though Smith and his wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith, have big public lives as superstar performers, when not working, they often retreat to the sanctity of home with their children Jaden and Willow (Smith's 14-year-old son, Trey, is also part of the clan). The actor has expressed confidence in allowing Jaden early entree into a business famous for eating its young. Said Smith to USA Today, "Anytime you can introduce your children to a business or a potential career and something that has fulfilled you and can potentially fulfill them, and it happens to be in your greatest sphere of knowledge, that's unbeatable. … The world is going to be hard, no matter what he chooses to do."

The Smiths' other children also are taking steps into the business. Smith's daughter Willow is slated to star next fall as his daughter in I Am Legend. Trey was a special correspondent for Access Hollywood. The Smiths, who have chosen home schooling for their kids, approach child rearing with "love, knowledge and discipline," Smith says.

"They can learn subatomic physics better now than they will when they get older. You teach them everything you know right now," he told THE BLACK COLLEGIAN.

Smith is especially adamant that his kids learn self-discipline. "They won't be able to achieve anything if they don't command their minds to overcome their bodies," he says. "I always call it the treadmill test. I test people on the treadmill – people I work with. …You deprive somebody of food and you deprive them of oxygen, you're going to see exactly who you're dealing with. I have a lyric in one of my records. I say, ‘The key to life is on a treadmill. I'll just watch and learn while your chest burns. Cause if you say you're going to run three miles and you only run two, I don't ever have to worry about losing in nothing to you.' It's that idea."

Jean A. Williams is a Chicago-based free-lance writer and author.