Six Degrees of the Fresh Prince
51
Meanwhile, the album
Homebase
was a huge hit as
well, selling about 1.2 million copies.
5
The exposure
Smith received by being on television every week likely
helped boost sales.
Always ambitious, Smith began to consider how to break
into movies. His first movie role was in
Where the Day Takes
You
, a drama about the hard lives of teenage runaways living on
the streets of Los Angeles. Smith plays Manny, a runaway
confined to a wheelchair. He decided to take the part for two
reasons. It showed that he could play someone other than the
joke-cracking wise guy on
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
. Smith
also liked knowing that moviegoers would see the dark plight of
homeless teens. In one scene, a cruel thug tips Manny out of his
wheelchair and beats him up.
Where the Day Takes You
was not
filmed by one of the major movie studios, and it was not widely
distributed to movie theaters across the country. As a result, not
as many people saw it. However, many movie casting directors
did see the movie and were impressed by Smith’s performance.
He started receiving offers to make bigger movies.
About this time, Smith and Tanya Moore broke up. It
was not long before Smith began dating someone else. One
day in 1991 Will was backstage at the taping of a television
program called
A Different World
. The show was a spin-off—
that is, a program featuring a character from another show.
In this case, the lead character was Denise Huxtable, one of
the daughters on
The Cosby Show
. Like
The Fresh Prince of
Bel-Air
, the show
A Different World
had a mainly African-
American cast.