For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this excerpt from our interview with screenwriter Kemp Powers for his latest feature One Night in Miami from Backstory’s brand new issue #42!
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Current Cinema
One Night in Miami
Kemp Powers on imagining a real-life hotel hangout between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown.
By Danny Munso
Kemp Powers resisted Hollywood for a while. Not long after the 2013 debut of his first play, One Night in Miami…, the writer was offered a chance to sell the rights to the one-act work and have it turned into a movie, but at the time he declined. That play, fictionalizing the real-life meeting between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown, went on to win a slew of awards and be performed in countries including the U.K. and South Africa. And every few months thereafter, producers Jess and Keith Calder would check in with Powers to see if he had changed his mind on having his play translated to the big screen. Finally in 2017, Powers agreed—but only if he could be the one to adapt it. He’d forayed into the world of screenwriting on CBS’ Star Trek Discovery and thought a film version could actually hold some merit. “The idea of adapting it didn’t seem as bad because I started to think about how I would go about doing it,” Powers says. “When they first approached me in 2013, that meant optioning the play for someone else to adapt, and that really concerned me. I didn’t know if another writer would key in on what made the story special.”
That story mostly takes place in a hotel room on the night of February 25, 1964, in the aftermath of heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay—who that year would become Muhammad Ali upon becoming a convert to the Nation of Islam—taking the world title from champ Sonny Liston. Clay is there to hang out with his three friends, all powerhouses in their own realms. And while the meeting really happened, the beauty of Powers’ work is his fictionalization of the dialogue. The play and film each explore the weight that each man carries of being a vital Black voice in a world that is changing before their eyes. It is also a night of great change for all involved: Clay is on the precipice of changing his entire public and private persona by becoming a Muslim, Cooke is about to pen his most enduring song and begin to use his powerful voice to better the world, Brown is about to put his storied NFL career in the rearview mirror, and Malcolm X is toiling in direct conflict with the Nation of Islam and coming to terms with the fact that his life is in imminent danger. (He would in fact be assassinated the following February.)
One of the reasons Powers insisted on being the adaptor of his own material is the lingering voices he had in his head of notes he received while getting notes on his play early on. “People kept telling me I was wasting this great opportunity of having Muhammad Ali in a room,” he says. “They said this play should be all about him. The other guys aren’t as interesting.” The writer vehemently disagreed. While Ali is certainly a towering figure in American history, the others had major roles to play in both the civil rights movement and in current Black culture. “They didn’t understand that this was Cassius Clay. He’s not Muhammad Ali yet. In fact, on this night the most famous guy in the room is Sam Cooke, followed closely by Jim Brown. What this was is a younger brother [Clay] debating with his older brothers what he should do with his future. These men all pushed each other to be better.”
Powers tackled the adaptation in the same manner as any other screenwriter would: He read the play. “I hadn’t read it in a few years,” he says of his beloved stage work. “I just treated it like a piece of source material in the same way I would have if someone handed me a book and asked what my take on that would be. I used that same mindset when looking at my own play.” A self-described hardcore outliner, Powers always starts there. “I probably spend more time on an outline or a beat sheet than a lot of other writers. I really like to have an idea of where the hell I’m going.” The play takes place entirely in the hotel room so the obvious place for a film to jump in would be the events leading up to the men walking into that room. Powers saw the additional element as essential to fleshing out the story. “That was the first thing that became evident after I read the play. This is a story about a crucial night in the lives of these four men. So my first question to myself was why. What have these guys gone through to make this such an important night for all four of them? That immediately took me out of the hotel room, and I started writing some of the pivotal things in their lives that put them in this vulnerable place. That’s how the idea of the four-part prologue came up.”
The film’s first 30 minutes show each of the four protagonists getting knocked down in some way. In the case of Clay (played by Eli Goree), it’s literal: The cocky prizefighter is in the ring toying around with British heavyweight Henry Cooper, and though he ends up winning the match on a TKO, Cooper momentarily knocks out Clay. For Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), we see the beginnings of him worrying about his own safety and that of his wife and children. We first meet Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) as he’s bombing at New York’s famed Copacabana by trying to perform songs he thinks the all-white audience wants to hear. But it’s our first encounter with Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) that is the standout. The footballer returns to his birthplace, St. Simons Island in Georgia, and visits the home of family friend Mr. Carlton (Beau Bridges). Carlton couldn’t be more praising of Brown, yet when Brown offers to help Carlton move a bureau in his house, Carlton leaves him on the porch while calmly saying, “Sorry, Jim, but you know we don’t allow n*****s in the house. Brown is as stunned at the casual racism as we in the audience are.
Powers chose that stunning encounter as the moment we meet Brown deliberately and for many reasons. “Jim didn’t really have any public failures leading up to that night in 1964,” he says of the NFL legend who had just come off a record-setting season and had just acted in the first film in his transition to Hollywood actor. “Jim was on a winning streak. He had no public stumbles like the others. Sam really did bomb at the Copa. Cassius really did almost get his ass knocked out by Henry Cooper. But it was really important to show each of them taking a loss of some sort before that night.” And so he chose this moment, which Brown recounts to others via dialogue in the play. The film was a way to show the events—based on a real-life story Brown wrote about in one of his autobiographies—visually. “I remember when I read about that I said, Okay, this is a vulnerability we never see from Jim Brown, I thought it was important for it to appear in the film. Each of them is having a stumble, and though Jim hadn’t had any public physical stumbles, this was the perfect emotional stumble for him to have.”
Like what you’ve read? Continue reading the rest of the huge full article in Backstory Magazine issue #42 to find out more about Kemp’s process for bringing One Night in Miami to the screen including the crafting of some of the film’s most important scenes. Plus, read the entire screenplay as well!
You can also read our article on Soul which once again interviews Kemp on co-writing/co-directing the Pixar film alongside co-writer/co-director Pete Docter and co-writer Mike Jones as well.
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