Growing Up King

by Dexter Scott King

  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.

  Danny said, “A biography or a film can be done by anybody about anybody.”

  “True,” I said, “but if you use that person’s copyrighted materials, like speeches and the like, then you’ve got to get permission. That’s the law.” They were trying to say, “We don’t know how much we’re using.”

  I asked, “How are you doing a movie about Martin Luther King and not using his speeches? Unless you do it like JFK.”

  As soon as I said that, I thought, “Of course that’s what they’re thinking of doing.” Like JFK. That was not the kind of film we were hoping for, where Martin Luther King would be just the backdrop rather than the main character.

  At that time, we were torn. If we were going to do a conspiracy film, Oliver woul
d probably be the best person, yet that’s not where our heads were. We were still hoping to attract the director and writer who would agree with our vision of a biopic. It turns out we were in more of a predicament than we knew. Somebody was taking the baby away from us. Do we sit back and just let our baby go? Or do we go with the child to make sure that it’s nurtured, cared for? We chose the latter. Better to embrace Oliver Stone and try to cultivate him than to be hands-off and just see what he comes up with. So we developed a relationship with Danny, and started meeting again with Oliver. The last time I met with him was in early 1998.

  I asked him straight out, “What type of film are you trying to do?”

  He said, “I really want to do a story about the man, not the assassination story.”

  That surprised me. I’m sure it showed on my face that I was happy to hear it. I’m not a duplicitous character. The way I feel shows on my face. Later I was questioning myself: “Does Oliver really have that in mind, or is he just trying to cool me out? He is a brilliant filmmaker-screenwriter, wrote Midnight Express, wrote Scarface, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon…”

  That’s when I thought, “Uh-oh.”

  It was the Vietnam War thing! That’s what had gotten him. That was the recurring theme in his films—working out his own conflict over his and America’s participation in the Vietnam War!

  Stone’s very close to Vietnam. That’s his hook. That’s what made it powerful for him. Daddy came out against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, in his speech called “A Time to Break Silence,” one year to the day before he was murdered. That’s what Oliver saw. I don’t know if he saw that the media had essentially muffled Daddy after that, which was the only reason he had considered running on a third-party presidential ticket with Dr. Benjamin Spock—so that he would be covered in the media, so that peace and Poor People’s campaigns would have to get coverage.

  To get started, Oliver had brought in a screenwriter named Kario Salem. We were still kind of skeptical. We didn’t know where Salem was coming from. We met with him, we did the interviews, and never really saw a script, so I can’t tell you till this day where he was coming from. I know Salem went to Memphis and did research, which made me more uneasy.

  My sense was Oliver was going to doctor or rewrite this script—it was going to be his thing in the end. I’d been hearing he was obsessed with depicting Daddy in terms of womanizing. I went to him and said, “What’s your position on depicting my father in this light?” Oliver said, “Your dad was really something.” I said, “I don’t believe it’s true. Who are you hearing this from?”

  Oliver was saying there was good evidence, in Ralph Abernathy’s book and from a woman who’d claimed she was sexually involved with my father the night before he was killed. I said, “I talked to Reverend Hosea Williams, who was there, about the incident; he told me it didn’t happen.”

  This whole thing about the FBI files being sealed for fifty years, these records of my father—if the FBI really had something concrete, it would have leaked out long before now. The tape that my mother received from J. Edgar Hoover was not all that concrete. Mother says you can’t tell what is on that tape, or who is on that tape—there were a bunch of people she could not identify—and we were also told that J. Edgar Hoover had his FBI agents fabricate incidents. Mother till this day still claims that was not my father on the tape.

  What I was trying to say to Oliver Stone was, “Whatever you do, make sure you’re basing it on facts, not innuendo.” Stone said, “Maybe I’m too close to it. Let’s go talk to the writer, Kario, and Danny.” We met with them; now, Stone could have been pulling my chain, but he was saying, “Look, you all make the call. If after you do your research, you come up with something different, I’m open.” What I didn’t want Stone to do was become obsessed with the perceived flaws both real and imagined of my father; it would be a tragic mistake for him to do a movie focusing solely on the perceived and unproven fallibilities of a great man.

  But in the end Oliver couldn’t find another figure, a majority figure, within my father’s story for the audiences to latch on to. With JFK, he’d made a protagonist of Jim Garrison, the district attorney in Louisiana—a public figure who has a revelation, goes after “them,” whoever “them” is, that were responsible for the assassination. There isn’t that kind of figure in my father’s story. One of Ray’s attorneys whom I hadn’t met then, William Pepper, provided an interesting twist of a character. In my opinion, he became a lot like the Jim Garrison figure in JFK, but the reason it’s hard to put him in that light is because he had a vested interest as Ray’s defense counsel. People have a hard time with his story; they feel he’s biased, or slanted toward defending his client, similar to Johnnie Cochran’s situation with O. J. Simpson. I believe that any defense counsel is going to be viewed as being biased just for doing his job. Catch-22. I can relate. Stone was drawn to Pepper; Ixtlan, his production company, optioned Pepper’s book Orders to Kill. It was a mystery, why Oliver was so interested in doing this film. Warner Bros. put it on the back burner. No matter how big you get in Hollywood, you’re never bigger than your last film’s grosses. Nixon didn’t do so well commercially.

  My sense was that Stone was still grappling with it. He wanted to do the conspiracy/assassination movie, based on Daddy’s coming out against the Vietnam War. I was in over my head here.

  History says lone assassins rarely use rifles. A list of lone demented assassins is long and quite depressing, and shows the use of pistols, ear-close: Lincoln, Gandhi, Oswald, RFK, Wallace, Reagan, Lennon, Tupac, Biggie, Versace. Medgar Evers was shot in the back with a rifle by Byron De La Beckwith in 1963, but from relatively short range. Vernon Jordan was wounded by long-distance rifle fire; he survived. And one more. JFK. You can see why Oliver Stone would be on this.

  My father, at Harlem’s Riverside Church, on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis, had said, “It is an evil war. We’re bombing too many rice fields, running too many peasant humble people out of the villages. It’s time for America to come on home from Vietnam.” That had to cut into Stone’s soul.

  Five years later: “Oliver sees the mid-’60s and the transformation [King] was going through,” said Steven Rivers, then a Stone publicist. “It’s not a whodunit, a birth-to-death biopic, or documentary; it may take years for this movie to come about, if it comes about. But if it does, it’s about how toward the end of his life, Dr. King became a leader of the peace movement, how he was perceived by his enemies as an increasing threat.”

  “Oliver can’t afford to do it wrong,” Phil Jones said. “Even if he wanted to be capricious, he can’t. He has more to lose than we do.” Because of this long-term back-and-forth with Oliver Stone, I thought more about the assassination, and James Earl Ray. The working title of Stone’s ill-fated production: Memphis. I found myself thinking more about Memphis. What had happened there? Not so much in terms of a movie, but for my own life, and the lives of my two sisters and my brother. Maybe we had not been able to move on because we were stuck there.

  “It would be a film about Dr. King’s life,” said Steven Rivers. “It’s not a whodunit—though Oliver supports reopening the investigation and a view there’s more to learn.” Maybe one day Stone’s Memphis—which would have portrayed our father’s emergence as a peace leader dead set against the Vietnam War who was killed by the same interests who killed Stone’s JFK—will get made by somebody else. Maybe not. Daddy went to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers and to support efforts to integrate schools and stores, not to protest the Vietnam War. Time passed. A film option we’d given Stone expired in the year 2000. Now my hope is that at some point during my mother’s lifetime, a movie on my father will be done.

  In the early ’90s, I traveled to Memphis, though not for a movie or to investigate my father’s murder. It was arranged through Juanita Moore, executive director of the National Civil Rights Museum. The whole movie thing was in stasis—rea
lly off the radar screen. Michelle Clark Jenkins was leaving the King Estate soon, but she took this trip with me. While in Memphis, Ms. Moore thought it would be a good idea to meet with her girlfriend who worked at Graceland. So we also met and visited there while in the city.

  We toured the National Civil Rights Museum. The museum is housed in the old Lorraine Motel, south of downtown. Michelle and Juanita took the tour with me. There were other people on the tour; among those, a few recognized me; some recoiled; some, after saying hello, let me have space. When I started out on the tour, I was unaware of a wonderful feature that didn’t hit me until the end. The way the exhibit was structured, you started out dealing with the history of African Americans, through the Civil Rights Movement. As you move forward in history, the exhibit elevates you: you literally go up as you walk through, you rise step by step; it’s almost like you’re going to the mountaintop. I didn’t have a somber or nervous feeling. Then I got upstairs, second-floor balcony, outside Room 306.

  From here, you could see the supposed path of the bullet. It was traced by visible laser-pointer light. At that time, I didn’t know what I know now, so I didn’t question it; yet the rooming house, window, bullet, pathway, the music they were playing, church music, and the background—it all suddenly seemed morbid. I could feel a cold sweat, and blood rising in my neck—where my father took the fatal shot. I thought of a song, played in the documentary Montgomery to Memphis, by Nina Simone, “The King of Love Is Dead.” As the documentary ends, during his funeral procession, with the wagon, the mule pulling the casket, that song is playing. It was all jumbled up in my head: What is film, what is real, what is re-creation, when was this music laid in? When I think of my father’s death, all of that is what comes to mind; I have mixed emotions—there was always a reluctance for my family to focus on the death. Even the King Center, in Mother’s mind, was to be a living memorial. We were approached years before, when the Lorraine Motel was still boarded up, about becoming involved with the National Civil Rights Museum. D’Army Bailey, a judge in Memphis, first chair of the museum foundation, came to Atlanta to entreat us. Mother had problems with it at the time. But it was all so distant. Now I was here. On the very spot.