DELAWARE PART OF THE STORY
Q&A with Wilmington’s Zach Baylin, who made sure the First State was mentioned in new biopic on Bob Marley
When Hollywood screenwriter and Delaware native Zach Baylin inherited an existing script for the new “Bob Marley: One Love” biopic, he noticed something was missing: the First State. ● As a Tatnall School student, he had fallen in love with Marley’s music, soon learning that the music icon had lived in Wilmington off and on for years starting in the mid-1960s. ● When it came time for Baylin to begin working on a rewrite for the Paramount Pictures movie with film director Reinaldo Marcus Green (“King Richard”), he made sure their research included a visit to Marley’s former home at 23rd and Tatnall streets in Wilmington.
And even though the majority of the new biopic focuses on a time in Marley’s life when he was living back home in Jamaica, Baylin included several scenes that were set in Delaware. One made the cut.
“I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but there is a scene that takes place in Delaware. When Bob fled Jamaica, essentially in exile after being shot, [his wife] Rita took the children and was in Delaware with them while he was in London,” Baylin says in an interview with Delaware Online/The News Journal.
“So it’s covered,” he adds. “There were scenes where I tried to chronicle some of the Delaware highlights of him working at the Chrysler plant [in Newark] and vacuuming floors at Hotel du Pont [in Wilmington], but they didn’t make it into the final film. Those were my contributions.”
“Bob Marley: One Love,” starring Kingsley Ben-Adir as Marley, opens nationwide in theaters on Valentine’s Day, including a VIP red carpet screening at 7 p.m. at Penn Cinema Riverfront 14 + IMAX (401 S. Madison St., Wilmington), hosted by the organizers of the annual Marley-themed Peoples Festival, who knew Marley when he lived in Wilmington.
Junior Marvin, guitarist with Marley’s band The Wailers, will attend as a special guest with a meet and greet ahead of the screening and a question-andanswer session afterward. Tickets are $30 at peoples festival.com.
We caught up with Baylin (“King Richard,” “Creed III,” “Gran Turismo”) as he prepared for last week’s premiere in Los Angeles and chatted about the challenges of writing a film about an icon, how he fell in love with Marley and his music, and the several high-profile projects he has coming up.
His new Netflix limited series, “Black Rabbit,” which he created and wrote with wife Kate Susman starring Jude Law and Jason Bateman, begins production in March. The couple will soon be moving back east from Los Angeles with their children, 10 and 8, to helm the program.
Question: What is the background of your involvement with “Bob Marley: One Love”? I know you have the connection with director and co-writer Reinaldo Marcus Green from “King Richard.” Is this something he had going on and you jumped in?
Answer: I remember at some point during “King Richard,” [Green] told me he had begun speaking to Paramount about the potential of directing a Bob Marley movie. I was frankly very jealous of him and also excited for him, but it was a project that I would have loved to have been involved in. I’m a huge Marley fan, and the Delaware connection has loomed pretty large for me. When [Green] took the job, he called me and he said, “I want you to write it with me.” And so there was an existing script that I kind of inherited. And so I began working with [Green] on rewriting that script for the better part of a year before it really got greenlit and became official.
And the original script was by Terence Winter (“Boardwalk Empire,” “The Sopranos”) and Frank E. Flowers?
I don’t know the whole history, but they developed the script for Paramount and then [Green] was hired to direct the movie. We wanted to not entirely re-envision it — I think they had done really great work in identifying the crucial time period of Bob’s life. But then we went away and did all our own research, talked to the family and talked to people who are still alive that were involved in Bob’s life. We began to build out this story that we felt was really essential to tell about his life in that specific moment.
Can you give us an idea of what the film covers?
It focuses mainly on the years from 1976 to 1978 when Bob was a Jamaican star, but not quite yet a global superstar and Jamaica was in a period of incredible political crisis. Bob was playing a peace concert in Jamaica to sort of try to quell some of the violence that had that had arisen. He was shot by assassins at his house and survived. The movie follows Bob’s exodus to London and Europe in the wake of that and the kind of emotional, spiritual and creative journey that he goes on — both to create the “Exodus” album as a response to the shooting and his ultimate decision to return to Jamaica to try to heal both his own wounds and help heal the wounds of that country. The centerpiece of it is really his relationship with Rita: how their musical collaboration and spiritual mission aligned and how they how they navigated that in the midst of a very complicated relationship.
I didn’t know if we were going to see him born and then see his whole life story.
There are elements of his past that felt really important we wanted to include, but like with “King Richard,” we are both sort of drawn to telling true life stories that locate a moment or pivotal time period of someone’s life where hopefully you can understand who they are through this specific event. What that allows you to do is make it a bit more of a character study and really live in more intimate moments with Bob or with Richard Williams. If you’re going to hit all of the landmarks in someone’s life, you just don’t get to feel like you’re a fly on the wall very much. I think that’s what we’re drawn to.
Can you tell me a little bit about your history as a Bob Marley fan, especially when you were younger and discovering him?
I became a big fan in high school. I had a couple friends who were big music guys and I think I probably was introduced to Bob the way most people are with “Legend.” But I remember going to Borders on Route 202 and buying this big book about his life and becoming, honestly, pretty obsessed with him at one point. He felt like one of those real mythical rock figures like John Lennon — people who felt larger than life, but kind of became spiritual figures to a lot of people. And obviously, the Delaware connection — when I learned in high school that he had lived there — it felt very small world. Delaware is obviously a very small place and the fact that this icon was living there, you know, it just kind of blew my mind. I remember going with some friends to his house on Tatnall Street where his mother had lived and made a pilgrimage when we were teenagers. So working with Ziggy Marley and the rest of the siblings and going back to that house again while researching this movie felt like a real full circle moment. That was pretty amazing.
Oh, that’s cool that you took a field trip back here. The park near right near the house now has an official historical marker designating it One Love Park.
Ziggy Marley was a producer on the movie and was an incredible collaborator and resource, but I talked to him a lot about his time in Delaware and he remembers it very well. It was a place that the kids spent a lot of time because when of when their parents were on tour, they would often come and stay there for months at a time with their grandmother. He had good memories of it and I’m sure having that connection was helpful in some ways when it came to us working together. We didn’t have a ton in common so that was that was a nice link.
For “King Richard,” you were writing about a public figure who is pretty much behind the scenes unless you’re a huge tennis fan and follow the Williams sisters closely. But Bob Marley, like you said, is almost a mythical, well-known figure. Was that an extra challenge for you?
Honestly, I was incredibly nervous about it and it felt like an enormous responsibility. It was a huge challenge, frankly. Richard Williams, like you said, was in some ways a public figure, but not someone that a lot of people knew intimately. And I think someone like Bob, people at least feel like they know him intimately. And that there are so many built-in preconceptions and associations and, again, mythmaking about him that it was a challenge to both make sure we were getting everything accurate, but also really trying not to portray him as a T-shirt or the face on the cover of “Legend.”
We wanted to really try and show that this was a man with a very complicated life who was dealing with all the same challenges and struggles that everyone else does. Many more, in fact. We wanted to show the man behind the iconography. And so the challenge of that was to try to find the stories and the moments that are not just what a general fan knows of Bob. So working very closely with Ziggy and his sisters and going down to Miami to meet Rita — we really tried to talk to people and understand as best we could who Bob the human being was and what his struggles and foibles were so it could be reflected in the script. But I was terrified.
When the strikes hit Hollywood, was this or other movie projects that you were working on have to be put on hold?
The big thing it affected was this TV show “Black Rabbit” we have at Netflix. We had turned in the first two episodes and were waiting to see if it was going to be picked up to go to series and we had to pause that. Just like for everyone else, it was just very unclear what the landscape of the industry was going to be when we came back. It’s all kind of a blur, but I had been working a little bit on developing the story for “Creed IV” that got paused and I’ve since picked that back up. The last five or six years, I’ve felt very fortunate, but they’ve been incredibly busy. And so in some ways, I was ready for a bit of a break, but Kate and I got very lucky to have a show that came back.
Can you tell me what you can about “Black Rabbit”?
I don’t think I can tell you what it’s about, but it’s a show I created with my wife Kate Susman and it stars Jude Law and Jason Bateman. And Jason is directing the first couple episodes. It’s like — I don’t know what can I say — it’s a pretty tense thriller.
Does that mean we going to hear you on Bateman’s “Smartless” podcast now?
We have not been invited on “Smartless” yet, but you know, I’m hoping.
And you’re part of “Creed IV”?
I’m working with Keenan Coogler who co-wrote “Creed III” with me and we’re working with Michael B. Jordan right now trying to crack the story for the fourth one. So I’m involved in that right now. And I have a movie I wrote that Jude Law was also in, which was shot right before the strike with Australian director named Justin Kurzel called “The Order.” It’s a true story about a group of white supremacist separatists in the early 1980s who were robbing banks and armored cars in an effort to try and overthrow the government. Jude plays an FBI agent who was on the hunt to try and stop them. That’s probably the next thing that will come out after Marley.
And I see you also co-wrote a new “The Crow” movie? Is that coming out this year, too?
It’s supposed to, yeah. At like the end of the year. We went back to the source material of the original comic and then sort of created a new vision of that, but we tried to pay a lot of allegiance to like to the original graphic novel. Rupert Sanders directed it and he’s kind of visual genius, so I think it’s going to be a very visceral and very, very cool movie.
Cool. Thanks for the chat. And thank you for getting Delaware in this Bob Marley movie.
Yeah, I was excited to do it.
Have a story idea? Contact Ryan Cormier of Delaware Online/The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline. com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier) and X (@ryancormier).