Director had devil of a time getting ‘Judas’ to the screen
Now Shaka King’s film is drawing Oscar attention
Shaka King was feeling depressed. It was his last scheduled day at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and the trip hadn’t gone well. King’s directorial debut, a bittersweet comedy about the misadventures of a marijuana-addicted couple called “Newlyweeds,” had been rejected by seemingly every major company in Hollywood.
“Newlyweeds” had cost King and his investors six figures, but it eventually sold, to a small Canadian distributor, for just $25,000 — a result that still leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Even the weather seemed to be against King — a nasty snowstorm in Park City, Utah, had grounded his flight home to New York, leaving him stranded in town for a deflating extra night.
At his hotel that evening, King happened to run into another first-time filmmaker, Oakland native Ryan Coogler, whose flight had also been canceled. Coogler’s experience at Sundance was virtually the opposite of King’s — he’d just won the top prize for his feature “Fruitvale Station,” about the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer. But the two men, among the very few Black directors at the festival, had noticed each other while making the rounds. They decided to meet up for dinner.
“You make fast friends with Shaka,” Coogler, who went on to direct “Creed” and “Black Panther,” said in a recent interview. “He’s hilarious and smart and charismatic — you just want to be around him.”
Though his experience at Sundance had been a disappointment, that friendship would eventually lead to the kind of sensational career breakthrough King had hoped for, one that few filmmakers — and even fewer filmmakers of color — ever experience.
His second film, “Judas and the Black Messiah,” which he and Coogler produced along with Charles D. King, has hit theaters (at least those that are open) and is available on HBO Max. Its stars — Daniel Kaluuya as the Illinois Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton, and Lakeith Stanfield as the misguided informant William O’Neal, who helped the FBI orchestrate his killing — seem all but destined for Oscar nominations.
But the more remarkable achievement may be that the film — a pointed fable about the historic embrace of white supremacist violence in the U.S. government, backed with the imprimatur and
promotional might of a major studio — exists at all. It announces the arrival of an unconventional new voice, and could serve as a test of a bold strategy to route a racial justice revolution through Hollywood.
King, with an unruly coil of dreadlocks, a short, fleecy beard, and gentle eyes behind gold, oversized aviator eyeglasses, speaks with a relaxed Brooklyn accent. He took a winding path to filmmaking. As a teenager, he worked as a stagehand on a local play written and produced by his parents, fulltime public-school teachers whom King described as “very Afrocentric.” He hated the work at the time — his real passions were hip-hop and basketball — but discovered his own love of creative writing in a high school short-fiction class.
“I was a low C, D student until I did well in that class,” King says. “I hadn’t been good at anything in a long time. It helped make me want to get my act together.”
He turned his grades around and went to Vassar College, where his roommate, Kristan Sprague, encouraged King him to join him in a film-production course. The two eventually teamed up on a documentary called “Stolen Moments” about hip-hop and capitalism (King directed, Sprague edited) and have been frequent collaborators ever since, including on “Newlyweeds” and “Judas and the Black Messiah.”
After graduating, King worked for several years as an after-school tutor and youth counselor in New York while writing screenplays on the side. In 2007, he was accepted to New York University’s graduate film program. “Newlyweeds” was his thesis film.
In 2016, he got the idea for what would become “Judas” while hanging out with Keith and Kenny Lucas, of the comedy duo the Lucas Brothers. The brothers, who had worked with King on a television pilot, thought
that the story of Hampton, O’Neal and the FBI would make for a powerful crime thriller: “‘The Departed’ set in the world of Cointelpro.”
“I thought it was the best idea I’d ever heard,” King recalled. “I could see the whole movie instantly.”
In 2017, King sent a script to Coogler, who agreed to produce the film under his banner, Proximity Media, and brought on Charles D. King, the Black founder and chief executive of the production company Macro, to finance half of the budget. But the filmmakers still had to find a studio to supply the rest of the financing and get the film on screens. Even with the pulpy script, the attachment of rising stars Kaluuya and Stanfield, and the involvement of Coogler — by then fresh from the record-setting success of “Black Panther” — the pitch wasn’t a slam dunk.
Many studios made what the producers considered obvious lowball offers. “It was baffling to me,” King
said. “I’ve learned that you can’t apply logic to racism.” But they found a champion in Niija Kuykendall, the senior vice president of production at Warner Bros. and one of few Black female executives in the industry.
But even before filming, King spent weeks battling with Warner Bros. executives and other producers over proposed changes to the script. Additional input came after an early screening for fellow Black directors, including Barry Jenkins and Ava DuVernay, and King made dramatic cuts that gave more screen time to Hampton.
“It took some long conversations with Ryan before I learned how to take ‘the note behind the note,’ ” he said. “To hear what people were asking for and figure out how to do it in my own way. Once I learned how to do that, the movie got better, it got bigger, it got more watchable, and it led to something even greater than what I had envisioned on my own.”