- published: 19 Feb 2011
- views: 11749
Lean on Me is a 1989 dramatized biographical film written by Michael Schiffer, directed by John G. Avildsen and starring Morgan Freeman. Lean on Me is loosely based on the story of Joe Louis Clark, a real life inner city high school principal in Paterson, New Jersey, whose school is at risk of being taken over by the New Jersey state government unless students improve their test scores. This film's title refers to the 1972 Bill Withers song of the same name.
Clark resigned as principal of Eastside High School the year after this film was released to become an author and motivational speaker. In August 1995, he was hired to run a juvenile detention center in Newark, New Jersey. Parts of the film, including the elementary school scenes, were filmed in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey.
In 1987, Eastside High School in Paterson, New Jersey, is plagued with numerous problems, especially drugs and gang violence. Furthermore, the students scored poorly on the state's test of minimum basic skills.
During the opening credits sequence, after a teacher is brutally beaten for trying to break up a fight and the state legislature has recently passed a law proclaiming that schools that cannot meet minimum test requirements will be put in receivership, Mayor Bottman (Alan North) consults school superintendent Dr. Frank Napier (Robert Guillaume), who suggests the school hire elementary school principal Joe Louis Clark, aka "Crazy Joe" (Morgan Freeman), who was a teacher at Eastside High 20 years before, as the new principal. The mayor is reluctant at first as he knows about the trouble the radical Clark has caused in the past, but Clark is hired. Tension arises immediately when Clark dismisses from the school hundreds of students identified as drug dealers or abusers and troublemakers. A meeting between the parents of those students and the academic board only fans the flames.