DEL.ICIO.USKing film obstacle not likely to be last
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Got any more good ideas, Mr. Spielberg?
You’re going to need them. Assuming the children of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stop squabbling and let you proceed with making a movie about his life, you’ve still got big problems to overcome.
Mikki K. Harris/mkharris@ajc.com
Dexter King negotiated the sale of rights for what he hopes will be ‘the definitive film’ on his father’s life.
AJC File
Bernice King said she and her brother don’t consider the deal with Steven Spielberg valid and will fight it.
• PDF: Coretta King adds a handwritten note thanking Jones for "the many ways in which you help us advance Dr. King's dream," and for aiding Dexter King's efforts.
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Such as: The plotline’s already incredibly well-known. And it boasts enough “big drama” moments — Selma, the Nobel Peace Prize, “I Have a Dream” — to fill a five-hour feature, something today’s moviegoers aren’t apt to sit through. On the other hand, what do you leave out?
And whom do you hire to portray King, a man who — sorry, Denzel — probably could out-orate the best Hollywood has to offer?
“It presents a lot of challenges,” said James L. White, who wrote the screenplay for “Ray,” which won Jamie Foxx an Academy Award for best actor. “[But] I can’t say anything because I want the job myself.”
White is not the only one following the project with great interest. Last week’s announcement that Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios had acquired King’s “life rights” spawned countless “Dream”-filled headlines and a blogosphere’s worth of speculation about who might win the role of the slain civil rights icon.
Some of the air went out of the balloon the next day when Martin Luther King III and the Rev. Bernice King said from Atlanta that they would try to block the deal that their California-based brother, Dexter, had negotiated without their knowledge.
While some observers said Hollywood should have seen it coming — the siblings are already battling over control of their late mother’s papers — DreamWorks released a carefully worded statement about wanting to proceed with the film “provided there is unity in the family.” Even then, production could be two years off, said producer Suzanne de Passe.
‘Great Man’ dilemma
Meanwhile, others have been left to speculate about cast and script and to discuss the myriad of challenges this big-screen biopic could confront before reaching a multiplex.
There’s also the nagging question of why, more than 40 years after his assassination in Memphis, King has yet to receive the prestigious “Ghandi,” “Malcolm X” or Johnny “Walk the Line” Cash treatment.
“Besides racism, it goes back to the so-called ‘Great Man’ biopics of the 1930s,” suggested Thomas Doherty, professor of film studies at Brandeis University and author of five books on Hollywood and American culture.
Whereas “great men” like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell came off in the movies as earnest and devoted to their life’s work, the films themselves were rather dull. A King film faces a similar predicament, according to Doherty.
“He’s so well known, and he’s a secular saint,” he said. “A saint’s life might be admirable, but it’s not necessarily dramatically compelling.”
Neither is the so-called “cradle-to-grave” story approach, which doesn’t skip over a single significant moment or supporting character on the way to telling an often bloated, ultimately unrevealing story. While it will be especially difficult on a King film to leave things out (no “Letter From Birmingham Jail” scene?), veteran screenwriters say it will have to be done.
“People in his life are going to have to be condensed,” said Ken Rotcop, who wrote and produced the Atlanta-made “For Us, the Living: The Story of Medgar Evers.” Longtime civil rights activist and NAACP head “Roy Wilkins might become six people in the film.”
More important will be using the most well-known aspects of King’s life and work to tell audiences things they don’t already know about him.
Robert L. Freedman wrote and produced the TV biography “Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows,” which won five Emmys. Of a possible King film, he said: “I don’t think it’s enough to just replicate the Lincoln Memorial and ‘I Have a Dream,’ even though DreamWorks could probably have the budget to do it.
“But what don’t we know about that day, for instance? Because we’ve seen the images over and over, that’s what’s imprinted on my mind. But I want to see more than what was captured on the TV that day. I want to know a lot more.”
How to humanize?
To Rotcop, it all comes down to something as simple — and unbelievably difficult — as making a movie about a real person.
“The biggest challenge to me is humanizing the man,” said Rotcop, pointing to “Milk” as a textbook example of a biopic that successfully found the living, breathing, feeling human underpinnings to a public figure’s iconic speeches and well-known stands. “I would want to know more about what he and Coretta talked about in bed at night than what the headlines told me about him.”
All well and good, except for another potential problem that raises. Namely, who gets to decide how to humanize Dr. King? And how much?
Director Spike Lee offered his version of it in “Malcolm X,” suggests Brandeis’ Doherty. An FBI agent wiretapping the title character’s phone conversations with his wife jokes, “Compared to King, this guy’s a monk.”
It’s “an irreverent line about King in the middle of a film” that “only Spike Lee could get away with,” Doherty concluded. “I don’t know if [this] film can go there, and its absence will be felt.”
Ten years ago, director Oliver Stone tried to offer his version in a King movie for Disney that never got made. One reason, screenwriter Stephen Rivele recalled, was conflicting visions of the civil rights icon.
“The big concern at the studio was how King would be portrayed,” said Rivele, who also wrote the script for Stone’s ‘Nixon.’ We thought he should be portrayed as a human being, a three- dimensional person, and human beings have flaws. But that became a problem.”
If you don’t think you’re going to be wrestling with all sorts of image-related stuff like this, Mr. Spielberg, call your buddies over at NBC. Its six-hour miniseries, “King,” hadn’t even hit the airwaves back in February 1978 when all heck broke loose in Atlanta.
On one side were the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Hosea Williams and other SCLC officials who claimed the script depicted King as “a very weak and cowardly sort of leader.” They called for a national protest. On the other side was King’s widow, who defended the project in words that somebody over at DreamWorks might want to consider filing away for future use.
“‘King’ is a drama and not a documentary,” said Coretta Scott King, who was compensated for cooperating with the project, according to press reports at the time. “Therefore, it should be judged as such.”
Given all this, what are the chances that Spielberg and DreamWorks will get their King movie made?
“It’s going to happen,” laughed film professor Doherty. “He could greenlight a movie about Emily Dickinson’s poetry.”
Staff writer Jeffry Scott contributed to this story.
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