Reading a "closet screenplay": Hollywood, James Baldwin's Malcolms and the threat of historical irrelevance

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Brian Norman

While many dismiss Baldwin's legacy as "merely" integrationist or "inclusionist," I wonder if Baldwin's version of Malcolm X and its dissemination as a "closet screenplay" can address the tensions implicit in the competing versions of Malcolm X now circulating. Individual reading practices of the speeches of Malcolm X and even the Autobiography might lend themselves to "transformationist" energies because they can be bought cheaply and consumed in the back rooms of stores, disseminated at political meetings, obtained in prison libraries, and so on. But the corporate theater dooms potentially transformative self- and system-confrontation to questions of "Will this movie spark a riot or not?" Such was the case with Lee's earlier films during the long hot summers of their releases. (10)

In 1970, though, it did not seem necessary to Baldwin to forfeit all of moving picture technology as always and only White and to remain content with a small fraction of the print market. Following Coombs's disparagement of Baldwin's "naivete," Hollywood generally escapes censure because many now agree with Jacquie Jones's contention that "The charge of Hollywood has never been to produce functional political documents" (Jones 10). But Baldwin, writing from the other side of the historical inclusion of black characters, writers, and directors in Hollywood, believed that inclusion of Black history into Hollywood forms could transform its "charge" and could, in fact, imbue Hollywood with political relevance. Whereas Cineaste may rationalize the controversy surrounding Lee's film by noting, "Malcolm X is not the sort of person Hollywood biopics normally celebrate" (Crowdus 4), Baldwin was not content to separate inclusion and transformation into mutually exclusive projects. In the aftermath of the exhilarating gains of Civil Rights and amidst a nascent Black Arts movement, Baldwin entered Hollywood in 1970 with the notion that cinema had the power to transform a generation hypnotized by the white supremacist fantasies of D. W. Griffiths and John Wayne.

I want to turn to 1970 and to the "scenario" in order to see how Baldwin worked with the visual image and filmic technology as useful tools of continuing Malcolm X's legacy in order to save him from "historical irrelevance" as an American icon, a Horatio Alger of racial progress. Baldwin, that is, did not automatically conflate the appeal and growth of visual culture with the loss of progressive politics and counter-cultures that had successfully used the printed word in pamphlets and newspapers as vehicles for disseminating systemic critiques. The role of James Baldwin's script in Spike Lee's film has been thoroughly downplayed, dismissed, or in some way denied. Lee mentions Baldwin's script as one of many from which he worked. Though he claims Baldwin's as the best, he succinctly dismisses it as lacking a finished ending, and often noting Baldwin's heavy drinking and the assistance of Arnold Perl. Though Baldwin explains the "closeting" of the screenplay through studio disputes over representations of Malcolm, Lee's dismissive depiction of "the Baldwin script" enjoys widespread circulation in By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X, and Cineaste replicates Lee's story in a 1993 interview. Contrary to Lee, Baldwin did not envision a Black Hollywood film as an endpoint. Instead, Baldwin remembered his childhood fascination with the seductive power of filmic identification and combined that with his distrust of a Hollywood complicit in promulgating the stories of race Baldwin spent his life unraveling and challenging. Baldwin looked to film itself as an opportunity to use the visual medium to enact a self-questioning placement of the viewer within a not-settled--and never-to-be settled--history that failed if it became a static binary or an easy teleology.