Documentary Superstars by Marsha Mccreadie

Author:Marsha Mccreadie [Mccreadie, Marsha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allworth Press
Published: 2012-05-17T15:52:42+00:00

Fame Transforms the Form

One of the most innovative ways in which the fame of a narrator has been used was in the documentary When We Were Kings by Leon Gast, the 1996 film about the “rumble in the jungle”—the much-anticipated and wildly publicized fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, promoted and brilliantly so by Don King, who had offered each $5 million, fronted by Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s dictator-president.

Through interviews and commentary by George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, and Spike Lee, the film takes on deeper, funnier, and much more socially significant ramifications. Yes, the movie would have been enticing without their recognizable tones. But unquestionably these highly distinct voices resonated in many ways.

“There was a time when you’d call a black person ‘African,’ you’d better be ready to fight,” is one such contributing comment, by Spike Lee, a latter day “add-on” narrator in the film. Lee also says “Very few black athletes had ever talked the way Muhammad Ali talked without fear of something happening to them or their careers,” repeating Ali’s oft-quoted remark about Vietnam that “No Viet Cong ever called me ‘nigger.’ ” Another editorializing voice giving narrative tension to the film was that of Howard Cosell. “I don’t think Ali can beat George Foreman. Maybe he can pull off a miracle. But I can’t conjure that.”

There is no doubt that these highly distinct voices made the film stronger. And very few resonate as much as George Plimpton’s, not coincidentally himself a practitioner of the New Journalism: a participant journalist in his articles and novels, in which he himself takes part in the activities of his subjects.

“I’d seen Foreman fight before,” says Plimpton. “I saw him destroy Frazier. One thing I always remember is, a beaten fighter, all of a sudden, he just diminishes in size. Frazier became a pygmy while Foreman suddenly became this gigantic figure.” As Ed Kelleher observed in his review of When We Were Kings in Film Journal International, “Looking startled at his own recollections, Plimpton tells of meeting ‘a woman with trembling hands,’ who assured him, before the fight, that a succubus would get to George Foreman. ‘That impressed me enormously,’ Plimpton admits. Mailer, true to form, muses about Zaire leader Mobutu’s women and analyzes the title fight, which, he points out, was won not just by Ali’s celebrated ‘rope-a-dope’ technique, but by his throwing of a daring ‘right lead’ punch, which the champion hadn’t anticipated. Lee sees the fight in larger terms, as a pivotal event in black history.”13

And leave it to that one-time pugilist himself, Norman Mailer, to penetrate the psyche of his subject. “I think Ali got scared as he got closer and closer to the fight. With his ego, he could keep telling himself that he would dominate Foreman, that he would dance, that he would make a fool of him . . . [But] in his private moments he had to know that he had not done nearly as well against two fighters—Joe Frazier and Ken Norton—whom Foreman had demolished.

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