It's amazing how serendipitous it was that Foxx and the role found each other in the first place, since the actor was just barely out of his teens when the project was conceived. The film's journey began when Ray Charles Robinson Jr. approached director Taylor Hackford and his producing partner, Stuart Benjamin, in 1987, soon after the pair released the Ritchie Valens biopic — and surprise hit — La Bamba. Hackford, also bolstered by recommendations from Charles' longtime compadres Quincy Jones and Ertegun, met with Charles Sr. to secure the rights to the musician's life.
Over the next decade, Hackford met — fruitlessly — with industry execs to try to get financial backing for the film. ''I had to keep going back to Ray and apologizing,'' says Hackford, who directed Dolores Claiborne, The Devil's Advocate, and Proof of Life in the interim. ''He could have dumped my partner and me, but he didn't. He kept saying, 'It'll come in its own time.'''
That time finally came in the summer of 2000, when Crusader Entertainment's Howard and Karen Baldwin (longtime friends of Benjamin's) and the company's owner, Phil Anschutz (who also owns stakes in L.A.'s Staples Center, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Kodak Theatre) agreed to take on the film. Hackford wrote the script with first-time feature screenwriter James L. White and was shopping it around by 2002. Still, no studio was willing to partner on the project. ''I kept hearing, 'Well, it's an interesting story, but it should be a TV movie,''' says Hackford. ''And I'd say, 'No, it's much more than that.' Ray Charles' story, once he got on that bus when he was 16 years old, never stopped moving. You have to give the audience the sense that they were along that ride to understand the enormity of the journey — which means the film could not be made for $3.95. They turned us down flat.''
Funding from Anschutz in hand, Hackford and Co. decided to shoot it anyway and worry about distribution later. And Hackford knew exactly who he wanted for the role: Jamie Foxx.
Born Eric Bishop in tiny Terrell, Tex., in 1967, the actor was adopted and raised by his mother's own adoptive parents. His grandmother encouraged him to take up the piano. ''She was trying to pull that bow back and aim me in the right direction,'' says Foxx. A football star in high school, Foxx ended up attending the United States International University in San Diego on a classical-piano scholarship. After he moved to L.A. to pursue his dream of being an R&B star, a girlfriend dared him to perform at a comedy club's open-mike night in 1989. (He took on the unisex stage name Jamie Foxx in the hopes of getting more gigs; female comedians, a rarity, were often booked sight unseen.) The appearances led to his first big break, on In Living Color in 1991, where he soon became known for in-your-face characters like Ugly Wanda. ''He is an intelligent man and bold,'' says Color costar T'Keyah Crystal Keymah. ''There were a lot of personalities to deal with, and he came in very quietly. But he used the show to his best advantage.''
