Yep, I live near Fredericksburg, VA, and we got hit by about 8-10" of heavy, wet snow. Trees down everywhere and power out for about 33 hours. Some of my coworkers are still without power. I-95 is still closed. So yes, missed yesterday's post. But all good here. Long, cold day and a half cooking over Sterno like a train hobo, but we all got through. Thanks, all, for the best wishes. So here's yesterday's post, which feels somehow strangely apropos to the situation in a way I can't quite explain.
Chapter 13, The Lion Gets its Teeth Back (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Where Did I Go Right? (or: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead), by Bernie Brillstein (with Cheryl Henson)
So, bringing Spike Lee on board helped the MGM Lion get its bite back, but by 1991 I was increasingly starting to think that it had bitten off more than I could chew. His
Jungle Fever had gone well for us, $44 million against a modest $14 million budget, despite the controversy of the interracial relationship plot. Looking back, it’s crazy to believe how that was such a big deal back then…things have come so far in some ways, even if not in others, but I digress.
But in the fall of ’91 Spike showed up in my office with a proposal/request: “Bernie, I’d like you to take over
Malcolm X from Warner.”
Oh boy, where to start?
Malcolm X was a controversial figure back in his heyday in the ‘60s and ‘70s. A lot of white people saw him at the time as the anti-Martin Luther King, the angry, violent counterpoint to MLK’s peaceful ministry of acceptance and forgiveness. Back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, in the face of increasing inner-city anger as the recession hit there hardest of all, Malcolm X had increasingly become a folk hero, and “X” hats were suddenly a thing. Warner had picked up the biopic and tossed it around Development Hell for decades. I remembered the uproar when they announced that Norman Jewison was slated to direct. And now Spike wanted MGM to pick it up.
“Isn’t he the guy who hated white people?” I asked.
If looks could kill, my head would have exploded on the spot. “It’s much more nuanced than that,” Spike said, flatly. He tossed a well-dogeared paperback of the
Autobiography of Malcolm X on my desk. “Read it for yourself, Bernie, then tell me this isn’t a life’s story worth telling.”
Ok, challenge accepted. I read the book. I met with him again.
“I get it,” I told him, looking him in the eye. “It’s about rebirth.”
He smiled. “Yea.”
Yes, it turns out that Malcolm X had many lives. He started as a country boy, became a hep cat in the big city, became a small-time crook, became a prisoner, became a Muslim believer in prison, became a controversial spiritual and political leader, and then went on his Hadj and embraced a more peaceful, inclusive humanitarian outlook and started preaching love and tolerance. So, naturally, that’s when he got shot.
We got down to business. Spike had essentially seized the production from Jewison. He’d challenged Warner to hire a Black director, so they hired
him. Jewison was frankly relieved, as he knew he’d be walking on eggshells. Even so, Spike got a ration of shit from Amiri Baraka and others for being a “Buppie”, whatever the hell that meant. So Spike took over the Warner production, but they refused to give him the budget he requested, so Francis Ford Coppola advised him to get the film “pregnant” by producing things until the studio had invested so much in sunk cost that they felt compelled to follow through with the larger budget needed. Even then, he’d sunk $2 million of his own $3 million paycheck on the picture. It still wasn’t enough.
“They’re going to take the film from me,” he said. He meant the bond company, which was on the verge of taking possession of everything and ending production. They wanted him to cut it down to two hours, fifteen minutes, where his envisioned cut was over three hours[1]. “I’ve got half the Black folks in Hollywood eager to pay the rest of the cost,” he said. “But I need to do the film I think needs to be made, not Warner, not the bond company, and not you, Bernie.”
It was a serious risk. Even beyond the standard controversy surrounding the man himself, race was on the verge of an explosion in the early 1990s. Just earlier that summer a young black man had been shot and killed by a Jewish man in a store in Brooklyn. To hear the one side say it, it was self-defense during a robbery. To hear the other side say it, it was a racially-motivated murder. Suddenly the borough of Brooklyn was in flames and the unrest threatened to spill over into Queens, the Bronx, and even Manhattan[2]. Spike had spoken out about it. Sam Fuller snapped back, and soon the two of them were back to lighting up the studios with their arguments.
Well, they apparently fought their way to a mutual understanding, because soon the two of them were off to New York, together, to appeal for calm and justice all around.
An old Jew and a young Black man walk into a riot. Stop me if you heard this one.
Anyway, the two were on the border of friendship at this point. Maybe past it. Whatever the case, Sam was lobbying me to take up the picture too. They convinced Jim to support it.
But the truth is that they didn’t need to convince me. I was on board. I called up my contacts at Warner Bros. and we worked out a deal. MGM would take over production and financing for the remainder of the production, we’d split the costs of distribution, which eased the minds of the bond company, and worst-case scenario we’d all have a neat tax write-off for the next couple of years and maybe some statuettes. Maybe they could help us out in a future production.
When the press got word that Disney was taking over a
Malcolm X biopic, they had a field day. People on both sides of the Malcolm X legacy were outraged, either because we were somehow “polluting” Disney (even though it was an MGM picture!) by dealing with a controversial figure or because we were making a mockery of Malcolm X. You can’t win some days.
There were some modest protests and a few political cartoons and some outraged speeches, but the controversy passed as newer outrages appeared to grab America’s goldfish-like attention span, like the Cosby Trial.
All said, the most lasting legacy of the controversy was a spate of graffiti that started in New York and soon began appearing in LA and cities the world over. It featured Mickey Mouse as Malcolm X. Mickey X, I guess?! To this day I’m not entirely certain whether they were painted appreciatingly, ironically, insultingly, or some weird combination of these.
But anyway, Spike came through with pretty much every major African American star[3] from Eddie Murphy to Oprah to the Artist at the Time Formerly Known as Prince signed on to help fund the film through to the end. They didn’t even ask for a share of anything. They just wanted to see it screen. We gave them all cameos anyway.
By the time we took over production, the film was already half in the can, but some of the more expensive and challenging shots had yet to be made. We had to hire an all-Muslim crew, for example, in order to film the scenes in Mecca, not to mention we had to get special permission just to film there, period. I have to say, being a Jew in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s was a strange experience, and I was sure that I’d be marked for trouble, but it turns out Spike (Christian) and I were for the most part welcomed as “People of the Book” by the people we met. I took the opportunity to visit Jerusalem and the Western Wall while I was there in the region. I’m hardly the most devout member of the tribe, but damn it, it was a moving experience.
The final cut of
Malcom X was over three hours. An epic length drama with a mostly Black cast. Made by a director-writer-producer as a passion project. With a long and troubled production. Passed from on studio to another. To hear the usual Hollywood know-it-alls, it should have failed miserably.
And yet when
Malcolm X screened in December of ’92 to great critical acclaim, to the happy surprise of us all it became a moderate success, making back double its ultimately $35 million budget. Maybe it would have done better without Steve’s picture as competition, but who knows? After heavy lobbying, we got Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, and Denzel naturally got nominated for Best Actor, but, well, you already know what happened with Steve’s big movie.
In the long run,
Malcolm X is seen by many as Spike’s Magnum Opus. In a better world, maybe it would have swept the Oscars. It should have gotten at least one, in my opinion. But Oscars or not,
Malcom X is remembered as a great moment in cinema history. And even with all the insanity that started two weeks later when Steve’s movie debuted, I’m glad that MGM got to play a part in it.
[1] All in accordance with our timeline so far.
[2] A similar thing happened in 1991 in our timeline in Crown Heights after a car that was a part of a Rabbi’s funeral hit two young black children. The proximate cause of that is butterflied, but random butterflies alone will not end years of mutual distrust exacerbated by economic challenges and a lack of opportunity.
[3] Notably
not among the big-name stars involved in this timeline is Bill Cosby, who’s money is going to high priced lawyers as he attempts to fight off numerous sexual assault accusations.
