How Hollywood Broke James Baldwin
Part 1 on the 1960s, Baldwin's script on Malcolm X, and the evils of capitalist consumption in media
The year is 1968 and James Baldwin is aware that the tides of America are changing. Baldwin is 48 years old, no longer as young as the movements around him that are filling up the headlines, like the Black Power Movement and militant Black nationalist organizations cropping up around the country. In his collection of essays, No Name In The Street, Baldwin writes of the late 1960s and how the murders of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X scarred him immensely.
Around the time, Baldwin’s acclaim was on a high. Just a year before, his acclaimed book, The Fire Next Time, hit the literary scene and rose to the top of the bookselling charts. Baldwin’s incisive takes on racism, systemic oppression, and the horror of the American project captivated readers around the world; especially white liberals clamoring for a voice that could speak to them in telligible ways. This positioning of Baldwin by the white liberal middle class sometimes put him at odds with different factions of the Black community, notably the Panther Party and SNCC.
This trauma first led Baldwin to agree to write a screenplay based on the biography of Malcolm X’s life for Columbia Pictures in 1986. Baldwin had many creative and personal goals for this project, especially due to his close political proximity to these men. Of his intent, Baldwin wrote in No Name In The Street:
This was a difficult assignment, since I had known Malcolm, after all, crossed swords with him, worked with him, and held him in that great esteem which is not easily distinguishable, if it is distinguishable at all, from love. (The Hollywood gig did not work out because I did not wish to be a party to a second assassination: but we will also return to Hollywood, presently.)
The screenplay in the end would be ripe with many hiccups along the way. By Baldwin’s most prominent accounts, the writing and editing process with Columba Pictures was granting. A continuous process of writing scenes, having them brought to his collaborator, Arnold Peler, and seeing his dear pages translate to a more cinematic or palatable presentation of Baldwin. By other accounts, like those of David Leeming and other Baldwin biographers, Baldwin’s mental health and drinking were taking a toll.
Baldwin vs Hollywood
In the paper “Lost and ... Found?: James Baldwin's Script and Spike Lee's "Malcolm X", Dr. Miller notes:
Baldwin called his script "my confession" (Leeming 299), and Lee says, "I was the director, I rewrote the script by James Baldwin and Arnold Perl, and I will take full responsibility [for Malcolm's portrayal]. I will say that this is the Malcolm I see". Baldwin and Lee clearly read Malcolm X's life and legacy from distinct historical vantage points, and more pointedly, from divergent artistic roles as writer and filmmaker, respectively. But addi-tionally, Baldwin's use of the word "confession" signals something crucial in his vision that cannot be accommodated by Lee's, or by any film. Confessions are public declarations of personal insights. Lee speaks of the Malcolm he sees, but Baldwin's Malcolm is felt as well as seen. Confessions yoke the spiritual to the material world, the invisible to the visible.
About a year ago while traveling in Toronto, I picked up a copy of Baldwin’s version of his screenplay on Malcolm X’s life, One Day When I Was Lost. The screenplay is lyrical and poetic and is beholden to a language of emotional reaching that is common for Baldwin.
As a man sometimes cast out of movements, like he allegedly was from speaking at the March on Washington or berated in Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, it makes sense that Baldwin would use his artwork to get as close as possible to the subjects that represented revolutionary acclaim to the masses. This closeness would demand that his screenplay be something different than the Hollywood machine, which Baldwin had already seen so devastated by McCarthyism and anti-Commujnist fears.
On McCarthy, Baldwin wrote:
For me, simply, McCarthy was a coward and a bully, with no claim to honor, nor any claim to honorable attention. For me, emphatically, there were not two sides to this dubious coin, and, as to his baleful and dangerous effect, there could be no question at all. Yet, they spent hours debating whether or not McCarthy was an enemy of domestic liberties. I couldn’t but wonder what conceivable further proof they were awaiting: I thought of German Jews sitting around debating whether or not Hitler was a threat to their lives until the debate was summarily resolved for them by a knocking at the door. Nevertheless, this learned, civilized, intellectual-liberal debate cheerfully raged in its vacuum, while every hour brought more distress and confusion—and dishonor—to the country they claimed to love. The pretext for all this, of course, was the necessity of “containing” Communism, which, they unblushingly informed me..
Baldwin was hyper-aware of the convergence of creative, political, and cultural censorship, that both the US and the world were living through at the time. These varying forms of censorship made it even more necessary for Baldwin to assert what integrity and morality for a contemporary artist must be. Furthermore, Baldwin asked this question of what integrity and morality for the contemporary human must be as well.
In 1969, he explored this question in his speech, The Struggle of The Artist…
April 1986: The Day That Changed Baldwin and The World
All of these considerations would become far more serious in April 1968. Baldwin was sitting by his pool in Hollywood to interview about the process of writing the biopic film on Malcolm X when a dear friend came over to inform James Baldwin that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. in the coming days, Baldwin would travel to Atlanta with the dark cloud of weariness and depression hanging over him. Surely the riots spreading through the country were a direct reflection of the ongoing battles of black people for systemic liberation that Baldwin was so ardently writing about.
What did it mean that another leader was killed?
This moment, being a breaking point, for Baldwin is very interesting, in terms of the mainstream, conception and understanding of Baldwin. To the public, Baldwin was a debater. He was a writer. He was a proponent of the Civil Rights Movement, and struggled to be a part of the black power era. The Baldwin that is not talked about much is Baldwin who became cynical about the political trajectory of white consciousness in the face of black terror. To put it in other words, Baldwin's heart was becoming hardened by the assassination of his friends. Death was becoming an escapable.
After Martin Luther King's funeral, Baldwin went to Europe and ended up in Istanbul. This was after another attempted suicide which wound him up in the hospital. Similar to being 24, and deciding to flee the US because he was not sure what would happen to him, Baldwin left again. He declined to work on the script anymore, too taken with his grief. In Istanbul however, he did try to write with some success and much frustration.
Eventually, the dashed movie would become 1992's narrative depiction of Malcolm, X's life, directed by Spike Lee. To many Baldwin, lovers and cinephiles there are many differences between Spike Lee’s version of a film depiction of Malcolm's life in the book that would eventually be published of James Baldwin's 1960s script, One Day When I Was Lost.
The mere fact that Hollywood and the horrors of anti-Black violence would break James Baldwin while he was trying to make an artful script that would honor the life of Malcolm X is very telling of the violence of capitalism in Hollywood then. This is not far from the reality today for Black, queer, and/or marginalized artists trying to navigate immediately landscape inundated with technology, propaganda, and platitudes about revolution.
Much like Baldwin, artists like myself and Billy Porter confront daunting questions about the role and integrity of the artist amidst the relentless grip of capitalism and the ongoing specter of genocide. As we stand at this crossroads, uncertain of the paths ahead, it becomes increasingly evident that only through understanding history can we hope to forge a more just and humane world. Education, then, becomes our beacon guiding us toward a future where the mistakes of the past are acknowledged, and where we actively work to rectify the injustices perpetuated by systems of power and exploitation.