On the night of February 25, 1964, four of the most influential African American men of the era came together in a hotel in Brownsville, Florida, to celebrate Cassius Clay’s victory as heavyweight champion of the world, earlier that night.
One Night in Miami is a fictional account of a meeting in 1964 between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke.There is a photo, showing Malcolm X holding a camera and smiling, just about to take a picture from behind the bar of a cafe. Seated at the bar on the right is a beaming Clay in black bowtie - 22 years old, and the new ‘champeen’. He would soon announce his conversion to Islam and a change of name to Muhammad Ali.
That meeting is just too good an artefact for a writer to ignore, especially a playwright. Whether it might work as a film is another matter.Acclaimed actress Regina King makes her feature film directorial debut on One Night In Miami.Kemp Powers’ play about this night premiered in Los Angeles in 2013, to much acclaim. It was his debut and ran 90 minutes, in one act.
This is King’s first feature, after a stellar career as an actor, and confining the action to the room increases the pressure, as these four powerful men discuss politics, race and power, but it means the film can never escape its origins. Those scenes in the preamble show us what King might have done with the film, had she been prepared to risk it. That she wasn’t is partly practical, because keeping scenes in a controlled setting is cheaper.
Much of the conflict flows from Malcolm’s anger with Cooke: his pretty love songs are doing nothing for the cause. Cooke responds that making money in music, employing other artists and selling records, does plenty for the only cause that matters, economic equality. In the context of the last year in American politics, the film has plenty to digest, even though it was written before the era of Black Lives Matter.
ptbyrnes Looking forward to this!
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