Are you kidding me? Interview Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs? At once, I am honored and leery. Is Rusty toying with my newbie emotion or is he serious. What Rusty doesn’t know is that, as a kid, I thought Freddie “Boom-Boom” Washington was the coolest dude in the world. Of course, now I’m all grown up and not as easily impressed. But, hell, we’re still talking about Mr. Hi There, I’m Washington. And lest we forget Cochise of Cooley High.

February brings the release of what is clearly one of the brightest film gems of the last thirty years. Claudine co-stars Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones, along with Hilton-Jacobs.

Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs’ life in entertainment has been a lesson in diversity. He’s been an actor, a writer, a director, and even a composer. And he seems to keep himself fairly busy with one project after another.

In spite of his busy schedule, he made a little time for einsiders.com

Tony: The first thing I’d like to talk about is your music.

Lawrence: I’m very big into music. I’ve kind of been all my life. I started playing piano by accident at 15, didn’t even know I could play. I just sat down starting hearing things and was able to remember it and play it whatever that means. I’ve been a professional musician for about 30 or 35 years, something like that. I’m really way into it. Done many albums of my own or session play, produced, sound tracks; down the line. I’ve been through all of it.

TE: I recall once when I was younger, I thought I remembered seeing you on Soul Train or something like that.

LHJ: Oh yeah man. Soul Train, Band Stand, yeah I’ve been busted. When I look at those old tapes, I crack up. With that big Afro and those platform shoes and the super skinny body; I’m like ‘Oh my gosh! Somebody feed that brother, please! Give him a break.

TE: Can you give a little insight on what it was like to work with Lamont Dozier?

LHJ: You know what? I happened to be thinking about Lamont today. I don’t know why he flashed my mind. Lamont Dozier was really an interesting man. We know the history of Holland-Dozier-Holland and all those incredible hits they wrote for Motown and so forth. But what blew my mind was I saw him at a place called the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles, where they would have different artists every three days doing a show. I think on this particular night it was Chaka Khan and that’s when I met Lamont in 1976 and told him, ‘They wanted me to do this album with ABC Records and your name came up as a producer.’ I was almost shy to ask him. I said, ‘I wonder if you be interested?’ And he was flattered that I asked him. It blew my mind! He said sure and then we got together the next week. We started playing around at the piano and I got to learn him. You go to his house and you see nine million gold records all over the walls. Then he brought Ron Coleman in and we just started writing, and singing and trying things out. And in the studio it was a real wonderful experience for me on learning production and arrangement, having fun while you work, so it doesn’t feel like a gig.. That’s what he really brought to the game. He’s a walking encyclopedia, he’s a knowledge man, it just come out of him so naturally and so easily that it’s just a nice way to learn. Real, real cool.

TE: Twenty or thirty years ago, when you got into this career, if you have had a choice to make between music or acting, which would it have been?

LHJ: It would have been acting. I’ve been a natural, not even a ham, but a Spam all my life. So it would’ve been acting first, but I feel they all inter-relate. The music and the acting thing started at about the same time in 1969 and it all incorporates with each other to me. It’s just another way of expressing yourself. One is through music. When you do music you have to learn how to play the words through voice inflection so you can get the picture. Visually, you have to be able to know how to pull back enough because you see the picture and still get the same feelings. The processes I understood either way. Of course you have to have the abilities and you have to practice and so forth. But if it was a choice; it’d be acting first. I love acting. I’ll never ever stop being an actor. Although I’ve become a writer and director over the years.

TE: And a composer too.

LHJ: Yeah, very much. I’ve written a lot of tunes. I‘ve been in all aspects of the music. As the years went on, I got involved in doing some low budget films.

TE: You were about eighteen or nineteen when you did Claudine?

LHJ: I was nineteen and turned twenty when we started filming. We started in August of ’73. August 20th. Don’t ask me why I remember every single date that I ever did everything. I just do. I know we did Welcome Back Kotter on April 10th, I know that Kotter came out September 9, which is a Tuesday. When they told me that Welcome Back Kotter went on the air it was May 5th in 1975.

TE: Wow! Did you, then as a 19-20 year old, think about where you’d be now or what you’d be doing?

LHJ: No. You don’t know that. At the time, if I put it back in its right reflection, I was just a young, New York actor that just wanted to get a gig. I was out there just hustling around. And back in New York you could freelance and so I didn’t have to sign with just one agent. I could work with several, which I did. So when Claudine came along, it was another gig to me. That was my thought. I took it seriously and also realized that at the time when I got that kind of a job, it was probably in the middle of what was called Black-xploitation or Black movies at the time. I knew that this film had a little more reason to it. It wasn’t just some throw away Super Brother film or something like that. I realized that the role had something to it. So I really put myself in it and got serious. But the outcome? Of course not. Even when they said ‘You’re gonna be working with James Earl Jones.’, I had to scratch my head a couple of times and think ‘Oh yeah, that’s who he is.’ I was just not aware of him that much back then. I knew who Diahann Carroll was, but James Earl was vague to me. And I had not seen him on stage at that point. And so I just went in and went after it as a young actor trying to hold my own. It was very exciting, I can tell you that!

TE: Let’s talk about your role in The Jacksons right now.

LHJ: Absolutely.

TE: Can you tell us how you landed that role?

LHJ: After about 94,000 auditions. I tell you what I have. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to use this, but I have the original screen tests for almost everybody that came up for that thing. Everybody from Dorian Harewood to Eriq La Salle to Vanessa Bell Callaway, you name it. Everybody and their grandmother was up for that role and everybody was good. We knew that because we could all hear each other’s auditions. Angela Bassett was auditioning at the time, but I didn’t know her. We were both there, but we never read together. They had matched us with everybody, but each other. It was a process; they were being very, very acute. They had a lot to deal with. They had to get all those kids together, which took a lot of time. The movie was a love story between Joe and Kathryn. You had to have a look that looked like you belonged to the family and the whole number. There were a number of things that they were really adamant about. Lot of network input about he’s right, he’s wrong, he’s right. Every other day I was in, I was out, I was in, I was out; to the point where it just got ridiculous. I’ll be honest, when they finally told me that I had gotten the role, which was like at the D-Day moment, I didn’t even read the script for a week. I was just pissed off. Eventually I woke up and got into it. Regular actor shit. Excuse the language.

TE: Did you guys get any technical advise from the Jackson family at all?

LHJ: No. I’ve known the Jacksons for a long time. When we were doing the Welcome Back Kotter show, we had a team called the Sweat Hogs, a basketball charity team that would always play the Jackson’s charity team. So I saw them a lot. And here’s a little footnote of trivia. I even dated Latoya back in the day. But that’s another story we’ll talk about another day. Anyway. It makes me laugh, because even when we did the movie, Jermaine Jackson was one of the producers and he sat down with me one day and he told me a whole lot about Joe, which was really helpful. He just went for about 45 minutes without coming up for air. But he still had to bring up ‘Remember that time we were at the Ms. Black America thing and I asked you about my sister you were dating?’ I said, ‘Man, get outta here. That again? Twenty something years later, and you’re trying to bust me for being out with your sister? Get outta here!’ But those guys are cool with me.

You get into what was written. I got a lot of background from Jermaine. I tried to talk to Joe many times, but he just didn’t want to do it. I talked a little bit with Jackie and Randy and that kind of gave me little spots of things to hold on to. But a lot of it is in the script.

Our families paralleled. Meaning there’s nine children in their family, there’s nine in ours. They have one light skinned sister, we have one light skinned sister. We’re all in the same age range. My father was a Merchant Marine, Joe worked the steel mills, kind of the same hard work and even the way they dressed me at one point, it looked like my father back in the forties. It was just weird. Getting into it, I could understand what it’s like to be in a big family and trying to achieve something and how do you make it and you have nothing, but you’ve got each other. It’s a real involving tough love. I kind of lived that. I told somebody playing Joe Jackson was like playing the guy I did in Claudine, grown up.

TE: Ok, here’s the inevitable question. Tell us about Welcome Back Kotter. Boom Boom has to be everybody’s favorite.

LHJ: Welcome Back Kotter was probably the biggest joy of my life because that was not work. That was fun. All day. And I’m not exaggerating. We had the most insane, nuttiest writers. Sometimes the network guys are a little serious because of the censors and the writers would all come out with rubber chicken feet and chef hats. They would just walk in and sit down and just take notes. You just had to crack up. We used to put little zingers inside the script for the network. We knew it would get cut. We’d laugh because we were a high school show and they were trying to make us all squeaky clean guys from the hood. It was just funny to us all the time. I’ll tell what was funny. We thought all shows were like ours. A lot of practical jokes, people being crazy all the time, but we would go across the courtyard to the other sound stages and watch them filming Barney Miller or Fish or Archie Bunker’s Place and it was pretty serious over there. Everybody was very serious and very calculating. But for us, we were just silly all day long. Which to this day has not changed. Whenever I get together with them, we go right back into it.

TE: How often are you in contact with those guys?

LHJ: I talk to Travolta occasionally and talk to Bobby Hegyes, his daughter and mine go to the same school. I see Bobby a lot. Haven’t talked to Gabe and Ron for about maybe a year and a half. I guess since the last time we talked. It seems like one of us talks to somebody and fills the other one in. And then every once in a while, they’re always asking to do these retro things with Bobby, Ron, and I. We always seem to be in contact whenever they ask to do those kinds of things.

TE: You ever been approached to do a Sweat Hogs reunion?

LHJ: About 55 million times at last count! At least. The two holdouts have been Travolta and myself. We just keep saying no. Only one time they got close. With the original director, Bob LaHendro. LaHendro came up with a real good concept. He got all of us to meet with him and we talked about it. He really seemed to be on it. And we were, for a second gonna be interested, but then by the time the Warner Brothers people got involved… What they wanted was Welcome Back Kotter again. But we’re adults now and it just wasn’t gonna fly. For me, it’s been done. It was a wonderful experience. It’s fun to look back on, but you move on. And I guess I have the visions of Gilligan’s Island, like Gilligan Goes to Bangkok. It’d be the Sweat Hogs in Iraq. They would come up with something dumb. So I don’t think that’s gonna ever happen. Although a couple of people have tried to have my character become the Kotter teacher in a sense and tried to spin off of Kotter, but it never flew.

TE: What about future projects?

LHJ: I’m gonna do a feature film called Thirty Miles. They start about the 24th of February. And roughly what it’s about is a man, who I play, who is an agent. He represents directors and all this. He takes some time off to go to Las Vegas. He drives there to go to his friends bachelor party. Along the way he picks up a stranded guy who becomes the hitchhiker from hell. That’s it in a nut shell. It turns really ugly and it turns into a murder, but I’m not gonna tell you who gets killed. You gotta go see the movie. Give up the nine dollars man.

TE: One more question and I’ll let you get out of here. In all of your career, if you had a dream role what would it be?

LHJ: You know, I’ve been asked that a few times. I really don’t know if there’s a dream role. To me, I get into what the depth of the role would be. To take some important character, whether it’s historical or not, if it’s got some meat to it, some depth, and some dynamics in terms of its levels of culture and anguish and feelings, that would be exciting. I’ve played some many kinds of roles over the years, that I don’t know if there’s a definitive role that I want to play, although I would see certain things that would be interesting. I wouldn’t mind playing a super hero but at the same time I wouldn’t mind playing Nelson Mandela. The feeling is just within the range. Anything that definitely takes me to a challenge. Even the film I’m getting ready to do. What’s challenging me is that there are only two characters in the entire movie pretty much riding in a car. That’s gonna be a real interesting dynamic; to keep an audience interested for 90 minutes. With two guys just talking to each other back and forth basically; no matter where the conversation goes. It’s been really interesting getting that script into shape. We’ve been re-writing it to death. We’re gonna go out there like brave little soldiers and take it on.

TE: You directed Quiet Fire and Angels of the City. Anymore direction in the future for you?

LHJ: Trying to set it up. That always takes time. That’s a minor miracle in itself. Seems like every time you start a movie, you start another one and you’re starting all over again. But I have some things I’ve written that I want to set up. I was a little late on a movie. I wrote a movie called Burn Rubber, based on my friend who is part of the motorcycle/bike culture. I wrote it and spent a lot of time with him and got the script together, had no idea that they were making Biker Boys. Not even a clue. And when I finally saw Biker Boys, (I saw it a couple times this week) I thought, well, they got there first. My movie is not the same movie, but if I make mine, they would compare it of course. So that’s the way it goes. I recently did a gospel play on the road and the only gospel about the play was the title. Everything else behind the scenes was to the left. Which was funny to me. So I’ve been writing about that. Hopefully, we’ll get that made.

TE: Can you give us a synopsis of it?

LHJ: It’s a behind the scenes mishaps of a touring gospel musical play through the eyes of the tour bus driver. So he’s like our narrator/overseer of the whole thing.

TE: I’d like to thank you very much for taking time to talk to us.

LHJ: Absolutely

Miscellaneous

Bacon Rating: 2

Tony Edwards