All-star cast makes movie 'Johnson Family Vacation' a hilarious adventure

Jet, April 12, 2004

Cedric the Entertainer put together an all-star cast for Johnson Family Vacation, a film about a hilarious, disaster-filled trip to a family reunion.

He brought in his buddy Steve Harvey and recruited Vanessa Williams, Bow Wow, Solange Knowles and Gabby Soleil for the movie in which he produces as well as acts.

In the film about a trip from Los Angeles to Missouri for a family reunion, Cedric is Nate Johnson, a man who hopes for a nice, warm drive with his three kids and wife. But, it goes haywire from the beginning with yelling and fighting.

First of all, the kids are unruly. His teen son D.J. (Bow Wow) is a rapper-wannabe, older daughter Nikki (Knowles) is a hot, Lolita-like girl and his youngest daughter Destiny (Soleil) totes around an imaginary dog. On top of that, he is accompanied by his wife Dorothy (Williams), from whom he has been temporarily separated.

Still, Nate is determined to get to Missouri and win the Johnson Reunion Family of the Year award.

The Johnsons endure one mishap after another. Nate gets chased by an 18-wheeler, is victimized by a spell conjured up by a voodoo hitchhiker and taken into police custody for allegedly using a "biological weapon." They're even set adrift in a corn field.

Cedric told JET that he wanted to make a nostalgic movie about the kind of family vacations that many Black families took during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. "I thought it was a great recreation of the old family in the car taking a trip," he said. "I lived most of my life in a small town called Carruthersville, MO, and I had a lot of relatives in St. Louis and every year we'd pack up and make that trip. I just thought it was a fun idea. It doesn't seem like people do it much anymore. I just thought it would be good to recreate that world."

He quickly pointed out that he was not attempting to do a Black version of the National Lampoon's Family Vacation with Chevy Chase. In the first place, he said his family was going from west to east, just the opposite of the Griswold family. "The only resemblance is that both are travel films," he added.

His first major concern was casting since he only had a small budget.

"We thought it would be a long shot to get Vanessa Williams and everybody we had in mind. Bow Wow was someone I'd seen do guest appearances on TV. He was a natural choice for the son. Vanessa Williams, we thought, would be a long shot since she was such a big Broadway star. But it just happens that she was trying to work her way back into doing some films and was excited about it. Her kids were saying, 'Mom, whatever Cedric wants to do, you do it.' So, I had to thank her kids when I met them."

Screenwriter Todd Jones (who wrote it with brother Earl Richey Jones) said: "Most family trips start off with everyone getting along and by the end of the trip they're trying to kill one another. The Johnsons, on the other hand, start off wanting to kill one another, but as time goes on, the family comes more and more together. This makes it very different from what you usually see in this kind of comedy."

Williams, who is the real-life mother of five children, said she was drawn to the project because it really made her laugh and reminded her of her own family trips with box lunches of fried chicken and boiled eggs.

"Cedric is such a great comic and this seemed like such a great project," she said. "In the beginning, he and Dorothy are separated. They split up for three months because they were college sweethearts, she got pregnant and she basically put her career aside to get married and have kids. And three kids later, she wants to go back to her dream of being an accountant, and Cedric's character basically doesn't understand why she wants a career. As the movie goes on, you see them discussing it and resolving it."

Like Williams, Bow Wow was thrilled at a chance to work professionally with a man who'd made him laugh a lot. And he got a chance to play a character exactly like himself.

"The character really fit me well," he explained. "And I really wanted to work with Cedric. I'm a really big fan of his. The good part was that D.J. was just like me! It was like I didn't really have to change myself. It was like me going in there and being who I am."

Beyond playing a teen who loves hip hop, D.J. also is a character who loves his family and wants it to remain intact.

He said D.J. "just wants to get his parents back together, just wants to be a family again."

Beyond that, he also wants to make his father more contemporary. "D.J.'s trying to transform his dad by getting him to come over to the hip side. He wants to introduce him to hip-hop culture, but his dad just isn't feeling it. D.J. really loves his father to death, but it bugs him that we're in the year 2003 (when the film was shot) and his dad is still listening to eight tracks."

During lunch breaks on the set, Bow Wow said he and Cedric relaxed by competing against each other on Playstation II for about an hour.

Solange Knowles, younger sister of Beyonce Knowles, is the lone newcomer to the cast (Soleil is a cast member of "The Hughleys"). Knowles made her film debut in the uproarious comedy. "Until this script came along, I hadn't seen any movie roles I really loved or wanted to do," she said. "But this one was perfect, an opportunity to be involved with a great story and a fantastic cast. I mean what could be better than to make my first movie with Cedric and Vanessa and Bow Wow? And the fact that it's a family movie makes it even more exciting for me, so I had to jump right on it."