Thirty years after Bobby Smith Jr. wrote a love story about two wounded young people trying to imagine a life beyond everything that had happened to them, Jason’s Lyric is coming home.
In February, Jason’s Lyric Live! will launch its national stage tour in Houston, the city that served as more than a backdrop for the 1994 film. Allen Payne will return as Jason. Treach will reprise his role as Alonzo. A new generation of actors will step into characters audiences have loved, debated and carried with them for three decades.
And Smith will be there.
Not simply as the young screenwriter whose name appeared in the credits of a movie that became a Black cult classic, but as a veteran writer, producer and entertainment executive helping one of his earliest stories find a new audience.
In an industry where careers can disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, Smith has done something considerably harder than breaking into Hollywood. He stayed.
For more than three decades, the Corpus Christi native has worked across film, television, literary adaptations, digital entertainment, education and live theater. He has written projects starring Oprah Winfrey, Halle Berry, Jada Pinkett Smith, Forest Whitaker and Maya Angelou. He has taught graduate screenwriting students at USC, developed projects with bestselling authors and worked behind the scenes as an executive and producer.
Yet, for all the different titles he has held, Smith says the thing that continues to fascinate him is remarkably simple: people.
“I have never wanted to write about people as categories,” Smith said. “I want to know what they are afraid of at three o’clock in the morning. I want to know what they desperately want somebody to forgive them for. I want to know where they have been wounded, where they have been brave, and what part of themselves they are still fighting to become. Once I know that, I can begin to write the story.”
A Texas beginning
Smith was born and raised in Corpus Christi, but Houston has always been part of his story.
His mother was from Houston, and much of her family remains here. Years later, when Smith wrote the screenplay that would become his signature early work, the city would become part of the emotional fabric of Jason’s Lyric.
Long before Hollywood, however, Smith was learning lessons about discipline and perseverance at home.
His father, Bobby Smith, played professional football, joining the Buffalo Bills as a halfback in 1964 and playing on the team that won consecutive AFL championships in 1964 and 1965. He later played for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
For his son, the lessons were less about football than about what it took to keep going.
“My father understood that talent gets you onto the field, but discipline determines what you do once you get there,” Smith said. “A lot of what he learned in football became part of the way I learned to approach my own life. You prepare. You take the hit. You get up. You run the next play. You don’t spend the whole game mourning the last one.”
It was an appropriate lesson for a future screenwriter. Hollywood, after all, is a business built almost as much on rejection as success.
“There is a football mentality that has served me my entire career,” Smith said. “The last play is over. Whether you scored or got knocked flat, you still have to line up again. Hollywood can make you believe that one success proves everything or one disappointment destroys everything. Neither is true. There is always another play.”
Smith became an Eagle Scout, was elected governor of Texas Boys State and attended Boys Nation before heading to Vassar College, where he graduated cum laude.
Then came Los Angeles.
And unlike the Hollywood stories that begin with years of waiting tables and unanswered phone calls, Smith’s professional entrance was impressive.
An extraordinary start
Smith’s first major produced television screenplay was There Are No Children Here, the 1993 ABC television film based on journalist Alex Kotlowitz’s nonfiction book about two brothers growing up in Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes.
Smith wrote the teleplay.
Oprah Winfrey starred as LaJoe Rivers. Keith David played her husband. Maya Angelou appeared as LaJoe’s mother.
The work earned Smith a Humanitas Prize nomination and established him as a writer interested in something that would continue throughout his career: not simply the circumstances surrounding people, but the emotional lives of those living inside them.
A year later came the movie that would forever connect him to Houston.
Smith wrote and co-produced Jason’s Lyric, starring Allen Payne, Jada Pinkett, Bokeem Woodbine, Treach, Eddie Griffin, Suzzanne Douglas and Forest Whitaker.
The movie earned more than $20 million domestically on a reported budget of about $7 million. But box-office numbers do little to explain why audiences are still talking about Jason’s Lyric 30 years later.
Yes, there was violence. There was trauma. There was family dysfunction.
But at its heart, Jason’s Lyric was a love story.
Jason was a man carrying the weight of childhood trauma and guilt, desperately trying to build a life different from the one that had shaped him. Lyric represented the possibility that love, and perhaps Jason himself, could exist beyond that pain.
Smith said giving Black characters that full emotional range has always mattered to him.
“I have always believed that our humanity is bigger than our struggle,” Smith said. “Struggle may be part of the story, but it cannot be the entire definition of a human being. We fall in love. We desire. We dream. We make terrible mistakes. We betray each other. We forgive each other. We laugh when we are not supposed to laugh. We get back up. That complete emotional life is what interests me.”
Houston helped give Jason’s Lyric its identity. Its neighborhoods, culture and rhythm became part of the film.
For Smith, the connection was personal. Corpus Christi was home. Houston was family.
Now, three decades later, the story is preparing to return to the city that helped make it memorable.
Finding the heartbeat
More than a decade after Jason’s Lyric, Smith’s career intersected with Winfrey’s again.
In 2005, ABC aired Oprah Winfrey Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry as Janie Crawford. Smith shared teleplay credit with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and Misan Sagay.
Adapting Zora Neale Hurston’s landmark novel presented an entirely different challenge.
Smith said adaptation taught him that getting every event from a book onto the screen matters less than understanding what makes the story live.
“You can preserve every incident in a book and still lose the book,” Smith said. “What I am looking for is the emotional heartbeat. What is this story really grieving? What is it hoping for? What question is it asking about being alive? Once I understand that, I know what I have to protect.”
That approach extends beyond adaptation.
Ask Smith about how he builds a story and he doesn’t begin with plot twists or three-act structure.
He begins with pain.
“I don’t begin by asking, ‘What happens?’” Smith said. “I begin by asking, ‘What hurts?’ Then I ask, ‘What does this person believe will heal that hurt?’ Very often, the thing a character thinks will save them is not what they actually need. The distance between desire and need is where I begin to see the story.”
Only after he understands that emotional core does Smith begin constructing the world around it.
“The emotional core is the North Star,” he said. “Once I know it, everything else has to answer to it. The plot has to answer to it. The comedy has to answer to it. The spectacle has to answer to it. Even the antagonist has to answer to it. If I have written something brilliant that does not serve the emotional journey, then brilliant has to go.”
Black stories deserve range
Smith’s career eventually expanded well beyond screenwriting.
He helped launch Kirk Franklin’s Fo Yo Soul Film & Television venture with Franklin and veteran casting director and producer Robi Reed, developing Church Boy for Lionsgate.
He later built Ashore Entertainment, eventually renamed Bobby Smith Jr. Productions, developing and producing film and television projects. He also entered the emerging digital entertainment world as an executive producer on Internet Icon, the YouTube filmmaking competition associated with Ryan Higa.
Smith formed a film and television partnership with New York Times bestselling author Brenda Jackson, leading to an agreement involving more than 25 of Jackson’s titles for potential screen development.
He also served as executive vice president of Je’Caryous Johnson Entertainment, overseeing film and television development and operations.
Through it all, Smith said he has resisted the notion that Black stories must fit neatly into certain categories to be understood by mainstream audiences.
“Black characters should not have to audition for universality,” Smith said. “We are already universal because we are human. Specificity does not diminish universality. Very often specificity is exactly how you reach it.”
That belief extends to the kinds of stories Black creators should be allowed to tell.
“What I want for Black storytellers is freedom,” Smith said. “The freedom to tell stories deeply rooted in our culture and the freedom to tell stories that have nothing to do with race. The freedom to make intimate dramas and huge commercial movies. The freedom to be historical, romantic, ridiculous, frightening, profound, sexy, spiritual, everything human beings are. Equality in storytelling means range.”
From writer to teacher
Smith eventually took the lessons he learned in Hollywood into the classroom as a visiting professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he taught screenwriting and mentored graduate students.
Teaching forced him to put language around instincts developed over decades of writing.
One lesson remained especially important: Encouraging writers does not mean telling them everything they write is good.
“I think being supportive of a writer and being demanding of a writer are completely compatible,” Smith said. “If I believe you have talent, I am going to take that talent seriously. Sometimes the most respectful thing you can say is, ‘You can do better than this.’”
He pushed students to ask the same questions he asks of his own work.
Why is the character making this decision now? What changed? What is the audience learning from behavior rather than dialogue? Is the writer explaining something the audience already understands?
Most importantly, does the writer actually know what the story is about?
“You can hide for a while behind dialogue and incidents and twists,” Smith said. “But eventually the story asks you to declare yourself. What is this really about? If you cannot answer that emotionally, the audience will feel the absence even if they cannot articulate it.”
Staying in the game
Smith knows firsthand that creative careers rarely follow a straight line.
There have been projects that got made and others that disappeared. Deals that happened and deals that fell apart. Years when Hollywood opened doors and others when Smith had to create doors of his own.
The lesson, he said, was learning not to confuse a single success, or failure, with an entire career.
“I used to think a career was something you built and then possessed,” Smith said. “Now I think a career is something you keep choosing. You choose it when everybody is calling, and you choose it when nobody is calling. You choose it when the movie gets made, and you choose it when the movie falls apart. Eventually you understand that longevity is not one victory. It is a thousand recommitments.”
No matter how many titles have been added to his résumé, Smith said writing remains the place where none of those accomplishments matter very much.
“The blank page is wonderfully unimpressed by your resume,” Smith said. “It does not care what you did 30 years ago. Every story asks whether you can do it again. I actually love that. It keeps you humble.”
The next generation
Smith also gets to watch another member of his family navigate the entertainment industry.
His daughter, Savannah Lee Smith, gained national attention playing Monet de Haan on HBO Max’s Gossip Girl and is set to star as Annie Grover in Prime Video’s Cruel Intentions.
For Smith, her career represents something different from simply following in her father’s footsteps.
“My greatest legacy could never be a movie,” Smith said. “My greatest legacy is my daughter. To see Savannah step into this business with her own gifts, her own voice and her own relationship to the work is extraordinary. I may have spent my life telling stories, but she is writing her own story.”
Smith entered Hollywood during an era when opportunities for Black writers, actors and filmmakers were far more limited. His daughter is entering an industry that has changed considerably, even if equality remains a work in progress.
“I would never want Savannah to inherit my career,” Smith said. “I want her to inherit possibility. Every generation should be able to walk farther than the one before it. If anything I did helped make the road even a little wider for her or for somebody else, then that means something to me.”
Coming home
For all the places Smith’s career has taken him, there is something fitting about Jason’s Lyric returning to Houston.
The movie premiered 30 years ago, but audiences never quite let it go.
Now Smith gets to see what happens when characters created for the screen step onto a stage and meet an audience that includes people who were not even born when the movie was released.
“A writer never really knows what is going to survive,” Smith said. “You write something in one period of your life and eventually the audience tells you what it meant to them. That is humbling. Jason’s Lyric belongs to me because I wrote it. But after 30 years, it also belongs to all the people who carried it with them.”
Smith has reached the point in his career where he can appreciate what he has accomplished without treating it as evidence that the work is finished.
“I am tremendously grateful for the work I have been allowed to do,” he said. “But I have no interest in spending the rest of my life standing beside my resume. A resume tells you where you have been. Creativity asks where you are willing to go.”
In February, one part of Smith’s past will return to Houston.
But Bobby Smith Jr. is still far more interested in what he is going to write next.