One good film leads to another and Cinema Paradiso's What to Watch series guides users towards titles they might not know and will undoubtedly enjoy. This time, we take a look at Oscar-winning actress Regina King's directorial debut, One Night in Miami...
Fifty-eight Februarys ago, four high-profile Black men met in a motel room in Miami to celebrate a famous victory. Each was on the verge of making a life-changing decision. Yet, within a year, two would have ceased speaking to each other. Moreover, two would be dead.
In 2013, Kemp Powers wrote a play that sought to imagine what happened during this historical encounter between boxer Cassius Clay, singer Sam Cooke, American football star Jim Brown and civil rights activist, Malcolm X. The conversations he conceived encapsulated what it meant to be African American in the United States in 1964. Dismayingly, however, they also said a good deal about the situation still facing the Black community in America today.
The Play's the Thing
Following journalistic stints with Reuters and Forbes, Kemp Powers was the front page news editor at Yahoo when he read British-born author Mike Marqusee's book, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties. From it, he learned that Cassius Clay had celebrated becoming World Heavyweight champion in February 1964 by meeting up with friends Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and Malcolm X in a motel room in the Overtown district of Miami, Florida.
As segregation prevented African Americans from staying in many of the city's swankier hotels, Hampton House became popular with Black guests. Some were as famous as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Nancy Wilson, LaVern Baker and Sammy Davis, Jr. Dr Martin Luther King had even delivered a speech that anticipated his iconic 'I Have a Dream' address at the motel in 1960.
Yet, this hardly seemed a suitably salubrious venue to salute a landmark in African American sport. But Malcolm X had chosen Hampton House for a reason and Powers was so intrigued by his choice that he started to speculate about his motives for assembling three friends who happened to be among the most influential Black men in the country.
Perhaps Powers was guided in his thinking by another stage drama with a Black sporting hero as its heart. Premiering at the Ironbound Theater in Newark, New Jersey in 1989, Edward Schmidt's Mr Rickey Calls a Meeting takes place in a New York hotel room in 1947. The man in the chair is Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who has summoned boxer Joe Louis, singer Paul Robeson and dancer Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson to discuss whether he should break the colour barrier in Major League Baseball by offering a contract to Montreal Royals second baseman, Jackie Robinson.
This meeting never actually took place. But Robinson becoming the first African American to play in MLB caused the ructions that Rickey anticipated, as writer-director Brian Helgeland reveals in 42 (2013), which stars Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and Harrison Ford as Rickey. It's possible that married film producers Keith and Jess Wu Calder had this picture in the back of their minds when they saw One Night in Miami at the Rogue Machine Theatre in Los Angeles in June 2013. Carl Cofield directed the production, which starred Jason Delane as Malcolm X, Matt Jones as Clay, Ty Jones as Cooke and Kevin Daniels as Brown.
The timing couldn't have been more poignant, as a month after the play opened, a Florida jury acquitted former neighborhood watch co-ordinator George Zimmerman of murdering unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin. Recognising that far too little had changed in the intervening half century - in spite of an African American president being elected for a second term - the Calders contacted Powers about a screen version of his play.
Their case was strengthened when One Night in Miami followed its rave reviews (the Hollywood Reporter praised the 'colourful dialogue that persuasively crackles with both the charisma and humanity of these iconic figures') with three wins at the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards. Having long dreamt of writing something that make each member of the cast a star, as Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1983) had done for C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez and Tom Cruise. Now, having quit his job at AOL and recovered from the muscle-tissue syndrome, rhabdomyolysis, he was going to get his chance.
Making Miami Myths
As Powers shared an agent with actress Regina King, she quickly became the front runner to make her feature bow as a director. She had been acting since her mid-teens, having played Brenda Jenkins in the hit TV series, 227 (1985-90). But it was a trio of performances for director John Singleton in Boyz N the Hood (1991), Poetic Justice (1993) and Higher Learning (1995) that brought her to the attention of film audiences.
While roles like Oscar winner Cuba Gooding, Jr.'s wife in Cameron Crowe's Jerry Maguire (1996) and Oscar winner Jamie Foxx's backing singer lover in Taylor Hackford's Ray (2004) further raised her profile, King found meatier roles on the small screen. In 2007, she appeared in nine episodes of 24 (2001-10) before spending five seasons as Lydia Adams in Southland (2009-13). In addition to guesting frequently as Janine Davis in The Big Bang Theory (2007-19), she also cropped up as Erika Murphy in Leftovers (2015-17) and won two Emmys for her work as Kimara Walters in American Crime (2015-17).
A third Emmy arrived for Seven Seconds (2018). But King had also started to direct and Cinema Paradiso users can seek out her episodes of Scandal (2012-18), Animal Kingdom (2016-) and This Is Us (2016-). She was on the Georgia set of Watchmen (in which she plays Angela Abar, aka Sister Night) when she heard about the chance to direct One Night in Miami... and, even though she hadn't seen the play, she had been so impressed by the script that she had Skyped Powers to pitch her vision and why she was the right woman for a film about four powerful men.
'I have never gotten an opportunity to see Black men written the way I see Black men in my life,' she told one interviewer. 'Kemp was so smart in using the voices of four of our most iconic people in their respective fields, in our history, and humanising them.' She informed the New York Times that the film was a 'love letter' to Black men. 'They are vulnerable, they are strong, they are providers, they are sometimes putting on a mask. They are not unbreakable. They are flawed.'
For his part, Powers was so won over that he practically begged King to make the picture. Moreover, as if her case wasn't strong enough, King then landed the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work as Sharon Rivers in Barry Jenkins's adaptation of James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk (2018).
Even before shooting began, King consulted with production designer Barry Robinson and cinematographer Tami Reiker to ensure that the colour scheme matched that of the Jenkins film. Although early scenes take place in Wembley Stadium and the Copacabana nightclub in New York, the bulk of the action is staged in Room 254 at Hampton House, which featured in the same infamous publication that gave Peter Farrelly's Green Book (2018) its name. This was another study of US society under the so-called Jim Crow laws and King would receive her Oscar alongside Mahershala Ali, who followed up his success for Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (2016) with a second Best Supporting award for his performance as jazz pianist Don Shirley on a tour of the Deep South.
In order to get the right look for the visuals, King drew Reiker's attention to the dazzling paintings of African American artist, Jacob Lawrence. As King revealed to a magazine, 'I told Tami that Black people are so vibrant. We're like the most resilient beings because we've been through so much, but we still manage to dance, to smile, to sing, to have an energy that comes off of us that's so colourful. I wanted to capture that without it feeling like a musical.'
She also presented the DP best known for lighting Lisa Cholodenko's High Art (1998) and Gina Prince-Bythewood's Beyond the Lights (2014) with a source book that contained both colour-saturated period photos and monochrome images by street photographers Saul Leiter and Garry Winogrand. She also unearthed a copy of Wong Kar-wai's 60s-set romantic classic, In the Mood For Love (2000) to demonstrate the visual tone she envisaged.
As King wanted to keep the camera moving to prevent the action from seeming too stagy, she had Reiker mount her two large Alexa 65 cameras on jib arms that allow the impression that they are floating around the room. She also had Robinson dot the set built inside a community centre in LaPlace (near New Orleans) with small holes so that the camera could become a fly on the wall.
All was set to go in January 2020. However, the 30-day schedule was so tight that principals Kingsley Ben-Adir (Malcolm X), Eli Goree (Clay), Aldis Hodge (Brown) and Leslie Odom, Jr. (Cooke) were given no time for rehearsals. This meant that King had to discover how to communicate with each actor as she went along and ensure that they created distinctive characters rather than simply doing impersonations. But it also brought a creative tension to the set that ensured the quartet brought their A game to each session.
Adding to the challenge was the fact that the scene on the motel roof was filmed with a handheld camera to reflect the looser mood between the four friends out in the night-time air. The cast also had to cope with the fact that Robinson had recreated the scene atop shipping containers that were so tall that a special guard rail had to be fitted to comply with insurance demands.
In addition to the core action, each actor had to film their prologue scene. Eli Goree shot both of his boxing bouts at Second Line Stages in New Orleans, with the Henry Cooper fight being held outdoors under a canopy and the Sonny Liston match-up taking place inside the Convention Hall in Miami Beach. Key to the authenticity of these settings were the ringside photographs of Howard Bingham and Neil Leifer, which were contained in the 2004 book, Greatest of All Time: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali.
Aldis Hodge hooked up with Beau Bridges to shoot the convivial chat with a racist sting in the tail on the porch of a Georgia plantation house, while Kingsley Ben-Adir joined Joaquina Kalukango for the conversation between Malcolm and Betty X over his decision to leave the Nation of Islam and set up his own party. This domestic setting was also used for Malcolm's phone call with his young daughter, Attallah (Nola Epps).
Leslie Odom, Jr. was the only member of the cast who got to film in four different locations. His first scene was set in a mock-up of a room at the ritzy Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach and centred on a discussion about his career and friendships with wife Barbara (Nicolette Robinson). The second recreated the famous Copacabana nightclub in New York, where Cooke received a cool welcome for trying to entertain an exclusively white audience with covers such as the 1957 Debbie Reynolds hit, 'Tammy'.
A theatre stage was rigged up for the cutaway to illustrate Malcolm's anecdote about meeting Cooke for the first time, when he had followed Jackie Wilson on the bill and had pacified a hostile crowd after the sound system had malfunctioned with a foot-stomping a cappella rendition of 'Chain Gang'. Odom and Goree also came together for the sequence outside the convenience store, which follows Cooke's clash with Malcolm over the morals of the Honourable Elijah Muhammad and the Cooke's reluctance to sing protest songs like Bob Dylan's 'Blowin' in the Wind'.
Covid meant that this latter sequence had to be filmed under lockdown conditions in Los Angeles in July 2020. However, the mood of the country had changed significantly during the ensuing four months. On 25 May, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin and the rise of the Black Lives Matter campaign put an added onus on King and Powers to back up their film's message about using a social platform for political good. As Keith Calder recalls, 'The public conversation caught up to the movie rather than the movie changing the public conversation.'
While Grammy-winning composer Terence Blanchard worked on the score with jazz pianist Benny Green, veteran British editor Tariq Anwar set about piecing the picture together. Like King, he had started out in television and Cinema Paradiso users can trace his evolution through shows like Doctor Who (1963-) and Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010) and such series as The Monocled Mutineer (1986) and Fortunes of War (1987). However, he graduated to features in the late 1980s and counts among his credits Nicholas Hytner's The Madness of King George (1994) and The Lady in the Van (2015), Sam Mendes's American Beauty (1999) and Tom Hooper's The King's Speech (2010). The latter pair saw Anwar nominated at both the BAFTAs and the Oscars. But he was overlooked for his deft work on King's film, which snagged a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Powers and two nods for Odom, who added to his Best Supporting Actor citation by sharing recognition for Best Song with Sam Ashworth for 'Speak Now'.
Separating Fact From Fiction
Whenever history is dramatised, the line between fact and fiction tends to get blurred. As it's not known what transpired between the four men who met up in Room 254 on 25 February 1964, poetic licence has to take over. However, Kemp Powers knew enough about the quartet to ensure that the events he depicted were rooted firmly in plausibility.
Just three months earlier, President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas and Malcolm X had claimed that the event that shocked a nation was 'merely a case of chickens coming home to roost'. But Black America had also been traumatised by the murder of activist Medgar Evers in June 1963 and the September bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama that had claimed the lives of four innocent teenagers: Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Rosamond Robertson and Cynthia Dionne Wesley. These events were respectively recalled in Rob Reiner's drama, Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), and Spike Lee's documentary, Four Little Girls (1997).
It was against this backdrop that Cassius Clay took the World Heavyweight title from Sonny Liston. In his previous bout, he had been dumped on the canvas by Henry Cooper and, exactly a week before the Miami Beach fight, he had come up against four more Brits in the shape of The Beatles at the 5th Street Gym.
The sensation that the Fab Four had created on The Ed Sullivan Show didn't seem to faze Sam Cooke, as his SAR company owned the rights to 'It's All Over Now', which had topped the charts for The Rolling Stones. Indeed, he was so confident that 'British Invasion' bands would record more songs written by African Americans (and, thus, raise their cultural and financial status) that he believed he was doing more to get Black voices heard than he would by penning Dylanesque protest songs. That said, he had already recorded 'A Change Is Gonna Come' and performed it on The Tonight Show (on 7 February) before he met up with his friends at Hampton House.
Having started out singing gospel with The Soul Stirrers, Cooke had scored 29 Top 40 hits since reinventing himself as a pop singer with 'You Send Me' in 1957. The same year saw Jim Brown join the Cleveland Browns at the start of an eight-year career that would see him break records as an elusive and powerful running back. He would go on to win the NFL championship (the forerunner to the Super Bowl) the season after he joined his friends in Miami. However, the part-time boxing commentator had also just made his acting debut, as buffalo soldier Sergeant Franklin in Gordon Douglas's Western, Rio Conchos (1964). As he wasn't sure whether he was ready to quit football and devote himself to movies, Brown asks Clay (in the film) not to let the cat out of the bag.
Clay had his own secret, however, as he has been receiving instruction from Malcolm X prior to joining the separatist Nation of Islam. The plan was to make the announcement the morning after the fight. But Clay was unaware that Elijah Muhammad had been telling followers to distance themselves from the garrulous Kentuckian in case he lost to Liston and his defeat reflected badly on the movement.
However, Malcolm had also lost faith in his mentor, as he had discovered that Elijah Muhammad had fathered at least nine children from extra-marital relationships. As he confides in Betty in the prologue, he was hoping to persuade Clay from nailing his colours to the Nation's mast and join him in a breakaway group. Cooke had expressed an interest in the Nation of Islam, but Brown was more sceptical, even though he was hardly convinced by Dr King's pacifist approach. Thus, the four friends certainly had much to talk about when Malcolm arranged his alternative post-fight party.
On 26 February, Clay declared his allegiance to the Nation of Islam and told reporters, 'I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be who I want.' He adopted the name Cassius X before changing it to Muhammad Ali later in the year. But his career was disrupted by his refusal to fight in the Vietnam War and he didn't box between March 1967 and October 1970. By that date, Brown had become an established actor, after having announced his retirement from football on the set of Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967). He has continued acting, even though his off-screen life hasn't always been free of controversy. Tap his name into the Cinema Paradiso searchline to learn more about his acting career.
Two weeks after the Liston fight, Malcolm X announced his departure from the Nation of Islam. By the end of March, Clay had broken off relations and they would never speak again after the boxer snubbed his old friend during a trip to Ghana in May 1964. Ali quit the Nation in 1975 and confessed in his 2004 memoir that he regretted turning his back on Malcolm, who was assassinated on 21 February 1965, while preparing to give a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York.
Sam Cooke didn't see out the year. He was shot on 11 December at the Hacienda Motel in South Central Los Angeles. The official verdict was justifiable homicide, as hotel manager Bertha Franklin claimed self-defence after Cooke had confronted her while searching for absconded companion, Elisa Boyer. However, no one has been able to establish a definitive account of the night's events and it's curious that the closing caption makes no mention of Cooke's tragic fate.
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