Sinbad Finally Hits The Big Screen
Fresh out of the Air Force, a young stand-up comic who called himself Sinbad embarked on what he would later refer to as his “Poverty Tour.”
He had no agent or manager, but he had a list of comedy clubs and he would drive from one club to the next, talking himself into a lowpaying gig. At the end of each performance, he would return to the stage with his overnight bag in tow and beg people to take him home.
The surprising thing is that it worked. This 6-foot-5 black man with a lobe full of earrings and brightly colored baggy pants would find a place to sleep for the night, whether it was in a big city, small town or farm country. Waitresses and customers alike would take pity on the pathetic but personable comic and give him a room for the night.
Sinbad, 36, said he was so grateful for the lodgings that he turned himself into the perfect houseguest.
“My motto was to leave a house better than I found it,” the comic said. “If the plumbing needed work, I’d fix it. If the rug needed cleaning, I’d vacuum it. The place would always look better after I was done. That’s what makes a great houseguest.”
If Sinbad didn’t swear the story was true, it would seem concocted by studio publicists. What better way to promote Sinbad’s first starring role in a movie titled “Houseguest,” which opened Friday?
In the comedy, Sinbad (born David Adkins; he changed his name legally in 1975) plays a marked man who escapes from a pair of murderous thugs by posing as the long-lost friend of a laid-back suburbanite (Phil Hartman).
Sinbad, realizing that the thugs would never think to look for him in a lily-white suburb, persuades Hartman to accept him as the family’s houseguest.
“We sat down before we started
the film and Joe Roth (Caravan Pictures head) asked me what I wanted to do in this film,” Sinbad said. “I told him I didn’t want another brother from the ‘hood making white folks looking stupid.
“This is just a guy, any guy, making people act crazy. You should be able to picture Bill Murray in the same role because this is his type of role. This is not about me being black. It’s about me being funny.”
The second-oldest of six children, Sinbad was born and raised in Benton Harbor, Mich., a small city about 90 miles from Chicago. His father was a minister who encouraged the youngster to dream, and Sinbad said he had two dreams - one to play professional basketball and the other to make people laugh.
He grew tall - but not tall enough for professional basketball, he says - and won an athletic scholarship to the University of Denver. It was during college that he changed his name to that of a character from the “Arabian Nights.”
“I was going through a period of my life when I was feeling sorry for myself, particularly about my basketball prospects, and I remembered all those Sinbad movies,” he said. “Sinbad never felt sorry for himself.
“He was never the biggest guy around or the strongest or the fastest, but he was always the most clever. I decided that I was going to call myself Sinbad because he always found a way to hang in there.”
His stand-up career started slowly, but he did get noticed. A few agents noticed that he was too different.
“On their advice, I shaved my mustache and took out my earrings, but I hated myself for doing that,” he said. “I took the advice of Whoopi Goldberg, who said that if you get big enough, they have to accept you for what you are.”
And Sinbad did get big on the comedy circuit - he appeared on “Star Search” seven times, regularly sold out arenas and starred in several network and cable specials - and that led to a role on the TV sitcom “A Different World” and his own sitcom.
But concert and television success were not enough, and Sinbad made no secret of his ambition to be a movie star.
Although he appeared in small roles in a couple of movies (“Necessary Roughness,” “Meteor Man”), he said he had trouble getting Hollywood executives to see him as star material.
A typical example, he said, was when he was sent the script for “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” a film that launched Jim Carrey’s career.
“Jim Carrey wasn’t even considered for the part yet, and I studied all the Ace Ventura lines,” Sinbad said. “When I got to the audition, I started reading the lines and they laughed. They said I was supposed to do the cop part, the one played by Tone Loc in the movie.
“I know I could have done the lead in that movie, but 99 out of 100 guys in this town don’t believe in you. I needed to find that 100th guy who did believe in me. But, in the end, those other 99 will come around. If I’m successful, which means when I’m making money for the studios, they’ll come around.
“They still might not like me, but they’ll want me.”