Miami Twice

KEMP POWERS on turning his play, One Night In Miami, into an Oscar-nominated screenplay

“IT’S NOT UNCOMMON for a playwright to continue tweaking their own play,” says Kemp Powers, author of One Night In Miami. And he knows of which he speaks. When the play —which fictionalises a very real evening in 1964, when Cassius Clay ( just before he became Muhammad Ali), Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown hung out at a Miami motel following Clay’s world heavyweight title win against Sonny Liston — began its run at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2016, Powers had already changed things from its debut in 2013. And when he was afforded the chance to revise the material again, turning it into a screenplay which Regina King would go on to direct, he decided to make some changes once more.

THE INTRO

“When you go into a stage play, the parameters are so different,” says Powers. “The play is all real time. It begins when they walk into the room, and it ends 85 minutes later when they leave the room. For a film, the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh man, I really need to put these guys into context.’” And so the film begins with four lengthy solo peeks at the icons in question — the first word from the play isn’t spoken until roughly half an hour in. “The stage play begins with a moment that’s not even a scene in the movie,” adds Powers.

THE EXPANSION

One of those introductions sees Jim Brown, the American Football player (who is the only member of the quartet who’s still alive), visit the home of Mr Carlton (Beau Bridges), owner of Brown’s team, The Cleveland Browns. They laugh, they joke, but when Brown tries to enter Carlton’s home to help him with a chore, he’s told, in the harshest possible terms, that Black people aren’t allowed inside the house. While

Powers invented the prologues for Cooke, Malcolm X and Clay, this was a dramatisation of an incident briefly referred to in the play.

“That was something I was very excited to show,” admits Powers. “In the play, it’s quite a comedic moment. But when we see it, it’s actually horrifying. From the first draft of the script, when I wrote that scene, it just came pouring out. The idea of someone being gracious and welcoming you but at the same time keeping you in your place was incredibly powerful to me.”

THE DELETION

“The most popular show-stopping moment in the play, I never even put in the film,” says Powers. He’s referring to a moment when legendary singer Sam Cooke recounts a performance in Harlem. “That’s the show-stopper moment in the play, but it didn’t fit the story I was trying to tell in the film. I had to rewrite the whole thing. I started writing from page one again, and as I was writing this new version, there was never a place for it.”

THE BOSTON GIG

Taking its place, after a fashion, is a bravura sequence in which Malcolm X recalls the story of the time he saw Cooke play a gig in Boston, and quickly win over a hostile crowd with an a cappella performance. On stage, the picture is painted with words. On film, Powers and King show the performance in question. “That was super-exciting to see come to life,” says Powers. “It’s incredibly effective in the play — the phrasing is a little different — but when you write a play for six characters, there’s no room to stage a concert. The wonderful thing about film is I’m allowed to show so much more. I remember seeing that edited together and I was bouncing in my chair.”

THE ROOF

One criticism you often hear of play adaptations is that they’re stagey. Well, of course they are. But that often results in screenwriters breaking up the action for no good reason other than to get the characters out of their one-set prison. To an extent, that happens in One Night In Miami too, particularly in a sequence where the quartet relocate to the roof of the hotel, but Powers didn’t come at the scene-change quite so cynically.

“Regina said, ‘It’s a story set in a room, but for the purposes of the film, let’s have the entire hotel be the room,’” he explains. “The Hampton House is a character, as far as I’m concerned. Regina drove a lot of that. She would say, ‘What do you think about this moment maybe being on the roof?’ I wasn’t able to do that on stage.”

THE ENDING

Both play and movie end with Sam Cooke (who, like Malcolm X, would be shot dead less than a year after that night) singing ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, but the circumstances are vastly different. “With the play, it ends on a rather tragic note,” says Powers. “Tragedy surrounds what happens after that night. But with the film, it was really important to Regina and to me to end on more of a note of hope, handing the baton over to the next generation.” So it finishes with Cooke performing the song on The Tonight Show. “Which in real life was the one time he did perform the song live,” adds Powers. “The recording of that moment got destroyed, so it felt like an incredible opportunity to recreate a moment that really did happen.”

Powers has now overhauled One Night In Miami at least twice, not counting minor tweaks. But he says that’s that for him. “I’m done,” he laughs. “I’ve lived with this story for so many years. There’s other stories I’m trying to tell.” The longest Night of his life has finally come to an end.