Superman star Christopher Reeve played a much darker kind of journalist in 1987’s Street Smart – a fascinating thriller based on a pack of lies.
In 1969, the May edition of New York magazine ran a feature about a chap named Lamont: a 19 year-old African American who happened to be one of the city’s “most successful pimps.”
Making a then-huge $48,000 a year (equivalent to about $420,000 in 2025 money), Lamont lived like a king in a four-room Harlem apartment. The place was kitted out with a gigantic bed, expensive rugs and paintings. His Cadillac – with its leopard skin seats and booming speaker system – sat in the street outside, closely guarded by Lamont’s assistant and driver, a 15 year-old kid named Reggie.
The four-page piece, written by David Freeman, went into considerable detail about Lamont’s lifestyle, musical tastes and ways of doing business – the $750 per night he made from the five sex workers under his control, and the $20 bribes he’d hand out to cops on Times Square. In order to protect Lamont’s privacy, there are no photos, but there was a handsomely impressionistic painting by Burt Silverman of the article’s subject, doled up in shades and what appears to be a gold Ascot necktie, like a young Hugh Heffner.
The piece offered an absorbing snapshot of Manhattan at the end of the 1960s. The only problem was, Lamont and everything in it was completely fabricated.
Freeman was 28 when he wrote the feature, and according to the AFI, New York magazine was such a new outlet that it didn’t have a fact-checking department. As a result, the piece, titled The Lifestyle of a Pimp, was published without anyone realising that it was a work of fiction.
A decade later, Freeman, who’d moved into writing screenplays and novels, began work on what would become Street Smart – a thriller loosely based on his work on that article and the (fictional) collateral damage that resulted. At one stage, the script – then titled Streets Of New York – was going to be made by director Sydney Pollack. That never happened, and the film was eventually directed by Jerry Schatzberg.
It was Superman star Christopher Reeve who was key to getting Street Smart made. By the mid-1980s, he’d sworn off playing the Man of Steel again, and was looking for projects that didn’t involve flying around in red and blue spandex. By the mid 1980s, however, Cannon Films had secured the screen rights to the Superman franchise from producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind. Cannon co-founder and producer Menahem Golan was determined to have Reeve wear a cape and play the Son of Jor-El again; Reeve was determined not to.
Eventually, a deal was struck: Reeve would appear in Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, but only if Cannon bankrolled his pet project, Street Smart. Reeve also insisted on having input into Superman IV’s script, hence its message about nuclear disarmament.
As a result, 1987 saw the release of two Reeve movies: Superman IV, whose ramshackle effects, iffy choice of filming locations and truncated 90-minute duration soon made it infamous. The other was, of course, Street Smart – a film Cannon begrudgingly punted into a handful of US cinemas and allowed to quietly wither from view. Viewed in retrospect, it’s one of the more thought-provoking and classy offerings to emerge from an indie studio better known for its mid-budget B-movies.
Reeve plays Jonathan Fisher, a New York journalist who writes a magazine feature about a local pimp, just as Freeman had in 1969. The article becomes a sensation, netting Fisher a regular gig as a roving TV reporter in a Manhattan crime slot called Street Smart. Trouble soon emerges when an attorney becomes convinced that Fisher’s story is based on a real New York pimp, Leo ‘Fast Black’ Smalls Jr (Morgan Freeman, who was 49 at the time of recording). Fisher insists that it’s a coincidence; the attorney argues that the article could prejudice an ongoing court case in which Smalls is accused of murder.
Fisher therefore finds himself in a moral quandary with far-reaching consequences. He could admit that his piece is a fabrication, but that would sacrifice his burgeoning career. Or he could keep quiet and risk either going to prison for contempt of court (a judge demands to see Fisher’s notes and recordings, which of course don’t exist). Even worse, Fisher’s silence could also help keep Smalls – who really is a murderer and all-round rotter – from going to jail.
It’s easy to see why Reeve was drawn to playing Fisher. Like Clark Kent, he’s a city journalist, albeit one seduced rather than repelled by his home’s criminal underbelly. Reeve’s perfect for the part, too: he’s tall and brawny, but has that Princeton air of poise and superiority that makes him immediately out of place in Manhattan’s less salubrious districts. He’s also far from heroic; right under the nose of his girlfriend, Alison (Mimi Rogers), Fisher starts sleeping with a sex worker named Punchy (Kathy Baker), whom he initially uses as a source of information for his writing.
Fisher is, essentially, a tourist: he fetishes the violence and exploitation he sees, revelling in the fizz danger on 42nd Street before heading back to his trendy studio apartment for the night. Fisher’s selfishness ultimately affects everyone in his orbit; and while the ending sees a certain kind of rough justice served, it’s largely the people who were innocent bystanders that pay the highest price.
If Fisher seems at all virtuous, then that’s only in comparison to Smalls – a charismatic, whip-thin criminal who can be both charming and terrifyingly ruthless depending on the situation. The performances in Street Smart are roundly impressive, but Morgan Freeman is something else: whether he’s gladhanding New York’s publishing elite at a swish party held in his honour, or terrorising one his workers with a broken bottle, he’s mesmerising. Some of his character’s unpredictable nature is in the script, but an equal amount of it comes from Freeman – he’s capable of adding menacing intent to even an incidental turn of phrase or glance. It’s little wonder that, even as Street Smart sank at the box office, Freeman caught enough attention to garner an Oscar nomination. The actor later credited the movie as the one that kick-started his Hollywood career.
It was during Street Smart’s limited promotional round that screenwriter David Freeman admitted to its true-life underpinnings, and that his own feature published all those years earlier was bogus. The revelation didn’t appear to garner much attention at the time, though that was maybe because the film itself largely passed by unnoticed. Or because David Freeman was hardly the first journalist to fabricate a story.
Earlier in the 1980s, writer Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer prize for a story about an eight year-old heroin addict. She later admitted to making the story up, and her Pulitzer was withdrawn.
Before that, there was the 1976 New York magazine article Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night – British journalist Nik Cohn’s expose of the Manhattan disco scene. His story, about working class Italian men putting on fancy clothes and dancing in clubs, caused such a sensation that it was turned into a film the following year: Saturday Night Fever, which launched John Travolta’s career in 1977. Cohn’s story was, as you’ve probably guessed, entirely fabricated. The film became a cultural phenomenon.
It’s no coincidence that these fabricated stories all have links to African American communities. As Street Smart highlights, the mainstream media was and is largely controlled by the white and the wealthy, and stories like Lifestyle of a Pimp conform to a stereotype of violent, amoral Black men.
In this regard, Street Smart makes a fascinating companion piece to American Fiction – writer-director Cord Jefferson’s terrific 2023 adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure. That film also deals with a fabricated story that spins out of its author’s control, though this time it’s a Black academic – Jeffrey Wright’s Dr ‘Monk’ Ellison – whose frustration with African American stereotypes prompts him to write a parody of books that wallow in stories of Black criminality. That parody, which Monk unsubtly titles Fuck, proves to be so devastatingly accurate that it becomes a bestseller, throwing the author into his own moral quandary. Does he continue to accept all the adulation and work offers coming his way, or admit that his book’s subject, a hardened criminal named Stagg R Leigh, is a fiction?
With precise, wry humour, American Fiction takes aim at a literary establishment that is more comfortable perpetuating stereotypes and myths than publishing nuanced stories about Black people from all walks of life.
Street Smart is, of course, written and presented from a white perspective, but it at least tries to scrutinise its own writer’s attitudes. In one brief yet telling scene, Fisher is accosted by an African American TV journalist (Donna Bailey) who takes issue with his name-making feature about a wealthy pimp.
“Why did you choose a subject that embodies the worst of Black people?” the reporter asks.
“Well, you can’t pretend that people like this don’t exist,” Fisher says.
“It might not be conscious racism,” the reporter counters, “but it is racism.”
The film itself could be seen as guilty of perpetuating the cinema stereotype of the well-dressed pimp through Morgan Freeman’s ruthless Smalls – the kind of role the actor flatly refused to play again. But then, it doesn’t let Fisher off the hook, either: strutting around Time Square in his expensive jacket and blue jeans, he’s the moral black hole that affects every other character he encounters.
Fisher is also a platform for Christopher Reeve’s talent as a dramatic actor. He brought real humanity and nuance to Superman, especially in his earthly alter-ego, Clark. But as Fisher, Reeve showcases a different side to his talent: beneath Fisher’s good looks and personable demeanour lies a deep pit of utter ruthlessness.
By pure coincidence, another story of fabrication has hit the literary world at time this is being written. Released in 2018, British memoir The Salt Path was an award-winning, critically-acclaimed best-seller – so much so that its story, about a middle-aged couple who lose their home and decide to go on a 630-mile hike, was adapted into a major film in 2024. But a July 2025 article in The Observer has raised a number of questions about the events described in the book.
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” Mark Twain once said. It’s an adage some writers, it seems, are only too keen to observe.
