Lee Cowan is an Emmy-award-winning journalist serving as a national correspondent and substitute anchor for "CBS News Sunday Morning."
The first thing you notice about Jennifer Lopez' perch over West Hollywood is the Old Hollywood part of it. Images of Barbra Streisand, Bette Davis and the Rat Pack all bedazzle the walls.
"I love making movies," she said, pointing to one photo. "And I feel like this is me a little bit. But it's not me, it's Sophia Loren! And with the crew there, and this is what my life is: it's me by a camera doing this every day!"
Lopez is a movie mainstay. She's made at least one film almost every year for the past three decades. Some were memorable, others weren't. Golden Globes and Oscars both eluded her. But this year just might be different, due to "Kiss of the Spider Woman," an old-fashioned musical. "I just thought to myself, This is what I've been waiting for my whole life," she said. "I grew up on musicals. My mom loved musicals, and so I saw every musical you can think of. She was a fanatic!"
I asked, "How many times do you think you saw 'West Side Story'?"
"So many," she sighed. "And it wasn't, 'Oh I've seen it about five times.' No! I've seen it hundreds of times! I feel like, so much!"
No surprise one of her idols is Rita Moreno, the other the late Chita Rivera, who starred in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" on Broadway - the same Tony-winning shoes that Lopez is now trying to fill.
Does she feel the weight of that? "I kind of let it go and understood that I had to make it my own," she said.
It came, though, at a tough time in her personal life - Ben Affleck, her now ex-husband, is one of the film's executive producers. "It was a really tough time," she said. "Every moment on set, every moment I was doing this role, I was so happy. And then, it was like, back home it was not great. And it was just like, Oh, you know, how do I reconcile this?"
Their divorce was settled the same month that "Kiss of the Spider Woman" premiered at Sundance. "It was the best thing that ever happened to me," she said. "Because it changed me ... It didn't change me, it helped me grow in a way that I needed to grow."
The bright music of "Kiss of the Spider Woman" is a purposeful contrast to the film's darker tale. It's an escape for two cellmates in an Argentinian prison: Molina, a queer window dresser; and Valentin, a proud Marxist revolutionary. Going to a movie in their mind helped ease their drudgery, and dissolve their differences.
Lopez said, "It is a love letter, in a way, to the Latin community and to the queer community, this movie, because in a time like this ... those communities are being demonized and marginalized."
Inclusion and acceptance have always been themes in her music. Performing at the 2020 Super Bowl halftime show in Miami, one of her twins, Emme (whom she had with her third husband Marc Anthony), sang with her proudly about the challenges of identity - cultural and otherwise. "Singing that with my child there, and them screaming that back to me - 'cause I'm gonna live my life - that was one of the best moments in my life," said Lopez, who then apologized for getting emotional thinking back on that. "I didn't know it would catch me like that. It was one of the best moments of my life. Being so joyful and happy and being exactly who they were."
The kind of global platform that she has now was unimaginable back when, against her parents' wishes, she dropped out of college and ran from her home in the Bronx chasing the city lights of Manhattan.
With no place to stay, she slept on a bench at the Phil Black Dance Studio on Broadway. "I crashed there for a while," she said. "You know, when you're young you can do stuff like that. You don't know what's gonna happen to you."
"It's not an inconvenience," I said.
"No! You're like, whatever. Great! I can sleep here. I'll sleep here!"
As a kid, seeing a live Broadway show was a rare privilege, but the experience stuck. "I remember sitting in an audience, watching a live show one time," she said. "And I was with a friend, and I said, 'When you see that, don't you want to be up there, doing that?' And they were like, 'No!' And I was like, 'Okay. Is it just me?'”
In-between her auditions, Lopez was selling programs for "Phantom of the Opera" out in front of the Majestic Theatre. "I was, like, really using my best tactics," she said. "Like, I swing it up in the air and, like, you know, kind of try to be charming and funny!"
It was a winding road that finally got Jennifer Lopez to her own musical. It might just be that going back in time to Old Hollywood -- is what pushes her Hollywood career forward.
"The hard times are the lessons, and you have to understand that," she said. "You have to understand that. And once you do, everything just becomes a little bit lighter. And you can really, really fly."
"Does it feel like you're flying now?" I asked.
"Yes. It does. It does," she replied. "And I still feel like I want to fly higher. I want to see more. I want to do more things."