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    ‘Muhammad Ali’ Docuseries From Ken Burns Is a Sweeping Portrait

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    A new four-part documentary series by Ken Burns paints a sweeping portrait of a man whose life intersected with many of modern America’s most profound changes.One day in the mid-1990s, Ken Burns had a cold while he was in Los Angeles to raise money for his next documentary. He ducked into a coffee shop for some hot tea, and after paying, one of the 20th century’s most ardent historians turned from the counter and locked eyes with perhaps its most towering icon. Muhammad Ali was sitting in a booth nearby. The two men stared at each other silently for longer than most strangers would — celebrities or not.“There’s was almost no movement on both of us except that kind of opening, that love that happens when you just feel unashamed and unembarrassed by the persistent gaze,” Burns said recently. “This wordless conversation; I have the script in my head, I heard his voice in my mind. But it was just without going over and shaking hands, of course, not asking for an autograph or anything like that.”By that point, Ali was in the clutches of Parkinson’s disease — hence the silence from a man who for many decades couldn’t stop talking: about his own beauty and skill, about how ugly and untalented his opponents were, about the injustice Black people across America had faced for hundreds of years.Nearly three decades later, Burns; his oldest daughter, Sarah; and her husband, David McMahon, have stitched together a sweeping portrait of Ali’s impact from more than 40 years of footage and photographs. “Muhammad Ali,” a four-part documentary series that premieres Sept. 19 on PBS, follows the arc of a man whose life intersected with many of modern America’s most profound changes — and who was also not as widely revered in his prime as he is now.David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker and author of “King of the World,” a 1998 biography of Ali, said “it was very clear that a lot of America found him dangerous, threatening to the way people were ‘supposed’ to behave — much less Black people.”“He won people over because he was right about the war,” Remnick continued. “He won people over because as an athlete, he proved himself over and over again to be not only beautiful to watch, but unbelievably courageous. So his athleticism and his superiority as an athlete couldn’t just couldn’t be denied, even when he lost.”In 1978, Ali beat Leon Spinks to win the heavyweight championship for the third time.Michael GaffneyThere has been no shortage of documentaries or biographies about Ali in the last few decades. For the filmmakers, the idea took root in 2014, when their friend Jonathan Eig was working on a book about Ali. (“Ali: A Life,” published in 2017.) Eig’s research led him to believe that a comprehensive film representation of Ali’s life had not been done before, and that the Burnses were the perfect team to do it.McMahon said it took only a few archival clips to convince them of the potential power of a wide-ranging Ali documentary. “There were so many possibilities to tie together all these threads that were kind of out there,” he said. “You’d see documentaries that had been about a single chapter in his life or a single fight, or books covering only a portion of his life.”The more the filmmakers dug into Ali’s life, Sarah Burns said, the more they realized “just how much there was to this story.”“Not just the boxing, obviously,” she said, “but his relationships with Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, his family life, his marriages, his draft resistance and his courage and being willing to go to jail for his convictions, and also his battle with Parkinson’s — you know, his later life, his post-boxing life.” That “really hadn’t,” she added, “been explored in as much detail.”The new series traces a path from the young Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville to the complicated, at times self-contradictory adult who won the heavyweight title three times and faced down the U.S. government over his refusal to fight in Vietnam. The filmmakers show him as not only a dominant heavyweight during his peak fighting years but also a figure of no small impact on society. Here is “The Greatest” clowning with the Beatles; standing at a podium with Malcolm X; embracing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; calling another Black fighter an “Uncle Tom” for refusing to acknowledge his name change, as a leering Howard Cosell tells the cameras to “keep shooting” the ensuing scuffle; and finally declaring publicly — at risk to his career and endorsements — that he was a Muslim.Ali had relationships with many other prominent 20th century figures, including Malcolm X.ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Live NewsAli’s rise to stardom coincided with a period of intense cultural change in the United States, and his connection to the Civil Rights and antiwar movements is critical in distinguishing Ali the man from Ali the boxer, McMahon said — and in recognizing his impact on American audiences.“You can’t understand his refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army without understanding his faith, without understanding the meaning of Elijah Muhammad in his life,” he said, referring to the mercurial and sometimes caustic leader of the Nation of Islam, with whom Ali had a close relationship. “We hadn’t really seen that explained. There were also perspectives that hadn’t been heard; we thought, ‘Who out there could tell us more about his faith?’”Eig, the biographer, shared a huge trove of contacts with the filmmakers, and they started their initial interviews in 2016, a week after Ali died. Dozens of writers, friends and boxing ambassadors participated: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Holmes, Jesse Jackson, the novelist Walter Mosley, the ESPN writer Howard Bryant, the boxing promoter Don King. Over the next several years, the filmmakers unearthed more than 15,000 photographs and dug up footage that had not been seen publicly. A production company that had shot the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali’s third and final bout with Joe Frazier, in the Philippines, had folded before the film could be used. Their footage was buried in a Pennsylvania archive.“This woman pulled these boxes out and said, ‘They say “Ali” on them — I don’t know what they are,’” McMahon said. “This is Technicolor, it’s 16-millimeter, shot from the apron [of the ring] — it just pops. And you see the fight in ways that had never been seen before.”Ali’s relationship with Frazier, who as a young fighter had been one of Ali’s fans, is one of the thornier aspects of the documentary. Ali’s treatment of him before their fights was quite cruel, employing some of the language of “racist white people,” as one commentator in the series says, to denigrate Frazier (who never forgave him). It’s part of the complex picture of Ali that the series provides: a people’s champion who could be petty; a devout Muslim who was a serial philanderer; an idealist who made a lot of people angry with his refusal to conform to public expectations.Bryant, the ESPN writer, said he didn’t think “people understand why this story is so heroic and so important and so unique.”“We just seem to think that every person out there, if they protest something, if they say something, if they face some sort of sanction, we put them in the same category as Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson,” he continued. “And it’s just such nonsense.”“Name me another athlete where the full weight of the United States government came down on one person. I’m not talking about the N.F.L. saying you can’t play when you’re already a millionaire. Colin Kaepernick obviously sacrificed and lost some things. It’s not the same thing. It’s not even close.”For two of Ali’s daughters, Rasheda Ali (from his second marriage, to Khalilah Ali, born Belinda Boyd) and Hana Ali (from his third, to Veronica Porche), the new documentary is an honest look at the father they knew mainly while he was under the weight of Parkinson’s. The film opens with a shot of him sitting with his oldest child, Maryum, encouraging her to look out the window so he can steal a bite of her food. The footage brought Rasheda to tears.Belinda Boyd became Ali’s second wife and changed her name to Khalilah Ali. Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos“I’ve never seen the family footage — and even the photos!” Rasheda said. “I was like, ‘Wow, where did you get that?’”“He was always making jokes and he was fun,” she added. “That’s the Muhammad Ali people don’t really see regularly.”Hana, who said that anyone other than the Burns would have been making “just another documentary about my father,” also noted that the more intimate footage helped fill in some of the nuances about him.“It’s so hard when you live a life like my father’s, where you’re so accessible, and so photographed, and his story’s been told so many times,” Hana said. “Honestly, I’ve seen so many documentaries about our father, and even just watching the beginning of this one, already, it was just different — it felt more personable.”The series comes to a close as Ali has become, as Ken Burns described it, “the most beloved person on the planet.” The footage of his trembling surprise appearance at the 1996 Olympics, in Atlanta, is a crucial piece of Ali’s lasting image and mythology. But as Burns put it, “mythology is a mask.”Bryant, who argued that Ali changed the relationship between athletes and fans, was more direct about the boxer’s evolving public image in those later years.Ali in Manhattan in 1968. Despite his popularity as a boxer, Ali angered many people with his refusal to conform to public expectations.Anthony Camerano/Associated Press“People hated his guts, and white people didn’t love him until he couldn’t talk,” Bryant said. “There were people — Black and white — who still called him Cassius Clay; there were people who still did not want to give him his due. And there were people who still held a lot against him.”“Then he couldn’t talk, and suddenly he belonged to everybody,” he said.Ken Burns suggested that this public redemption was akin to “a funeral where people are talking really nicely about other people.”“And you go, ‘Why can’t we do this in the rest of our lives?’” he said. “The funeral isn’t for the person who’s dead — the funeral is for the people who are left behind, and we’re always modeling the best, most human behavior. And yet, we don’t seem to be able to bring it to our own lives.”He quoted one of the journalists in the documentary, Dave Kindred, who said that in death, Ali “can’t hurt us anymore; he can’t make us mad anymore.”“He could no longer anger us, he could no longer make it difficult for us, to force us back on our own feelings, our own beliefs, our own prejudices, Burns said. Then there’s this room to forgive and perhaps exalt.”“It’s a long process with him,” he added. “And it’s so interesting that a great deal of that positive progress is from defeat.” More

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      ‘City of Ali’ Review: A Final Round for a Champ

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      This documentary makes for an extremely minor addition to the Muhammad Ali cinematic universe.Muhammad Ali is probably already the most dramatized and documentarized athlete in film history, and “City of Ali” makes for an extremely lightweight addition to the former heavyweight champion’s cinematic universe. This documentary, directed by Graham Shelby, focuses on Ali’s relationship with his hometown, Louisville, Ky., and how the city gave him a grand send-off after his death in 2016.Made with the participation of Ali’s family — some of his children are among the interviewees, as is his wife, Lonnie Ali (who is also shown giving a September 2020 speech about racial and social justice during the closing credits) — “City of Ali” presents an extremely basic overview of his career. It emphasizes Louisville-centered stories (of how the city police officer Joe Martin encouraged Ali, then Cassius Clay, to pursue boxing, for example) and shows residents and friends reminiscing about local sightings.The film movingly pays tribute to Ali’s generosity and lack of airs. Kelly Jones of the Louisville Metro Police recalls the time Ali entertained Jones’s 18-month-old daughter at an airport. The Louisville news media personality John Ramsey is shown delivering a eulogy in which he remembers how Ali raised the spirits of a losing boxer at the 2000 Olympics.But the nuances of Ali’s relationship with Louisville — where Ali faced discrimination as a Black American and controversy for his refusal to be drafted — tend to get lost in the celebration of civic pride. And much of “City of Ali” is simply arcana. The security arrangements for Ali’s funeral procession and the plan to spread rose petals near his resting place aren’t exactly movie-worthy subjects.City of AliNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More

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      Leon Gast, Director of ‘When We Were Kings,’ Dies at 84

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLeon Gast, Director of ‘When We Were Kings,’ Dies at 84He spent 22 years making an Oscar-winning movie about the 1974 Ali-Foreman boxing match, considered one of the greatest sporting events of all time.Leon Gast at his home in Manhattan in 1997. His film about the heavyweight fight billed as “the Rumble in the Jungle” won the Academy Award that year for best documentary feature. Credit…Librado Romero/The New York TimesMarch 12, 2021Updated 7:38 p.m. ETLeon Gast, a filmmaker whose 22-year quest to make “When We Were Kings,” a documentary about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s epic 1974 boxing match, involved a Liberian shell company, the Hells Angels, a drug deal gone bad, the singer Wyclef Jean and ultimately an Academy Award, died on Monday at his home in Woodstock, N.Y. He was 84.His wife, Geri Spolan-Gast, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.Mr. Gast was a young filmmaker who had already directed one major documentary, about New York’s Latin music scene, when he learned in 1974 of a plan by the boxing promoter Don King to stage a combination music festival and boxing match in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo).A company in London had agreed to pay for the dozens of performers at the festival, including James Brown, Miriam Makeba and B.B. King, while Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire, put up $10 million to split between the boxers in the fight’s main event, Foreman and Ali.Mr. Gast, who had boxed in high school, lugged his projector to Mr. King’s offices in Rockefeller Center, where he lobbied for the job of making a film about the music festival, with clips of the fight interspersed. Mr. King wanted a Black director, but he liked Mr. Gast’s work, and he hired Mr. Gast after he agreed to hire Black crew members.Muhammad Ali sending George Foreman to the canvas during their historic 1974 championship fight. Mr. Gast bet his friend the writer Hunter S. Thompson that Ali, the underdog, would win. He won the bet. Credit…Red/Associated PressThe fight, billed as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” was to take place on Sept. 25, 1974, preceded by the three-day music festival. But on Sept. 17, Foreman cut his forehead while sparring; he needed 11 stitches, and the fight was pushed back six weeks.Many of the boxing fans and reporters who had traveled to Zaire left, but Mr. Gast decided to stick around. He had a sense of the drama unfolding: Ali was 32 years old, considered over the hill for a boxer and certainly no match for Foreman, 25, the reigning heavyweight champion of the world, whose 40-0 record included 37 knockouts.“The time may have come to say goodbye to Muhammad Ali,” one of his admirers, the sportscaster Howard Cosell, said on television, “because very honestly I do not think he can beat George Foreman.”But Ali was unfazed. While Foreman — who at the time was reserved to the point of surliness — refused to be interviewed, Ali opened up to Mr. Gast, who over the next several weeks recorded hours and hours of the former heavyweight champion exercising, sparring, meeting locals and indulging in his famed verbal virtuosity.“If you thought the world was surprised when Nixon resigned, wait until I kick Foreman’s behind,” Ali said at one point; another time, he said: “Only last week, I murdered a rock. Injured a stone. Hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean, I make medicine sick!”He even suggested when and how Mr. Gast’s crew should film him.“One day Muhammad told us: ‘In the morning when I run, I come around that corner with the sun and the river behind me,’” Mr. Gast told The New York Times in 1997. “‘Put your camera over there. It’ll be a great shot.’ He was right. It was a great shot.”Foreman was favored to win by 4-to-1 odds, but Mr. Gast had faith in his newfound friend. He bet the writer Hunter S. Thompson $100, at 3 to 1, that Ali would prevail.The fight finally took place on Oct. 30 — at 4 a.m., to accommodate audiences watching it in theaters in the United States — under a giant poster of Mr. Sese Seko. Ali had bragged for weeks about how he was going to “dance” around the ring to avoid Foreman’s powerful fists. But instead he leaned back against the ropes, absorbing blows until Foreman wore out, after which Ali delivered a knockout punch. Ali called it his “rope-a-dope” strategy, and it stunned the estimated one billion people watching around the world.Back in New York to assemble the film, Mr. Gast immediately ran into problems. Ticket sales from the music festival were supposed to have paid his production costs, but after the fight was delayed, Mr. Sese Seko had declared it free as a way to drum up attendance.Ali was the undisputed star of the Gast film, playing to the camera and showing off his verbal virtuosity. “I’m so mean,” he said, “I make medicine sick!”Credit…Anthology Film ArchivesMr. Gast couldn’t even get ahold of the 300,000 feet of footage he had shot. The London-based company that Mr. King said would bankroll the project turned out to be a cover for a shell company based in the Cayman Islands and owned by Stephen Tolbert, the Liberian minister of finance. Mr. Gast flew to Liberia to arrange for more money, but before they could make a deal, Mr. Tolbert died in a plane crash.Mr. Gast’s lawyer, David Sonenberg, sued in a British court, and after a year Mr. Gast had his film, plus hours and hours of audio, piled up in the bedrooms and hallways of his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.What he did not have was money, and so he took on a series of side projects. At one point the Hells Angels hired him to make a film that would counter their reputation as violent criminals — though they undercut their own case when several of them beat up Mr. Gast (without seriously injuring him) for refusing to give them editorial control. (The film, “Hells Angels Forever,” was widely panned.)Not all of Mr. Gast’s moneymaking efforts were film-related, or legal. One night in June 1979 he and at least four other men were waiting by an airport near Charleston, W.Va., for a plane carrying some 10 tons of marijuana, which they were smuggling from Colombia. But the aircraft crashed on landing, spilling its contents down a hillside. Mr. Gast was arrested, pleaded guilty and received a $10,000 fine and five years’ probation.In 1989, after years of struggling, Mr. Gast reconnected with Mr. Sonenberg, who had since become a successful music manager. Mr. Gast persuaded him to underwrite the rest of the production process, and even to let him use a room in his Manhattan townhouse as a studio.Mr. Gast was still intent on centering the film on the festival. But one day one of Mr. Sonenberg’s clients, the hip-hop star Wyclef Jean, was in the studio when Mr. Gast was editing a clip of Ali. Mr. Jean was enraptured, and asked to see more and more of the footage. Mr. Sonenberg and Mr. Gast decided to re-edit the film, this time focusing on the fighters, with the music festival as the background. They brought in the director Taylor Hackford, who helped edit the film and conducted interviews with Spike Lee, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer (the last two had covered the fight as reporters).Mr. Sonenberg suggested calling the film “When We Were Kings” as a nostalgic reference to the musical and sports royalty who gathered for the event. He even got Mr. Jean and his group, the Fugees, to provide music.In 1996, Mr. Gast and Mr. Sonenberg took it to the Sundance Film Festival, where they received a special jury citation and 17 distribution offers. Critics praised the film, which nearly swept the awards for documentary films that season — including, in early 1997, the Academy Award for best documentary feature.At the Oscar ceremony, Ali, who by then had developed Parkinson’s disease, rose from his seat to join Mr. Gast and Mr. Sonenberg in accepting the award. Foreman, his former nemesis, came up behind him. When Ali had trouble mounting the stage, Foreman took his arm and helped him up.Mr. Gast, right, in March 1997 after winning the Oscar for best documentary feature. With him was the executive producer, David Sonenberg, along with Ali and Foreman.Credit…Sam Mircovich/ReutersLeon Jacques Gast was born in Jersey City, N.J., on March 30, 1936. His father, Samuel Gast, worked in real estate; his mother, Madeleine (Baumann) Gast, was a homemaker.Leon played basketball at Seton Hall University and then transferred to Columbia, where he studied film and photography but left without a degree.He found a job at an advertising agency as a still photographer, and his work appeared in Vogue and Esquire. When his company opened a film division, he transferred to making commercials — his first was for Preparation H.Mr. Gast moved away from advertising in the late 1960s as he began to get work in the music industry, designing album covers and making short films. In 1972 he directed “Our Latin Thing,” a cinéma vérité profile of performers like Willie Colón, Jose Feliciano and Johnny Pacheco. Five years later he released “The Grateful Dead Movie,” a concert film co-directed with the band’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia.In 1991 Mr. Gast married Geri Spolan, who survives him, along with two sons from a previous marriage, Daniel and Clifford; a stepdaughter, Sara Marricco; and six grandchildren.After “When We Were Kings,” he made two more major documentaries: “Smash His Camera” (2010), about the celebrity photographer Ron Galella, and “Manny” (2015), about the boxer Manny Pacquiao, which Mr. Gast directed with Ryan Moore.Mr. Gast and his wife moved to Woodstock in 2005 and became involved in the Woodstock Film Festival. In 2018 he presented a cut of his latest project, a film about the history of the town.Despite his nearly 60 years in film, Mr. Gast’s career, and most likely his legacy, remains bound to the loquacious boxer he followed around Zaire in 1974 — a fact that he did not seem to regret.“When I started on it, my kids were in grade school,” he told Newsday in 1997. “I’m a grandfather now. I’m 60, and I’ve spent more than a third of my life working on this. I can’t even remember when I wasn’t thinking about it, when I wasn’t thinking about Ali.”Jack Begg contributed research.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Breakthrough Year Didn’t Come Easily

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ProjectionistKingsley Ben-Adir’s Breakthrough Year Didn’t Come EasilyPlaying Malcolm X in “One Night in Miami” is a dream realized for the British actor, but drama school didn’t prepare him for all the disappointments along the way.Ben-Adir has been the subject of awards chatter for his turn as Malcolm X.Credit…Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesFeb. 24, 2021Updated 3:43 p.m. ETOver the past year, all the pieces finally began to fit together for Kingsley Ben-Adir.Foremost among them was the British actor’s breakthrough performance as Malcolm X in Regina King’s “One Night in Miami,” in which he movingly mines the human, vulnerable side of an icon. But there were also roles as varied as Barack Obama in “The Comey Rule” and Zoë Kravitz’s love interest in “High Fidelity.” And then, the most unambiguous sign of “making it”: Ben-Adir even popped up as a character played by guest host Regé-Jean Page on the latest “Saturday Night Live.”But this sudden rush of attention, success and awards buzz is a heady development for Ben-Adir, who had begun to question everything about his approach to acting only three years ago. “I felt like I was just making it up as I was going along, sometimes hitting and sometimes missing,” the 35-year-old actor said on video chat from his home in London. “And I really got to a point where I won’t say what show it was, but I saw something I had done on television and I felt so depressed by the work. I was like, ‘Is that it? All of the work that went into it, and that’s what it was?’”Raised on a steady diet of “Inside the Actors Studio” episodes — “I’ve seen every one of those two or three times,” he said — the London-born Ben-Adir expected his passion for acting to be stoked at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which he graduated from in 2011. Instead, Ben-Adir got a stiff, technical education meant mainly to prepare him for big British stages. “The training that I had and the training that I dreamed about, they were two completely different things,” he said.Ben-Adir as Malcolm X in a scene from “One Night in Miami.”Credit…Patti Perret/Amazon StudiosThat left Ben-Adir feeling disconnected as he began to put together his career. But acting classes he began taking three years ago with the teacher Victor Villar-Hauser taught him how to better marry head and heart, and without that renewed commitment, Ben-Adir said he couldn’t have made it through “One Night in Miami.” Directed by Regina King, the film imagines a quartet of Black icons — Malcolm X, Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), Muhammad Ali (Eli Goree) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) — as they spend one tumultuous night together hashing out their issues.Ben-Adir was the last to be cast in the film after the original actor playing Malcolm dropped out, and had only 14 days to get ready before the shoot began. “It was a complete whirlwind,” he said.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why did you have so little time to prep for “One Night in Miami”?After I auditioned, I kept being promised that I was going to find out in a few days, and those few days turned into a couple of weeks. I was really losing faith that the part was going to come to me, and then we got to the 21st of December, and I said to my team, “Guys, we’re shooting on the 3rd of January. This is insane. What’s going on?” I told them, “I’m out, because I’ve been robbed of my preparation time.” That message didn’t get passed on, so when the offer came, it was a real surprise.How different would this role have been if you’d had a year to prepare for it?I would have had an encyclopedic knowledge of Malcolm that I didn’t have going in — I was learning as I was going along. But I don’t necessarily think that’s always helpful, to know too much. There’s something about not knowing and feeling unsure that’s very, very useful to being vulnerable in the moment and just having to trust in everything that’s going on around you. You should be flying into those scenes with your chin out, in full surrender. Ben-Adir on what he hadn’t been prepared for when he left drama school:  “I saw something I had done on television and I felt so depressed by the work. I was like, ‘Is that it? All of the work that went into it, and that’s what it was?’”Credit…Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesIn this case, it probably helped that you knew the other characters well: You’ve auditioned to play Sam Cooke in different projects, and you spent years attached to star in a Muhammad Ali movie for Ang Lee that fell apart.I had a huge understanding of Sam’s history, and I know Muhammad Ali’s story probably better than I do Malcolm’s — that’s how many years I spent working on Muhammad Ali. But without getting too witchy-woo about it, genuinely I feel like it was the accumulation of all the projects and experiences that I’d had up to that point really allowed me to connect with Regina in a way that was equal and collaborative. And what you have in Regina is someone who understood that it needed to be a different Malcolm, a vulnerable Malcolm. A Malcolm we haven’t seen before, a Malcolm in private with his friends.As an actor, you have to call upon that vulnerability a lot, but at the same time, doesn’t this profession require a thick skin?Yeah, absolutely. Last week, I realized that my accountant here has been [screwing] me over for six years, and it was a really big wake-up call, because I realized the business and the creative are linked and you have to be on top of both of them. It’s no good to just be like, I’m an artist. No, you need to get a real handle on the business so that you can be really free within your art. In drama school, no one expressed the importance of being sensible with money and how much impact that has on you creatively.How much impact does it have when you get your hopes up for a big project and it falls through? That Ang Lee film was supposed to be your breakthrough, and then it didn’t happen.I feel like 95 percent of this job is dealing with disappointments and getting your energy up only to be let down. Something fell through last week that I’ve been working on and off for a year, but I made that work about me and my journey as an actor, and I learned something about myself through that process. Yes, it hurt, and you have to cope, but I feel like working with Ang for those two years was a major lesson in how you do not get your hopes up about anything until you’ve wrapped, it’s edited and it’s out.You go, “That door’s closed, another one will open. Show gets canceled, that means you’re available for other stuff.” Lots of people I’ve come up with through the years aren’t able to do that, and you’ll become resentful, bitter, and depressed. I feel real disappointment sometimes, but the bigger the disappointments, the better the highs will be when you get them.If this success had happened when you graduated from drama school, how different would it feel?I don’t think I would have been ready for this when I was 24, I really don’t.For years Ben-Adir was set to play Muhammad Ali for an Ang Lee film, but that project is no longer on.Credit…Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesBut I’m sure that at 24, you felt ready for this, right?More than ready! I was convinced that I should have been walking out of that drama-school building on to playing No. 2 with Brad Pitt. That’s not what happened, but I’m so glad it didn’t, because I know a lot of people who got huge opportunities too early, and they’re not around anymore.The first time I went to L.A., I was scared away and I didn’t go back for four years because I just wasn’t ready. I hadn’t done enough work on the dialect, and I had some really bad experiences with being stopped halfway through auditions because it wasn’t working. I was really lonely — L.A., if you don’t know people, can be really isolating — and I had no money and a terrible manager who ignored me the whole time I was there.So I was like, “Let me just go home.” And then I stayed onstage for a few years and let it happen more naturally. All those small parts where I got to be on set watching Brenda Blethyn, Mark Rylance, Michael Fassbender … you take bits.You’ve said before that part of the reason you came to L.A. in the first place is because your options were limited as a Black actor in the U.K. After the year you’ve had, is that changing at all?Yeah, massively. It’s hard to talk about offers and stuff without it sounding arrogant, but in the last few weeks since the movie’s come out, there’s 16 scripts. It’s really confusing, and it takes you a second. I was like, This is what you dreamed about. This is it.I’m so grateful, man. Yesterday, I had a teaching session at 9 on Zoom, and then I had a singing lesson, four hours of script reading, and two movies that I had to watch. How lucky am I? I really don’t need much. My agents hate me saying it, but I know how to live off $200 a week. I don’t want a big car, although I’d like a garden one day. But I am turned on and excited by the possibilities of my life, which is to be with the people I love, traveling and seeing the world, and then making cool movies.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘One Night in Miami’ Review: After the Big Fight, a War of Words

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storycritic’s pick‘One Night in Miami’ Review: After the Big Fight, a War of WordsA 1964 meeting of Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown is the subject of Regina King’s riveting directorial debut.A moment in time: A scene from Regina King’s “One Night in Miami.” Kingsley Ben-Adir, left, as Malcolm X, taking a photo of Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.).Credit…Patti Perret/Amazon StudiosJan. 14, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETOne Night in MiamiNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Regina KingDramaR1h 54mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.On Feb. 25, 1964, at the Convention Hall in Miami Beach, Fla., Cassius Clay — not yet known as Muhammad Ali — defeated Sonny Liston to become the heavyweight champion of the world. That’s hardly a spoiler, and the fight isn’t the main event in “One Night in Miami,” Regina King’s debut feature as a director. The movie is about what happens after the final bell, when Clay and three men who witnessed the fight gather for a low-key after-party that turns into an impromptu seminar on fame, political action and the obligations of Black celebrities in a time of crisis.The host is Malcolm X, played by Kingsley Ben-Adir less as a confident, charismatic orator than as a smart, anxious man facing a crisis of his own. We’re reminded in a few early scenes of the rift opening up between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad, his mentor and the leader of the Nation of Islam. Frustrated by Muhammad’s autocratic dogmatism and appalled at his sexual predations, Malcolm sees Clay (Eli Goree), who is gravitating toward Islam, as “the ace up my sleeve” — a prominent ally who will help him break away from the Nation.[embedded content]Joining the boxer and the minister in a modest suite at the Hampton House motel are the Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and the singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.). Each is at the peak of his career, and also at something of a crossroads. Brown, increasingly fed up with the ways Black athletes are exploited and commodified, has his eye on Hollywood. Cooke’s most recent effort to attract a white audience — a gig at the Copacabana in New York — was met with a chilly reception.Malcolm tries to push Cooke in another direction, arguing that the job of successful Black artists isn’t to court white approval but to use their fame and talent to advance the cause of their own people. The dramatic nerve center of the film, adapted by Kemp Powers from his own play, is the quarrel between Malcolm and Cooke, who have known each other for a long time and whose intimacy is laced with rivalry and resentment. It’s a complex and subtle debate that implicates Clay and Brown, and that reverberates forward in history and the later actions of all four.Cooke, who drives a red sports car, smokes cigarettes and carries a flask in his jacket, stands in obvious temperamental contrast to Malcolm, who is both the straight arrow and the nerd of the group, offering them vanilla ice cream and showing off his new Rolleiflex camera. Among the pleasures of “One Night in Miami” is how it allows us to imagine we’re glimpsing the private selves of highly public figures, exploring aspects of their personalities that their familiar personas were partly constructed to obscure.This is also, I think, an important argument of Powers’s script: History isn’t made by icons, but by human beings. Fame, which provides each of them with opportunities and temptations, comes with a cost. The fine print of racism is always part of the contract. What Cooke, Brown and Clay share is a desire for freedom — a determination to find independence from the businesses and institutions that seek to control them and profit from their talents.Malcolm, who faces different constraints, urges them to connect their own freedom with something larger, an imperative that each of the others, in his own way, acknowledges. Malcolm’s manner can be didactic, but “One Night in Miami” is anything but. Instead of a group biopic or a ready-made costume drama, it’s an intellectual thriller, crackling with the energy of ideas and emotions as they happen. Who wouldn’t want to be in that room? And there we are.What we witness may not be exactly what happened. I don’t know if Malcolm X really traveled with a copy of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” in his luggage so that he could make a point about protest music by dropping the needle on “Blowin’ in the Wind.” There are aspects of the characters’ lives that are noted in passing but not really explored — notably Cooke’s and Brown’s treatment of women. Malcolm’s wife, Betty Shabazz (Joaquina Kalukango), appears in a few scenes, as does Barbara Cooke (Nicolette Robinson), but they are marginal to a story that is preoccupied with manhood. Still, there is enough authenticity and coherence in the writing and the performances to make the film a credible representation of its moment, and King’s direction makes it more than that.An actress of singular poise and intensity — see “Watchmen,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” and, going back a little further, “Poetic Justice” — she demonstrates those traits behind the camera as well. There are a few boxing and musical scenes, but most of the action in “One Night in Miami” is talk. King’s attention to it as nimble and unpredictable as the dialogue itself, and creates an atmosphere of restlessness and spontaneity, that nervous, exhilarating feeling that this night could go anywhere.Clay, the youngest of the four, is the one who most vividly embodies that sense of possibility. Goree captures the familiar rasp and melody of the voice, and also the champion’s wit and exuberance. There haven’t been many people who could match his giddy, unapologetic delight in being himself, and Clay can look a bit callow next to Cooke and Brown, who have logged more years and paid more dues in the world of celebrity. But Goree shows that Clay, as playful as he could be, was also serious and brave, qualities that would come to the fore a few years later when he risked his career and his freedom to oppose the Vietnam War.The seeds of that action and others, this movie suggests, were planted that night. The shadows of a complicated, tragic future hover over the motel furniture. Within a year of that night, Sam Cooke and Malcolm X would both be killed, one in a Los Angeles motel, the other in a Harlem ballroom. (Only Malcolm’s death is mentioned in the film). The later chapters in Muhammad Ali’s life, and in Brown’s, are part of the crazy, contentious record of our time.And “One Night in Miami,” at first glance, might be taken as a minor anecdote plucked from that larger narrative. It doesn’t make grand statements about race, politics, sports or music. It’s just a bunch of guys talking — bantering, blustering, dropping their defenses and opening their hearts. But the substance of their talk is fascinating, and their arguments echo powerfully in the present. This is one of the most exciting movies I’ve seen in quite some time.One Night in Miami.Rated R. Smoking and Swearing. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Amazon.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More