One Night in Miami: Writing for Political Change

One Night in Miami: Writing for Political Change This week we're going to be looking at One Night in Miami by Kemp Powers, adapted from his play. The movie, if you haven't seen it yet, is about a fictional evening between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. In exploring One Night in Miami, we’re going to be talking about three things that will be incredibly valuable to you as a screenwriter: the way the screenplay lands its powerful political and emotional message, the slightly old fashioned way it uses exposition (it’s not perfect), and the simple power of a character’s secret as a tool for building structure. When you’re writing a political screenplay like One Night in Miami, it’s important to make sure you’re not just preaching to the choir.  To create a desire for change in your audience, you need to take your audience to a place of deep and transformative emotional power. And the way One Night in Miami succeeds in doing this is by fusing its political message with a powerful emotional message. And this is what we all strive for when writing a political movie: we're all striving to move an audience to not just affect their intellect, but to actually move them emotionally in relation to a topic, so that they feel a new kind of empathy and understanding they might not have felt if they hadn’t watched the film. And the way that we do that is by allowing them to see themselves in a character and move them on a journey just like that character is going through. So it's an emotional move that actually creates the power of a political film.  What's really interesting about One Night in Miami is that despite the incredibly powerful place it ends up, it doesn't start very strong, mostly because of that pesky little problem called “exposition.”  In an attempt to set up the world of the movie for the audience, rather than launching us right into the action, One Night in Miami starts off by introducing the four main characters and setting up things the old-fashioned way. The most problematic of these intros is the one with Jim Brown, so that’s the one we’ll look at.  Jim Brown, potentially on his way to Miami (it's not quite clear) has stopped off at the house of a white family friend. And he has an extraordinarily long conversation with his white family friend on the front porch of the Southern gentleman's house. And while the writer has an ace up his sleeve for the final line, the conversation is problematic for a lot of reasons.  The first is, nothing is happening. And when I say nothing is happening, what I mean is Jim Brown doesn't want anything from his white friend. He's simply stopping by. And similarly, the white friend doesn't want anything from Jim. He's simply chatting him up.  If anybody wants something, it's the white friend's daughter, who just wants to be in the company of this legend. But even her want really gets attenuated. And what the scene ends up doing is what a lot of not-so-successful scenes do, it ends up being a set-up scene for the audience.  Now there is an incredible line at the end of the scene that is absolutely devastating. Because what you watch is a very long scene where this white man is so nice to this black man, is so kind to him, and so lovely to him. And Jim Brown is so nice and lovely to his white friend. And then, for reasons that are not exactly clear, the daughter pops in and says, "Hey, Dad, are you going to help me with that furniture?”  And why exactly the daughter, who just wants to be in the company of this legend Jim Brown, is interrupting her dad's meeting with this superstar family friend to move a piece of furniture is not particularly clear. But it's really there as a setup, right?  Because we're going to find out that this white man who has seemed so nice (“if there'...