Bringing Malcolm to the Masses: The Long Journey from Page to Screen

Abstract

The effort to adapt The Autobiography of Malcolm X into a feature film lasted a quarter of a century and serves as a window through which Hollywood's relationship with Black spectators, artists, and subject matter can be examined. Preceding the controversy surrounding the production of Spike Lee's biopic Malcolm X (1992), this essay looks at the numerous failed attempts at adapting the Malcolm/Haley text and places each within the context of the changing film industry and African American popular culture. Charting the rise and fall of the blaxploitation cycle and the resulting erasure of African Americans from the cinematic frame in the 1980s, the failure to bring Malcolm X to the big screen can be rooted in the rationale of Hollywood production strategies and how they relate to African Americans as both subject and audience. The eventual realization of the project in 1992 is evidence of the cultural capital of Spike Lee individually and the hip hop generation as a whole, with Hollywood reconsidering the profitability of African Americans as both cultural producers and consumers.

Keywords:

• African American cinema
• blaxploitation
• hip hop
• Malcolm X
• motion picture industry

Notes

For a good history and analysis of Spike Lee's push to direct and complete Malcolm X, see Anna Everett's essay “‘Spike, Don't Mess Malcolm Up': Courting Controversy and Control in Malcolm X,” in Paula Massood, ed., The Spike Lee Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2008).

David Bradley, “Malcolm's Mythmaking,” Transition 56 (1992): 22.

For a groundbreaking use of political economy in African American film studies, see Ed Guerrero's Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1993).

For a full discussion of the end of the Production Code and the birth of the ratings system, see Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960–1969 (Berkeley: University of California, 2001).

Black playwright Clifford Mason's scathing New York Times editorial “Why Does White America Love Sidney Poitier So?” (September 10, 1967) best expressed the growing divide between Poitier's screen integrationist image and the Black Power movement.

With The Learning Tree, Gordon Parks became the first African American director to be credited on a Hollywood studio film. Stop was directed by Bill Gunn and Cotton Comes to Harlem by Ossie Davis.

FBI Memo, March 26, 1968, http://foia.fbi.gov/malcolmx/malcolmx18.pdf.

James Baldwin, “The Devil Finds Work” (1976), in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 550.

David Ansen, “The Battle for Malcolm X,” Newsweek (August 26, 1991).

Hughes cowrote the screenplay to RKO's Way Down South (1939, Bernard Vorhaus), whereas Richard Wright played the role of Bigger Thomas in the independently made adaptation of his novel Native Son (1951, Pierre Chenal), a coproduction between U.S. and Argentinean studios. For more on Thurman's fruitless efforts in Hollywood see Phyllis Klotman, “The Black Writer in Hollywood, Circa 1930: The Case of Wallace Thurman,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993).

James Baldwin, “No Name In the Street” (1972), in Collected Essays, 358.

Spike Lee and Ralph Wiley, By Any Means Necessary: the Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X (New York: Hyperion, 1992), 24.

FBI Memo.

Lomax wrote When Word Is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World (Cleveland: World, 1963), and later published To Kill a Black Man: The Shocking Parallel in the Lives of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1986).

For a detailed analysis, see Christopher Sieving's “The Concessions of Nat Turner,” The Velvet Light Trap 61 (Spring 2008).

FBI Memo.

Jesse Algeron Rhines, Black Film/White Money (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 44.

See David. A Cook, “Exploitation and Allusion,” in Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

For a history of documentary aesthetics and reception see Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Continuum, 2005).

Bernard Weinraub, “A Movie Producer Remembers the Human Side of Malcolm X,” New York Times, November 23, 1992.

David Puttnam, Movies and Money (New York: Vintage, 1997), 214.

Willingham had been noted by both Spike Lee and David Bradley as one of the writers to work on the project, although there is no indication as to when exactly he was employed by Worth. It is certain that he was employed somewhere between Perl's death in 1972 and Bradley's hiring in 1984, and Spike Lee notes that Willingham's script was completed before David Mamet was hired to write a script, meaning before 1978. See Lee and Wiley, By Any Means Necessary, 24.

Michael Schultz, personal interview, October 8, 2006.

Samuel G. Freedman, “Others Had Problems in Staging Malcolm,” New York Times, October 5, 1986.

Lee and Wiley, By Any Means Necessary, 26.

Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2001), 264.

John A. Williams and Dennis A. Williams, If I Stop I'll Die: The Comedy of Richard Pryor (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1991), 173.

UPI, “Movie Time for a Black Panther,” May 7, 1984. Coincidentally, Spike Lee eventually directed Roger Guenveur Smith's one-man stage show A Huey P. Newton Story for HBO in 2001.

Ivor Davis, “Richard Pryor Lives Through Hell to Find His Place,” The Globe and Mail, December 1, 1984.

Bradley, “Malcolm's Mythmaking,” 25.

See Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

Norman Jewison, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me: An Autobiography (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2005), 217.

Puttnam, Movies and Money, 230–231.

David A. Cook terms them “instant majors” (Lost Illusions, 301).

See Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, eds. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993).

For a detailed and insightful account of the introduction of SoundScan and its effect on black artists and consumers, see S. Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Popular Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).

Ibid., 94.

Lee and Wiley, By Any Means Necessary, 100.

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=malcolmx.htm.