Filming has begun on the movie Like Mike, which stars rapper/actor Lil' Bow Wow as teenage basketball wonder -- thanks to a little help from his shoes.

"Things are changing constantly, so we really don't want to give anything away," Lil' Bow Wow says of the film. "But it's about this old pair of magic sneakers. They're really not magic -- someone just tells me that Michael Jordan played in them and I put the shoes on, and it's like a Cinderella-type thing."

Like Mike, tentatively set for a summer 2002 release, also stars Morris Chestnut (The Brothers, The Best Man), and veteran actress Anne Meara, a.k.a. Ben Stiller's mother. Michael Elliot, who worked with Bow Wow on MTV's Carmen: A Hip Hopera, is the film's writer and co-producer, and John Schultz (Drive Me Crazy) is directing.

"Acting's stressful," says the fourteen-year-old Bow Wow, "but it's something that I want to do. I was already an actor before all my music stuff."

AUGUSTIN K. SEDGEWICK
(January 31, 2002)