The classic Spike Lee movie saved by Oliver Stone: “Don’t tell ’em I said so”
From his early pictures like She’s Gotta Have It and Do the Right Thing to his more recent efforts BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods, Spike Lee has always been unabashedly himself. A relentless champion of Black representation on screen and a headstrong critic with strong opinions, both good and bad, Lee is truly one of a kind, and his back catalogue is well worth dipping into.
Arguably his greatest and most enduring work is the 1992 biopic Malcolm X. Starring Denzel Washington as the civil rights campaigner, this 202-minute epic chronicles the life of the man born Malcolm Little, from his time spent in prison to his public conversion to Islam to his assassination in 1965. The movie is something of a historical artefact, containing cameos from Black Panther Bobby Seale and the late Nelson Mandela, and it is widely considered a classic in every conceivable way. However, it very nearly never happened.
The movie had been in the works since the late 1960s after producer Martin Worth acquired the rights to X’s autobiography. Questions still remained over the circumstances of the assassination, which halted production, as did the death of original screenwriter Arnold Perl. In fact, Worth made an entire documentary about the subject, also titled Malcolm X, before the script for the fictional version was even finished. Even when Lee was finally selected as the director after Sidney Lumet and Norman Jewison both passed, there were protests against the project, as X was viewed as a highly controversial figure amongst the Black community.
Even when filming was complete, Lee still faced backlash from Warner Bros. They were concerned over the proposed length of the film, as they worried that audiences wouldn’t be willing to sit through a three-hour story. Given that three of the four highest-grossing movies of all time are over three hours, that idea seems laughable now, but at the time, it was a dealbreaker. That was until Lee received help from a very unlikely source.
“Warner Bros always had a problem with the length,” Lee told IndieWire to commemorate the film’s 30th anniversary. “They didn’t think it needed to be three hours. But I knew when we were shooting that Oliver Stone had JFK coming out, and I asked Bob [Daly, Warner Bros executive], ‘How long is JFK?’ He said it was two hours. He didn’t know that Oliver and I were friends, so I called Oliver and asked him, ‘How long is JFK?’ He said, ‘Spike, it’s three hours, but don’t tell ‘em I said so!’ I felt that if that subject justified three hours, so did Malcolm X. I needed that time to show the evolution of the character and all the roles he played. When I refused to cut the movie down to two hours, Warner Bros let the bond company take over the movie.”
JFK, Stone’s conspiracy-friendly examination of the killing of John F Kennedy, was released one year before Malcolm X. The theatrical cut ended up being 188 minutes, although a director’s cut was later released at a total of 208 minutes. Clearly, Stone saw what Lee had done and became jealous.
Without that phone call, there’s every chance that the version of Malcolm X that everybody knows wouldn’t exist today. It’s interesting to think about what could have been cut to placate Warner Bros, but thankfully, that’s not a reality that ended up coming to pass.
