Bet You Didn’t Know: Secrets Behind The Making Of “Lean On Me”
The Idea
Norman Twain, the producer of Lean on Me, said he saw a 10-minute segment about Joe Clark on NBC back in 1986 “and I immediately thought this was a movie.” He added, “I called Joe up the next day and came out here the day after that. He was all for it, even though he didn’t know whether I was talking about a made-for-TV movie, a home movie, or what. I paid him a fee for a 120-day.”
Warner Brothers, the studio with which Twain was working, wasn’t the first group to show interest. Universal purchased the rights for the film five years before but nothing ever came of it.
Having already been a part of this process, Clark didn’t know if it was really going to happen this time around.
In a 1989 interview with LA Times, Clark said: “I’d become accustomed to promises being made and declarations declared and ultimately nothing emanating from it,” said Clark. “So I said to myself pessimistically that nothing will ever come of this new attempt either…Only when I saw the cameras in the building with (director) John Avildsen, Morgan Freeman and everybody else, did I say, ‘yes a movie is really being made.'”
