Duke’s opinion was that we couldn’t allow people on board if they were just looking to take advantage; he also believed in
having an African American in the process, if that person was among the best producers, screenwriters, or directors; somebody
who knew how to make a film. He felt we needed to make sure “Dr. King” was portrayed strongly. He kept saying, “People need
to get his full impact. Many think he was just some kind of wimp when in fact he was a revolutionary with a transcendent ability
to move audiences and individuals through the power of his cause, his presence, the power of his speaking ability and action.”
He got it. No question in my mind Bill Duke got it. I was sure he could get the ball rolling, but he was clear he’d need backing.
No knock against him. That was our challenge.
Producer George Jackson was passionate as well. In recent years, he died of a heart attack. We met at a restaurant on Sunset.
I was beginning to know my way around L.A., and I was beginning to like it. First of all, nobody seemed to recognize me, or,
if they did, they didn’t stop or stare or point or have some hustle they wanted to run by me. I liked being anonymous under
the azure skies of Southern California. This was agreeing with me big time. I mentioned this to Michelle and to George as
we sat down to lunch. George smiled. “That’s the way it happens,” he said. “You get bit.” He seemed to have a passion for
the project. He and his partner, Doug McHenry, were involved in a number of films during this period—
Disorderlies, Jason’s Lyric,
several others. We met Doug later; this first time it was just George Jackson, and he was reverent about Daddy. He said,
“It’s got to be done. It’s a powerful film.” He even talked about the importance of telling it right: every detail, from scenery,
set design, the works. He spoke in the curious grammar of film, which I must admit mystified me somewhat, but I had Michelle
break it down into English later. George got technical, down to the nuts and bolts of re-creating certain scenes, texture.
He was excited about the prospect.
We walked away from Bill, George, and Doug with possibilities. Here were some people who would be interested, but we hadn’t
met anyone with the ability to green-light a project. Without a script, we didn’t have a project. They all said, “We’d have
to get a studio behind it.”
So we ended up meeting with a couple of people in the studio system as well, among them Ashley Boone at MGM, now deceased.
We were trying to get advice on how to pull together a project. Everybody seemed positive from both the studio side and the
creative side. They all seemed pumped. We met with HBO Films; as I’ve mentioned, Michelle was once Director of Business Affairs
at HBO, so she knew people there. We were thinking, “Let’s not restrict ourselves, talk to everybody,” in case HBO was looking
at that time to ratchet up their feature film division, and we felt like maybe we could get kind of both angles, cable TV
audiences and feature-release quality.
Everybody was interested, intrigued, but the ones who asked the hard questions would say, “What is there really new you can
tell us about Dr. King’s story? Haven’t we heard it all?” That was their feeling. We said, “No, you really haven’t.” The public
has often seen only a very one-dimensional character and not the full three-dimensional person. Particularly in African Americans’
stories and lives, we don’t portray them as human beings with feelings and emotions and complexities of humor, pathos, conflict.
When I read my mother’s book
My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr.,
I was in tears when she talked about what she went through in making a decision to come south after they both went to school
and met in Boston, to come back to the land of their ancestors’ struggle, in a time of segregation, knowing they’d have to
struggle, knowing what they’d be giving up, things they shared as a couple. They were well-rounded, talented people who were
going to have to come back to a segregated South and give up what could have been a life of comfort, of learning, of travel.
To me, there are other stories within the bigger story that need to be revealed. That’s where
Gandhi
or
Malcolm X
showed that kind of epic range. My mother and I met with Sir Richard Attenborough, who had directed
Gandhi.
He felt a feature biopic about my father should be done by an African-American director. He was also adamant that though
the screen-writer didn’t have to be black, the story had to be well-written and original.
We did meet with Denzel Washington and his production company head, an extremely observant and competent woman named Debra
Chase. We met at his office, on the Columbia lot. Debra and he thought this was a good idea. He seemed interested. I think
what intrigued him was showing another side of the man. A lot of people saw Washington as Malcolm at the time; a juxtaposition
of Malcolm and my father was often portrayed as two opposites. However, I felt Malcolm and my father bore the same frustrations,
had similar dilemmas, longings, obstacles, and desires for their people to be truly free. But due to the circumstances of
their lives, one approached it differently; sometimes you do things not so much because of the emotion of just getting the
anguish out, but because you want to be effective, and my father was at root a Gandhian, with nods to Thoreau’s
Civil Disobedience
and Reinhold Niebuhr.
Somehow, I must’ve said something that resonated with Denzel—it could have been merely the challenge of portraying both men,
getting lost in both characters. I can still see his face changing, him saying, “Yeah,” like he was getting it. People are
amazed if they see the story generationally, my father and grandfather’s relationship, where my grandfather was personally
a forceful man who would tolerate no mistreatment of himself, yet he was a product of his era. Meanwhile, my father was utterly
nonviolent, and yet confrontational of the dilemma. He overturned a system with which his father had bargained. The father
was converted by his son, based on the proof being in the pudding. My grandfather observed my father’s method, saw how it
worked. It actually was effective. He had to be convinced; once he was convinced, he tried it and again it worked. It may
have saved my grandfather’s sanity after nearly everything he loved was killed. He might not have survived the tragedies if
he hadn’t changed. They would’ve eaten him up inside; you can’t give to others when you’re preoccupied. Grand-daddy saw the
potential for hypocrisy within Christianity, being a minister of the gospel. At some point you’ve got to be accountable to
what you say you believe. The difference between a great person and somebody who appears great is, one lives it and the other
talks it. My father talked and lived it.
Denzel said, “Yeah, I hear you.” At first I thought he’d be opposed, wouldn’t care for the whole idea, because he had just
portrayed Malcolm X, so maybe it would have been tough for him to play this different character from the same moment in history.
But he wasn’t. Maybe he looked at it as a challenge for him as an actor. Michelle seemed to think that was key for interesting
him in a role, particularly this one, where the actor says to himself, “I can reinvent a character people think they know,
but don’t.” Actors enjoy that, Michelle said. I think also he was intrigued by the possibility of being on the production
side. So I think it was more than just him as an artist/actor on this project. Debra sat and listened. I’ve no idea if they
hashed it out between them later. I could see that the idea resonated with both of them somewhat, but I didn’t know how much.
Michelle did most of the talking in the meetings. We were hoping to put together a “package” as Michelle termed it, with a
producer, director, writer, and star who could “open the picture.” Not just focus on one aspect, but consider the entire “package.”
Michelle was knowledgeable because of her background in the industry; she had a sense of how you get things “packaged.”
We wanted a “studio project” rather than an “independent project,” but what we did not want was to go into “development hell.”
On the question of whether the director should be African American, to me, art is art no matter who does it. There are some
people who can better relate to certain experiences, but I don’t think it’s the skin color that enables you to relate so much
as your heart and your head—like Maya Angelou says, everybody who’s your skin folk ain’t necessarily your kin folk.
“Black” is cultural, a state of mind, particularly when you use it in the abstract context, and not about skin color; which
led me to believe, then, that it did not have to be a black person who directed, because if it’s a state of mind, and cultural,
then anybody who subscribes should qualify.
So it followed that if Steven Spielberg got it the way Bill Duke got it then it wouldn’t matter. Competence is what matters.
Passion. Shared experience. Spielberg proved with
Schindler’s List
that he could relate to human suffering. So I was having these kinds of conversations with Michelle, whether or not we should
look for the right kind of non-African-American filmmaker, when she interrupted me.
“We may have him already. I’ve booked us another sit-down. With Oliver Stone.”
The first Oliver Stone meeting occurred in the spring of 1992. I was spending enormous amounts of time in L.A., taking meetings.
JFK
was about to come out. We went to Stone’s office in Santa Monica, in a building he shared at the time with Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It was Michelle, Janet Yang, who ran Oliver’s production company, Oliver, and myself.
Right away, he kept looking at my face.
Stone was one of the people we’d heard had been talking about doing a King film, but at that time it was assumed it would
be similar to
JFK
—more on the assassination, the controversial aspect. Which, to be honest with you, at that time, we were not necessarily
interested in. If Stone wanted to do a controversial assassination film, fine, but let that be kind of in the aftermath; let’s
get something definitive, get a “biopic” out there. Dealing with the assassination is aftermath.
I wasn’t thinking about the assassination at the time. Hadn’t dealt with the assassination myself, really, not deep inside.
I tried to act as if it was just a business decision, but it was still too painful for me to discuss as film fodder to be
callously manipulated. First we need to know who the man was before we start dealing with why he got killed. That was my position.
JFK
is a perfect example of what we wanted to avoid. Not that it wasn’t a fine movie, with great performances by Tommy Lee Jones
and Kevin Costner, just to name two of dozens, really. But in Stone’s movie, the president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the one
who called my mother when she was pregnant with me to offer his sympathies about my father being unjustly jailed—he wasn’t
even a character in the movie that bore his name.
All we saw was the few seconds of what Abraham Zapruder shot with an 8mm camera.
Then there was the reaction to that movie. It’s almost as if people, otherwise intelligent people, became like the three “hear
no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” monkeys, refusing to acknowledge there is evil in this world. Judging from the critical
reaction to Oliver Stone’s
JFK,
you’d have thought it was Stone who’d assassinated Kennedy.
Conspiracy theories bother people. They bother me. They bother most right-thinking people: we don’t want to hear it, we don’t
want to believe it, we just want to live free and safe and pursue happiness, and get by. That’s all we want to do, that’s
all we want to know. As far as my father’s murder was concerned, at the time, we thought James Earl Ray was probably the shooter,
with help; we had no issue with it otherwise, and we surely weren’t looking for any smoking gun. We mostly accepted the verdict
and the official story, except we felt they had probably left out some other players. But accepting that James Earl Ray was
the trigger-man—no problem with that. So we weren’t seeing Stone for any other reason than we heard he was interested in doing
a film about my father. We wanted to kind of see what was under his fingernails—find out what he was talking about in that
regard.
When we met him the first time, he was sketchy. He said he didn’t know what type of film he wanted to do. He seemed vague;
he was interested, but he was not ready to commit; he was involved in other projects.
Nixon
was one of the films he was working on, and maybe by then he was finishing
Natural Born Killers.
He had a lot of stuff “in the can” or “on the drawing board” or “in development.” He made a comment when I was leaving, something
along the lines of “Have you ever considered playing your father? You look so much like him.” I just said, “No I haven’t;
I’m not an actor, but I take it as a compliment.” Little did he know that I’d been avoiding playing Daddy all my life. That
was the extent of the meeting.
It turned out Oliver Stone really didn’t need much of a Martin Luther King character in the movie he had in his head—if he
had a vision for it in his head. He wanted to make a point that had little to do with the point we wanted to make. That’s
the way we left it. Friendly.
Michelle and I began to feel we had exhausted our options at that time. We decided to put the film idea on the shelf for a
while and move on.
We sort of forgot the film idea for that time and moved on for a while.
It must have been 1995 when we learned that Oliver Stone was going ahead with a Martin Luther King, Jr., film project, and
hiring a writer to create a script. I was immediately concerned because he hadn’t contacted us, hadn’t invited us to be a
part of it. We didn’t know what to do, so we requested a meeting. Oliver was not in this meeting; he sent his producing partner
at the time, Danny Halstead, who co-produced
Nixon
with Stone. Danny was not a suit. Creative, he seemed as though he’d be a cool guy in the long run; initially he was just
following Oliver’s orders. They were playing hardball: “We’re doing this and we don’t need your permission or support.” We
wanted them to understand it was important for us to be a part of the process. People assume incorrectly that Dr. King is
fair use, public domain. No, he isn’t. Plus, most important, he was my father.