Credit: Marcus Middleton

Every time Roger Guenveur Smith enters a scene, the situation allows for intensity only a prolific character actor of his stature can bring forth. The Bay Area native has perfected his craft in scores of roles in TV and film spanning four decades, including the Spike Lee masterpieces “School Daze,” “Do The Right Thing” and “Malcolm X,” and most recently the legal drama series “All Rise.”

His latest work, “In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” is a true labor of love and arguably his most personal to date. The award-winning thespian tells the real-life story of his close friendship with the iconic street artist. The two met on a dance floor in Los Angeles during the 1980s. Basquiat, who died in 1988 at age 27, was working out of a white washed studio in Venice, painting works for a new show.

“That’s how Jean-Michel and I met, because I was in L.A. rapping as Hollywatts — that was my rapping name, because that’s where I grew up, halfway between Hollywood and Watts,” Smith told URL Media: “And he was dancing, and he came up to me after one of my sets and said, “Hollywatts, I really like your energy, man. You want to hang out?’ I said, ‘Yeah, okay, cool.” The two twentysomethings both ended up going to see the Martin Scorsese drama “The King of Comedy” starring Robert De Niro during their first hang.

‘It’s my responsibility to tell these stories’

That anecdote, along with many others, make up the hourlong theatrical monologue that originated as an improvised homage for Basquiat’s retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum and MOCA Los Angeles over 20 years ago. Chocolate Genius founder Marc Anthony Thompson handled the sound design for the solo show, in which audience members get deeper insight into the young legend in the making.

“I think as an academic because I am an academic of sorts, and I have taught and I continue to teach, it’s my responsibility to tell these stories as only I can tell them, because I was the only other person in the room,” Smith said.

Credit: New York Theatre Workshop

Since his death due to an heroin overdose — at his East Village home studio just blocks away from New York Theatre Workshop, where “In Honor” is playing through Oct. 10 — Basquiat’s legacy has endured and increasingly grown.

His abstract works have broken sales records at auctions, served as the centerpiece of landmark exhibitions, was featured in a Tiffany & Co. campaign starring Beyonce and Jay-Z, and adorned an array of merchandise from retailers like Yves Saint Laurent, Coach, Old Navy, Supreme and Uniqlo, as well as uniforms for the Brooklyn Nets. Emmy Award winner Jeffrey Wright portrayed him in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biopic, “Basquiat,” and Anthony McCarten’s hit London play, “The Collaboration,” debuted on Broadway in 2022. 

This past June, Netflix snapped up the rights to the documentary “Jean-Michel Basquiat,” directed by Quinn Whitney Wilson and Viridiana Lieberman. 

In the new play, the “A Huey P. Newton Story” star recounts how when the artist mentioned quitting “an uncontrolled white substance in a fat sack” during a visit to the Venice studio, he told him it was his choice because he’ll “be more valuable to people dead than alive.”

His words turned out to be prescient. 

The ongoing interest in the Brooklyn-born artist isn’t lost on Smith, who shared that “while he was living, there was a kind of paucity of interest in this dude as a Black man” before mentioning that he only knew one Black person (his former Gray bandmate Michael Holman) to ever conduct an interview with Basquiat.

Basquiat’s Black identity

“I went to one of his exhibits at a museum and I overheard a dude say, ‘Oh wow! I didn’t know he was Black. I thought he was French,” he snickered, adding: “We all know, the reclamation of Jean Basquiat as a Black man is kind of an ongoing struggle.”

Smith’s initial meeting with Basquiat during his Venice Beach retreat isn’t the only aspect of the artist’s impact explored in the one-man show. He also reveals that his famous artist buddy inspired his breakthrough role as Smiley in Spike Lee‘s 1989 magnum opus “Do The Right Thing.”

During a climactic scene towards the end of the Academy Award-nominated film, the developmentally disabled character sets a pizza parlor ablaze amid a racially-charged riot in Bedford Stuyvesant after the police involved killing of Radio Raheem on the hottest day of the year.

“When I’m burning down the pizza parlor as Smiley and putting up the postcard of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King on the wall, that came from Public Enemy, but it also came from JMB,” he said, referencing Basquiat’s initials. “I explained in the show that I ripped him off his crown. I ripped him off. I took his X.”

Credit: Universal Pictures

“And at the same time we were doing that in JMB’s native Brooklyn, JMB was expiring in Manhattan. I remember exactly when it happened, bro,” he solemnly recalled. “I’m over there playing an artist, playing like I’m an artist, and he’s on the other side of the river dying like an artist.”

Smith noted that while Smiley played a pivotal role in the landmark film, the stuttering street artist character was not in the original screenplay: “There was no page. I keep trying to tell people this is an Academy-Award-nominated original screenplay, but if you read it, you will not see the character of Smiley in it. It was completely improvised.”

‘He’d probably laugh’

The Yale University alum, who previously worked with Lee on “School Daze,” said the filmmaker trusted him and told him the concept of “Do The Right Thing,” which was shot in Brooklyn during the summer of 1988. He pitched the Smiley idea while Lee visited Los Angeles to meet with Martin Lawrence, who made his feature film debut in the film: “When I was thinking about the style of Smiley’s work, what he was doing on that postcard, which is how Jean-Michel started — by selling postcards, he sold a postcard to Andy Warhol. It was only then that I realized how influential Jean-Michel had been on the creation of that character.”

Stating that while Basquiat had “a very rich life that was tragically abbreviated,” he said he is thankful to Basquiat’s family members — namely his sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux — for upholding his legacy. 

Lisanne saw “In Honor” last year when it played in Los Angeles and gave it a thumbs-up. “I fully expected to give the guy the side eye and tell him something about himself relating to my brother but i can’t. It was a brilliant performance … it’s worth going to see it. I have to say,” she said in an Instagram video post.

Smith, who referred to himself as a surviving brother of the artist, said Basquiat would get a kick out of the fame and fortune that came after his death. 

“He’d probably laugh …because one part of JMB I think was very, very proud of what he was achieving. But another half of him was playing the master trickster, getting over on folks and he knew what the dilemma was of being a young Black man in New York City,” Smith said, adding:. 

“You know, he’d go to these openings and shit with people bidding tens of thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands, eventually millions for his work, and he goes outside and he can’t get a cab. Or folks who are so-called art critics and journalists just want to read primitivism into his work. And not connected to the shit that he grew up looking at and absorbing as a child when he ditched school and went to The Met.”

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