James Baldwin — a friend of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X — is widely celebrated as a civil rights activist, a writer of forceful essays and an eloquent speaker.
But his passion was for storytelling.
He wrote seven novels, two plays, several short stories and screenplays. He was arguably the most evocative Black writer of his generation and among the most powerful champions of marginalized characters in the 20th century.
Still, if you know him from film, it is for just one movie, released in 2018, more than 30 years after his death: If Beale Street Could Talk.
Adapted by Barry Jenkins from Baldwin's 1974 novel — as a follow-up to Jenkins' Oscar-winning Best Picture Moonlight — Beale Street is a swoon-worthy romance about a young woman who seeks to prove the innocence of her wrongly jailed lover before the birth of their child.
The fire ... next time?
The $20 million that Beale Street earned at the box office suggests that Baldwin's other novels and plays might also have worked on the big screen. Among them:
- Go Tell It on the Mountain: Baldwin's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel with a brutal father modeled on his stepfather, who despised white society and took his anger out on his family. (Just before Baldwin died, it was finally adapted for television starring Paul Winfield.)
- Giovanni's Room: a 1956 novel about a conflicted young American living in Paris who struggles with his feelings for an Italian bartender he meets in a gay bar.
- Blues for Mister Charlie: a 1964 play about the murder of a young Black man in Mississippi in 1955 (the year Emmett Till was lynched). Baldwin dedicated the play to civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who had been slain months before the show opened on Broadway.
- Another Country: a 1962 bestseller set in Harlem, Greenwich Village and France and dealing with interracial, bisexual and extramarital hookups (all taboo at the time), as well as a self-destructive hero.
But you see the problem: Baldwin was writing in the 1950s and '60s, when subject matter that was racial, interracial, homosexual or even just extramarital was expressly forbidden by the morality-policing Hays Code that preceded the movie-rating system.
That Baldwin was himself Black, gay and outspoken made producing his work all the tougher. Still, he kept trying.
What happens to a dream deferred?
While interviewing Ingmar Bergman for Esquire magazine in 1960, Baldwin proposed a century-spanning slavery drama (a project he later pitched to directors Gordon Parks and François Truffaut).
In 1968, he was working on a screenplay for Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X but withdrew his script when the studio started talking about casting Charlton Heston as the Black revolutionary.
He came up with a treatment in the 1970s for Giovanni's Room that reportedly intrigued both Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.
Sadly, none of those drafts got traction. But he did write a book-length essay on Hollywood, The Devil Finds Work, which The Atlantic has called "the most powerful piece of film criticism ever written."
It's part memoir, part reflection on dozens of films, from a Joan Crawford/Clark Gable thriller that his mother took him to when he was 7 to the Sidney Poitier-shackled-to-Tony Curtis chain gang drama The Defiant Ones, which he noted had a self-sacrificing ending that played very differently in Harlem than in white neighborhoods.
Baldwin was in many senses ahead of his time, but time has a way of catching up. It says something about his impact that what struck uptight studio heads as problematic when he was alive — that he so loved all his characters, be they Black, white, gay, straight, promiscuous, misguided, whatever — would today be counted as a strength.
Yes, he was confrontational, but to a purpose: As he put it in a phrase that sounds a lot like the ultimate Hollywood ending, "I really do believe that we can all become better than we are."
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