Fatima Robinson was 21 and still working as a hairstylist in Los Angeles when her phone rang. On the line was John Singleton, the young director whose first film, “Boyz N the Hood,” had just become a hit.
Singleton already knew her. He’d seen Robinson and her friends dancing in the city’s hip-hop clubs while he was finishing school. “John Singleton saw us. He was just graduating from film school at USC,” she told Emmy magazine in 2024. “We were extras in Boyz N the Hood.”
Now he had real work for her. “After the movie [Boyz N the Hood] was a hit, he cold calls me and is looking for a choreographer for a music video,” she said.
A wall full of posters
Robinson had grown up a fan of one singer above all. In her 2023 interview for the Television Academy Foundation, she said she had so many posters of him that her wall “felt like Michael Jackson wallpaper.”
None of that came up on the call. Singleton walked her through the whole idea for the video, and Robinson liked what she heard. She told him yes.
Only one thing was missing. Nobody had told her who the song belonged to.
So who was the singer?
Before they hung up, she stopped him. “Wait, wait, who’s the artist?” she remembers asking.
Singleton’s answer: “Michael Jackson.”
The man on her wall. The song was “Remember the Time,” and the director wanted the 21-year-old who did hair by day to build its dances. “I was 21 at the time,” she told Emmy magazine. She also told the Academy that she and Michael share a birthday, August 29.
Fatima Robinson tells the story of the phone call
This is an official clip from the Television Academy Foundation’s interview. Robinson tells the call and her question in the first 30 seconds, the posters and the shared birthday come at about 0:30, and Michael’s rehearsal habits start at about 3:10.
What rehearsal with Michael was like
She didn’t meet him at the start. “I didn’t meet Michael until we were in the studio working,” she told Emmy magazine. Singleton had done the hiring, and “Michael put a lot of trust in John for who he was bringing to the table.”
What she found was a student. “Michael was very curious about this new style of dance that was bubbling in the clubs,” she said. That club style was exactly what she’d been brought in to teach him.
He also worked differently from the dancers she knew. In the Academy clip she explains that Michael didn’t count out the steps the way most dancers do. There were no numbers. Instead, she says, you mimic the beat.
And he wanted the music loud. She says he had extra speakers brought into rehearsal, because “he wants to feel it in his chest when he dances.”
The video premiered in February 1992, with Michael leading the dances she’d made with him. “That video put me on the map,” Robinson said. “It put my name in so many people’s mouths.”
She didn’t make those steps alone. She shared the job with Buddha Stretch, a choreographer from New York she still calls “amazing.”