OnWriting Live: Shaka King, “Judas and the Black Messiah”

By: Geri Cole

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Transcript

Geri Cole: You’re listening to OnWriting, a podcast from the Writers Guild of America, East. I’m your host Geri Cole. In each episode, you’ll hear writers working in film, television, and news break down everything from the writing process, to pitching, favorite jokes, to key scenes, and so much more.

Hello, I’m Geri Cole, and welcome to the final installment of the Black History Month live tapings of OnWriting. In these special episodes, we’ve been talking with black screenwriters who have written amazing black films about black icons. Today’s episode is being presented by the WGAE Black Writers Salon, and I’d like to welcome one of my fellow Salon coachers, Rashidi Hendrix. To conclude our rousing series of Black History Month talks, we’ll be speaking with Shaka King, co-writer and director of Judas and the Black Messiah.

Judas and the Black Messiah is the powerful true story of Fred Hampton played by Daniel Kaluuya, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, and his betrayal by an FBI informant, William O’Neal played by LaKeith Stanfield, which led to Hampton being executed in bed in a pre-dawn raid by Chicago law enforcement. The film’s screenplay is by Will Berson and Shaka King, the story by Will Berson, Shaka King, Kenny Lucas, and Keith Lucas, better known as the Lucas brothers.

King also wrote produced and directed three previous films. His debut feature film, Newlyweeds, won the Someone to Watch Award at the 2014 Independent Spirit Awards, after premiering at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. His next project Mulignans, which he co-wrote with Kristan Sprague, competed in the USA Narrative Short Film Program at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and won the Nantucket Film Festival Screenwriting Award. He also co-wrote and directed the 2017 short film, LaZercism, starring LaKeith Stanfield. Additionally, King has written and directed for several series, including High Maintenance, Shrill, and Random Acts of Flyness. Please welcome Shaka King. Thank you so much for talking with us today.

Shaka King: My pleasure, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Geri Cole: So I guess first question is really just how are you doing? How are you holding up? These are rough, rough days.

Shaka King: I’m doing all right. Kind of taking everything in stride, day by day.

Geri Cole: Are you able to feel like you can get work done, or is it just sort of like…

Shaka King: No. I haven’t done any work. I was doing a little bit of work I’d say maybe almost two months ago now. A little bit more. Whenever, I think right before this press run started I was starting to dig into something interesting. And then since that happened, I’ve had to cast it aside for now.

Geri Cole: Yeah, yeah. I really feel like, or I’ve been constantly questioning. I was like, “Does it make me less professional if I don’t feel productive during this time, or does it make me more human?” I don’t know. So first I also want to say, thank you so much for making this film. I think like most Americans, I only had sort of a vague understanding of the Fred Hampton story, and did not appreciate how young he was, how effective of a leader he was, and how clearly he was murdered by the FBI and the Chicago Police Department. So it’s an important American history story, it’s an important black history story, that deserves a more prominent place in our collective memory, especially since it feels like things have not really changed that much. So thank you, thank you, for making this film.

But also, how did arguable a comedy writer and director get to this project, to making a thriller about the murder of Fred Hampton? What drew you to this story, and did you have to convince folks that you were the right person to make it?

Shaka King: Well it came to me from some comedy writers, so that’s sort of the irony of it all. Lucas brothers brought me the idea in 2016, and they said basically, “We want to make a movie about Fred Hampton and William O’Neal that we envision as The Departed set inside the world of COINTELPRO.” And like yourself, I probably had a sort of surface level understanding of Chairman Fred Hampton as an icon, and the Panthers really as an iconic political organization. I had heard his name my entire life growing up, I knew that he… the story I’d been told was that he was shot 100 times while lying asleep next to his pregnant wife. That’s what I heard growing up. Which isn’t quite accurate, but is pretty close to the events.

And I knew nothing about the way he lived, and I knew nothing about William O’Neal whatsoever. But I did know that… just instinctively, I grew up in a household where even though I didn’t have a really holistic understanding of the Panthers as a political organization, they were lauded as heroes in my household and in my community. And I knew that this was a piece of history, even despite just my sort of surface level understanding, that would be valuable to bring forth to the masses in this very clever, sort of pop cultural vessel that the Lucas Brothers had kind of crafted for it. And then once I started to research the Panthers, and the Illinois chapter, and Chairman Fred Hampton, it galvanized me even more to make sure that it came to fruition.

Geri Cole: Let’s talk a little bit about that collaborative writing process with Will and the Lucas brothers. How did that work?

Shaka King: So the Lucas brothers had maybe a one to two page outline, and they gave me that, they gave me some books to read. And so I started working with them and kind of beefed that outline to probably somewhere between, anywhere between probably seven and 10 pages. And then eventually, we were introduced to Will Berson through Jermaine Fowler, who plays Mark Clark in the film. And Will was off writing a more traditional kind of Fred Hampton biopic, and the antagonist in his film was actually J. Edgar Hoover.

And we decided after some conversations to team up and go in the direction of making this the sort of two hander, Departed, COINTELPRO movie that the Lucas brothers had pitched. And so myself and Will started writing the screenplay. First we wrote the story over a course of a week in an apartment that I had rented in Silver Lake, and put it on cards and put it on the wall, and photographed it. And then Will went off and kind of turned those cards into an outline, sent it to me, I rewrote the outline, sent it back to him. And that process kind of informed how we wrote the screenplay. It was very similarly… he’d write a draft, send it to me, I’d rewrite the draft, send it back, and exchange pages that way.

Geri Cole: So did you have to do… I mean you obviously did additional research on Fred Hampton. Was there any part of the history that you had to leave out to service the story?

Shaka King: A ton of it, just because the history in full is far too expansive for a movie format. You’d need a limited series, and you’d need several seasons to tell the story in full. So a great deal of the real story was sacrificed. Major players on both sides, members of the Illinois chapter who were integral in the party’s rise, folks like Doc Satchel, Wanda Ross, Che Brooks, the list goes on and on. Bobby Rush was marginalized in our version of the events, even though he was really cofounder of the chapter.

And then on the side of law enforcement, Mayor Richard Daley who was a major figure in the story had to go by the wayside. Same goes for state’s attorney Edward Hanrahan. Marlin Johnson. Just a number of characters who were instrumental in the assassination plot we had to sacrifice.

Rashidi Hendrix: So when you were outlining this, just this idea and then eventually it became a script, how was it in dealing with certain aspects of getting the story right? Did you have to consult the family while you were writing, did you have to consult other former Panthers in the organization just to get kind of the accuracy that you may not get from books and things like that? How involved was that communication when you had to really craft the script and get it to a point where you really felt like it was authentic?

Shaka King: Yeah, well you start out writing what you know, and that’s the information that you glean from texts, and articles, and documentaries. And then eventually, we made contact with Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., who ultimately introduced us to his mother Akua Njeri, formerly known as Deborah Johnson. And we were in dialogue with him primarily, but ultimately with both of them over the course of over a year. And initially, it was just really them I think getting a sense as to whether they could trust us, us stating our intentions and restating our intentions, working on securing the family home which he and his family were interested and still are in the process of turning Chairman Fred Hampton’s childhood home into a museum, so it was helping them get that secured. And just getting to know one another.

And that happened before they gave us any information as to the real history. That didn’t really happen in a real way until they officially joined on as cultural consultants about two weeks into shooting. They’d give us little gems here and there, but we had to be kind of wary as to what we included in the script, because we didn’t have an agreement in place at that time when we were writing, and so it wouldn’t have been proper to include some of that information that they were giving us in fairly casual conversations in the script.

I also made contact with a number of former Illinois chapter members, starting with Lynn French, who introduced me to Joan McCarty, and she introduced me to Michael McCarty and Bruce Dixon, and just a number of chapter members. Ultimately Blair Anderson, who was also a survivor of the assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. So I always had to be somewhat cautious as to what I could include, and that was dependent upon their comfort level whether I could include it, but also just rights issues.

But you’d be surprised how once you’ve started to really research this material, how your imagination is able to synthesize things you’ve read and create scenarios that are incredibly close to the historical record, and you only find out after the fact. Like I had Blair Anderson be like, “How did you know that? How did you know this thing? Where did you hear this thing, that’s not in any book.” I’m like, “I don’t know.” It made sense that it would go down this way based on what I had read.

Geri Cole: I feel like you’ve actually perfect led me to the next question and are already talking about, like your approach to writing real people. What’s the line essentially? You feel like you sort of need to respect the history, and certainly in this case with someone like Fred Hampton. But also, do you being a filmmaker want to create characters that serve the story?

Shaka King: Yeah, I mean you go up to the line, you go over the line, you go back the other direction. It’s a dance. Initially I started out from a place of, I don’t feel comfortable putting people in paces they weren’t. So for example, the shootout that takes place at Panther Headquarters that took place during the summer of ’69, that happened. Police did burn down Panther HQ. William O’Neal. It took a lot of… I was not comfortable for the longest putting William O’Neal present at that shootout, because it felt like when it comes to shootouts, when it comes to people going to prison, when it comes to people losing their life, that happened to someone. That’s a traumatic experience that happened to someone in real life. I didn’t feel comfortable inserting someone there who wasn’t there. And it wasn’t until I was like, well, what if we show him behaving like a coward? I said, okay, I can maybe put him there if that’s the case. Because ultimately, we were all in agreement, we’re making a movie. We’re making a piece of narrative fiction.

And similarly in the case of Judy Harmon, we had written the script, and I’m looking through the script and I’m like, “Man, the Illinois chapter was known for having all these powerful women, and because we’re focusing on the security cadre and the security cadre didn’t have any women, I’m finding that we’re marginalizing these women and they’re not in the narrative. That doesn’t seem okay to me.” Well we’ve got these two security cadre characters, and we are changing names at this point. There’s so many people who started out as this real person, but now because we’re not comfortable naming them for legal reasons, we have to change their name. So what if we combine these two characters into one character and make them a woman, so we have at least another powerful woman in the movie besides Deborah Johnson? And so yeah, there weren’t any women in the security cadre, there wasn’t a Panther named Judy Harmon. But we kind of need that, this movie needs that. In some ways, it’s more historically accurate to have this made up character than it is to completely remove the role of women in the chapter.

So it’s a negotiation process that you have to go through, and it’s subjective, and it’s all dependent upon the individual. There are those writers who say, “Look, this is public domain. I can do whatever I want. I don’t need to reach out to the family. I don’t need to consult anyone.” That’s an opinion, and even though it’s not one I agree with, they do have that legal right.

Geri Cole: So one thing I’m very excited to talk with you about is the perspectives. So at one point while watching this film, my husband was like, “I hate this man. Why are we following this man?” And I’m like, “The movie’s called Judas and the Black Messiah. We’re following the POV of arguably the villain.” So I guess I just want to talk a little bit about this unsympathetic protagonist. What really made you want to tell the story from his point of view?

Shaka King: Well I think that that’s a bit of sleight of hand on our part, because the movie’s actually not told from his point of view. I think a lot of times, people watch the movie, and because of the structure of the interview, the fact that we bookend the film with the interview and that it’s peppered throughout to some degree, your mind automatically goes to movies that you see and that do that. And so you automatically go, “Okay, oh. This movie’s from William O’Neal’s perspective.” But the truth of the matter is, is that you never even see William O’Neal and Fred Hampton in the same room alone, in a car alone. They have no scenes alone. That was actually not allowed by Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., they’re not friends actually at all. They’re not close. We fool you into thinking that.

The truth of the matter is that the movie’s actually, in terms of Fred Hampton, it’s from Deborah Johnson’s POV. His entire narrative is from her POV, and he is humanized through not just her eyes, but through her interactions with him. And so we tricked you, you know what I mean? It’s actually, format wise, it’s more like Heat in the sense of, it’s a movie about these two individuals and their disparate journeys, and how their lives collide in this way. But they’re not really, neither story is told from one’s POV.

And so the reason for doing that, to get back to the reason for doing that, started from just it was baked into the pitch. When you think Departed inside the world of COINTELPRO, you’re going for a two hander from the jump. That’s why we cast two movie stars in the leads, to very much, through the part of the Heat, that sort of template we had in mind. And initially, it was done that way to just get the movie made, because being in the industry, we knew that there was no way that we were going to get a traditional Fred Hampton biopic made in Hollywood, and that the way to get it made was to couch it in genre. We understood that.

But then it became a place of okay, well how can we sort of use this to highlight the politics of the Panthers in this film? And so we said, okay, well Fred Hampton is always talking about the… he’s basically always railing against capitalism. And in a lot of ways, I think we as a culture have a tough time sort of understanding what that even looks like. And so yeah, I think there are movies that can sort of deconstruct capitalism as a structure, which is really, really, really amazing when people can do that, and really, really hard. I think it’s a lot easier to deconstruct capitalism as a culture than it is as a structure. And so it was like, okay, well how can we sort of show what that looks like? Specifically black capitalism, right? Because our characters are black. How can we sort of show what that looks like in a character and a lifestyle?

And actually in different organizations. One could argue that the Crowns, they look at black capitalism as a methodology, empowering black people, right? And the dichotomy between the Panthers and the Crowns and the conversations that they’re having in some ways are around that. “We feed over 3,000 kids a week.” “Motherfucker, the Crowns feed more babies than General Mills. Who do you think employs their mommies and their daddies?” He’s saying yo, we put food on the table for these families. And Fred was like, “We can do even more,” so he’s trying to get him to think differently.

And then in the case of O’Neal, he’s an example of how really black capitalism works I believe, where it’s just servicing the individual. And so in a lot of ways, he as a character embodies a capitalist cultural ideology. And we show what that looks like, and we show the harm. Not just the harm that it causes the Panthers as an organization, but the harm that it causes William O’Neal himself, and how the snake eats the tail at the end of the day. He ends up consuming himself and his soul, and taking his own life, and he gets what he wanted. It’s a tragedy, because he wants this thing, and he gets what he wanted, and he’s more miserable than he ever could be.

And I think we did an effective job at that just in terms of seeing how this man’s wardrobe changes, seeing how he feels, seeing how he treats the black waitstaff at that restaurant. The way that he luxuriates in being the only black person in that white space, and how that gives him power and domain over others. The ways in which he takes pleasure in manipulating others and winning, you know what I’m saying? Like greed is good. It’s the same shit. The way in which the movie ends with him getting his own business, and his handler saying, “You’re free.” But also saying you’re free, and his-

Geri Cole: [crosstalk 00:19:25].

Shaka King: I’m trapping you deeper. Exactly. Give me more info and get more money, and I’m keeping you on the hook. And simultaneously, you contrast that against the way that we show Fred culturally as a socialist, as a Marxist. You see him amongst his… he’s always, “Power where there’s people.” People equals power for him. It’s the idea of money equals power for O’Neal, people equals power for Fred. Seeing how he’s always surrounded by others. The only time he’s not is when he’s in the hole in prison, and when he’s one on one with Deborah. And so that was the reason politically that we chose to kind of… to make O’Neal a central character, because the way to show who Fred Hampton was is to also show who he wasn’t.

Rashidi Hendrix: No, that’s amazing. And I think you really did a great job capturing that. I just wanted to see, just even though you’ve directed this film, do you feel like that the conversation can continue on now? Do you feel like there’s an ability to kind of open the door now for just even more conversation, about Fred Hampton and the Panthers? Because there’s a lot of conservatives that will compare the Black Panther to a terrorist organization, and to other terrorist organizations. And I feel like this was just a great conversation starter.

Shaka King: Yeah, that’s literally what it is. It’s literally an entry point into some of these ideas and this history. Literally basic entry point. I think that that’s the role of a piece of pop culture essentially, is it’s not like a documentary. This is not… we didn’t attempt to make it. I mean, early on we did just because we were that ambitious, but we rapidly saw that it was impossible to do a sort of soup to nuts retelling of this history. So it’s literally just a, hey, let’s make this cool and popular so that it becomes cool and popular to learn about this stuff.

Geri Cole: That actually, I feel like it also sparked the conversation that I also had previously last week, we spoke with Suzan-Lori Parks about this betrayal of black people by other black people, and how do we hold them in history? Do we hold them with contempt, do we hold them with compassion? I’m curious to know what you think.

Shaka King: Wow, that’s great. I think you can hold them with all of those things. In writing about William O’Neal and learning about William O’Neal, I initially… it took a lot of drafts before Will and I stopped referring to him as a sociopath, because that was a really easy way we realized to dismiss what he was doing, and not really… it was a wasted opportunity to learn about ourselves in a lot of ways. And so I think it’s natural, and I think it’s fine, to identify the behaviors that he engaged in as reprehensible. But I also think it’s useful to contextualize them, so that we can identify ways in which we copy some of that behavior in a more innocuous way in our own day-to-day.

Geri Cole: I thought it was an especially powerful choice to bookend the film with the interview, starting with the fictionalized and ending with the real… and I feel like you’ve sort of already been talking about this. But in that moment, I sort of was like, “Oh, this is not a redemptive story about this man.” And so I guess besides wanting to learn more about the Panthers, was there a specific message that you wanted the audience to walk away with?

Shaka King: Yeah, one was, on the O’Neal side of things, was the dangers of being apolitical. It didn’t just cost the world a great man, Chairman Fred Hampton. It cost William O’Neal his life ultimately.

Rashidi Hendrix: So Shaka, talking up a little bit about your career, you’ve changed hats. From being able to go from comedies to drama, what was that process like, and just having you… you’ve directed on High Maintenance and People of Earth, which Geri’s a big fan of. And Shrill. Like-

Rashidi Hendrix: Can you talk about your approach to changing when you’re going from comedy to drama? I’d love to know about what it was like for you.

Shaka King: The thing is, I never saw myself as changing hats. I always just had one hat of filmmaker. And I think that the business kind of pigeonholes you as this or that, the comedy person, or the drama person, or the horror person. But a lot of filmmakers that I know, they don’t think of themselves that way, and they’re always eager to demonstrate… not even demonstrate actually. Not demonstrate. They’re always eager to explore just the different ways in which stories manifest in their minds. And they encounter resistance a lot of times within the industry. And so I was fortunate that the Lucas brothers, for whatever reason, probably because they themselves have probably found themselves in this position as comedy writers, but also two dudes who almost graduated from law school, and at one point I think wanted to get involved in doing some kind of social justice legal work. So I think them recognizing the kind of vastness of their own interests, in talking to me, looking at my work, they could probably get a sense of the fact that I too wasn’t just one thing.

Geri Cole: Yeah, I feel like the idea of sort of picking a lane feels a bit antiquated. Even though it does feel… is it better, does it help people understand who I am better as a creator, or does it pigeonhole? And I think maybe it does more pigeonholing than it does help focusing.

Rashidi Hendrix: Well, it’s a land lock. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t do both, but what it is, is it’s always like an opportunity for just the industry just to say what you should be doing, what you can’t be doing.

Shaka King: I feel like in the beginning, you’re just trying to get a job. Just trying to get the industry to notice you as a creative person who’s good enough to get paid some money to do it. And you get in as… and they’re like, “You’re this.” And you say, “Okay, I’m that.” And then I think first they say… they don’t say you’re this, they say maybe you’re this. Because first, you have to do it a number of times before they say, “Okay, this person is this now.” And then after you do it a number of times, you’re now that. And look, it’s a potentially… it could be a velvet coffin, you know what I mean? It’s a gift and a curse, because… there was a time, I mean I wasn’t looking to make a studio feature or to make this movie per se. I was content doing half hour comedies, and making my shorts on the side.

And if I’m honest, I had a desire to make another movie. I didn’t have an idea that I was passionate about until the Lucas brothers brought me this one. And I think that’s part of the reason that I seized upon it. It wasn’t just that this is a good idea that I can see. I think it was also, part of it was like oh, it’s another movie. It’s another opportunity to make another movie. And those things just weren’t… you know how Hollywood is. It’s kind of a list-based system. And when you’re on the mid tier to low tier comedy director list, no one is thinking of you for feature length films. You’re not even in the conversations. So I just was lucky that the Lucas brothers brought this my way.

Geri Cole: Let’s talk a little bit about short films, because you have made a few, and I feel like it’s an underrated medium. I feel like it’s a great way to get to make stuff that you want to make without having a lot of money, but it also… yeah, so I guess I’m just curious about how your goals in making short films, and/or your outlook on making short films.

Shaka King: I love short films. I made a feature length film I took to Sundance, and came home in debt, and the movie basically might as well have been unsold. And making the short, I made the short Mulignans that I made after Newlyweeds, about a year after, a year and change. And it got me re-excited about the craft. It was just an opportunity to make art again. I hadn’t made anything in a while. It brought me so much personal fulfillment. It was the most satisfying experience I’ve ever had making a movie next to this film. Maybe more so. It’s definitely on par with maybe even more so, because it really brought me back from a dark place, Mulignans did.

And on top of that, when I screened it at Sundance, a friend of mine named Chris Goodwin who wrote for the Lucas brothers on… yeah, it was for Adult Swim. He saw it, liked it, and said, “Hey, I’m going to share this with some folks at Adult Swim.” And one of the people he shared it with was looking for a pilot presentation director for this show that they were shooting for Killer Mike. And I was non-union, and they liked my short, and they liked some other shorts I’d done.

And so they hired me to shoot this pilot presentation, and it was because I had that existing body of work, that TV pilot essentially that I got my first job with People of Earth. So my short Mulignans got me my first TV directing job. And I made it for $500, and I did it just for fun. I did it just for fun. I was going to throw it up on WorldStar, I wasn’t even going to enter it in Sundance. My friends had to convince me to enter it into Sundance, because I was like, “I just want to see what it does on WorldStar.”

And so I really think short films can really… I believe that if you really want to make stuff, you should not delay, and delay, and delay until until everything is perfect. Barry Jenkins gave me that advice when I was like 27 years old. I met him at South By Southwest on one of those speed dating things, and I wanted to make Newlyweeds. And I was like, “I can make it for all these millions, or I could try to just make it for a couple whatever.” And he was like, “Make it for a couple whatever.” He was like, “Don’t wait, don’t delay.” And he was right.

Rashidi Hendrix: Yeah, because at the end of the day, sometimes you’ve just got to get it out there, and that’s what it is. It’s just actually doing it, and not letting it be just a great idea.

Geri Cole: And also never knowing what it will connect you to, where it’s like you put it out there and then it ended up connecting to something that you never could’ve anticipated. Which brings me to a question that I love asking, what is your definition of success? I feel like success never looks like what you think it’s going to look like, and so I’m curious what you used to think success looked like, and then now what you think success looks like or feels like.

Shaka King: Yeah no, for sure. I have to think about what I used to think success looked like. I think success used to look to me like getting paid to do this professionally, to just direct TV, make TV, make films. Getting paid to do it professionally was I think success. Go to film school, make a feature at film school, take ti to Sundance, now I’m in the pipeline, that’s success. Now my measure of success, I watched a documentary years ago about Richard Pryor, and they interviewed Cornell West. And Cornell West said this thing about Richard Pryor that I don’t necessarily agree with, but I think it set the bar for me for success. He said Richard Pryor was the freest black man of all time. He said he died the freest black man of all time. Which I haven’t even read a lot about Richard Pryor, I don’t know if that’s true. But when he said that I was like, that’s something to aspire to for me. That’s like my goal, is for someone to talk about me like that when I’m dead. And so that’s kind of my compass now. That’s what I prioritize. That’s what I’ve prioritized for a while now, and I find that it brings me a lot more satisfaction than my previous definition of success.

Geri Cole: I actually just saw a quote, I feel like last week. I’m going to get this wrong. But it was from Audre Lorde, and it was talking about how she wants to just keep working to the point where no matter what she says, thinks, comes out of her ears, is just fire, and that she wants to go out like a fucking meteor. And I thought that that was a fantastic-

Shaka King: That’s amazing. That’s amazing.

Geri Cole: Yeah, I was like, that’s amazing.

Shaka King: That’s amazing. That’s amazing.

Geri Cole: I was like, that’s my new goal right there, is to go out like a meteor.

Shaka King: Jeez, jeez, jeez. That’s amazing.

Geri Cole: So I also want to urge listeners to, if you have questions, to throw them in the chat. We’ve got about 10 minutes left, so if you’re eager to ask some questions please feel free to throw them below.

And so another followup to the success question is, is there something that you… if you have any hard one lessons. And so by that I mean, something that you appreciate now that you really wish you had appreciated before.

Shaka King: Something that I appreciate now… Today, I was talking with some students at Howard today. I had a teacher, professor, mention a book that they’re reading that I was so impressed that he had them reading this, about… I forget the name of the book, but it was about failure and about the lessons to take from failure, and the opportunity that failure provides you to grow as a person and as an artist. And I can’t say that had I read that as a film student, I would have read it and had the takeaway that I have having experienced that, but now having had experienced failure, and having grown from failure, I have a great respect for it and appreciation for it. And I don’t fear it, because if it happens, I know that it’s… you’ve got to die to be reborn essentially. And so that’s something that I think I’m appreciative of now that I definitely couldn’t appreciate when I was going through it.

Geri Cole: I feel like you’ve now given me a question for you, but also a future question which I hadn’t thought of as like, what does failure look like to you?

Shaka King: At this point for me, failure would look like not attempting something that I thought was risky, or just not fighting, not putting up a fight. Just giving up essentially is to me the only failure at this point. But before, failure used to look to me like people not liking something I made, it not selling. Expectations not being met specifically. Expectations not being met I think is how I used to define failure. And now, I try to remove expectations from anything I do as much as I possibly can. Which is hard, obviously. Because how can you have a goal without expectations? But I do try to navigate my expectations in a way I didn’t until I got older.

Rashidi Hendrix: And it’s also too about putting those blinders on. Because as your star is growing, Hollywood will try to tell you when something fails when you know that it succeeded, you know what I mean? And that’s the thing that sometimes disturbs me, is because who’s to say that someone else, a system, can tell me where I failed? I’m the only one that can say I failed if you know what I’m saying.

Shaka King: Agree 1000%, agree 1000%. Yeah.

Rashidi Hendrix: Absolutely. Looks like we’ve got some questions, you want to go into the questions Geri?

Geri Cole: Yeah sure, for sure. Do you want to start?

Rashidi Hendrix: Yeah. Okay, so our first question from Elijah Gabriel. “Do you have another idea ruminating for a movie, or do you think you’ll be going back to shorts for a bit?”

Shaka King: I have another idea ruminating for a movie. I don’t know what I’ll do in terms of next, hopefully another feature but we’ll see.

Geri Cole: Has the idea that you have ruminating has not told you what it wants to be yet? Another feature or something else?

Shaka King: It wants to be a feature. Yeah, I want to do another movie.

Geri Cole: From David Taylor we have, “Thank you for making this film. I love the opening scene. Could you talk about deciding to start with the scene of William going into the bar, his motivation in that scene, and your choices in filming it?”

Shaka King: Yeah. So that’s one of my favorite, I was always very excited to shoot that scene. It was like I was so hyped. So that scene, there’s a lot going on in the sense of going into this, I knew that probably most people who saw this movie, if they saw the trailer would know… or even if they just read Wikipedia would know that William O’Neal is an FBI informant. But I also recognized that a lot people aren’t going to know what that means, and they’re not going to know when he’s… they’re going to expect to see him become one. So I was like, it would be kind of cool if we start the movie and you don’t… and we start the movie with O’Neal dressed as an FBI agent. And so you don’t know when he goes inside this bar, and he “arrests” this guy for stealing a car, ideally we wanted to frame it so you didn’t know if in that moment he’s working on behalf of the FBI.

So we dressed him as such, obviously he’s pretending so we had him perform. And it was so fun, because it was like well, how would a 17 year old black kid in Chicago, how would he interpret how the FBI behaves, right? He’s never met an FBI agent. Well, it would be on movies and TV. So he talked like those guys, you know what I’m saying? He put on that affectation. So it was fun to play with LaKeith in terms of finding how we modulate that voice. So do we go full cartoon? Or do we kind of somewhere in between?

And then it was like, let’s also have the hat glow, so that his face is concealed a little bit. He feels like a different person. Basically we wanted to align you, and we wanted to do this from the beginning because this is the style of filmmaking overall, is only telling you as much as the people in the room as often as possible. So we wanted him to film the audience just as much as he’s fooling the guys in that bar. So when his hat comes off when he gets headbutted, it’s a reveal not just for them, but it’s also a reveal for you as a viewer.

And then in terms of the visual language of it all, I remember insisting. I was like, “That coat needs to billow in the wind.” Because I just saw that, I was like, “It has to billow.” And my costume designer, Charlese Antoinette Jones and I, we’d talk about it. And she had to specifically make that coat, because all of the coats were too heavy. So she had to tailor make that coat so it would blow in the wind like that. And then it was just, how do we create just the sort of visual iconography of a noir film, so that that opening feels like the opening of a noir film? Which our movie is borrowing from that overall, but again, we’re trying to make you think this guy’s a detective. He’s an FBI agent, rather. And so that, and then the inflated tear, using those horns and that almost feeling like a kind of score in some ways from a 1940s detective flick. All those things kind of working in tandem to create that vibe, that vibration.

And then it was, we also knew… I was like if we nail this opening with the knife going through the roof and all that stuff, people are going to say, “Oh shit,” and they’re going to sit forward. I always say, the touchstone for that opening was X-Men 2. I remember going to see X-Men 2, the one with Nightcrawler. That opening, and just being like, “Oh shit, this movie’s going to be crazy.” And just, I wanted to basically make an opening where you’d say, “Oh shit, this movie’s going to be crazy.” And now we have you entertained. So now we’re giving you the dessert so later, you’ll eat your vegetables.

Rashidi Hendrix: Did you go back and forth on the ending, or did you kind of know, “This is how we’re ending it.” Because a lot of people who are writers… well it’s very common that a lot of writers, they don’t know how to end it. They struggle to get through the first act, the second act is usually like, “Okay, I got this.” And then the third act leading to the ending they’re like, “Wait a minute, is this how I want to end it?” So I was just wondering if you had that kind of dialogue back and forth with your co-writers.

Shaka King: With my first screenplay, with The Newlyweeds even, I found the edit in the ending, and I was… I mean, I found the ending in the edit. That’s not true. I found the ending… we shot the ending, which was a very different ending, and I hated it. And I hated it from the page, I hated it when we shot it. And I realized we could re-jigger it and we could redo some things and come up with an ending that I liked while shooting, and changed it in the midst of that. But I always promised myself… not even just promised myself, but I remember one of my screenwriting teachers at NYU, Mick Casale, telling me, just expressing to us how important it was that we know the end of our movie before we start writing it. He thought that that was really important. And I remember after Newlyweeds and having that experience, and just literally being saved by the bell, being like, “Okay, never again. I’m going to always know the end of a movie before I start writing it.” And so I knew the end of this movie long before, long before we started writing it.

The thing that’s funny is that it was different than what you see. Because in terms of what we shot, that was always going to be the end of what we shot. But in terms of the archival, our plan up until very late in the game was to end the movie with the O’Neal interview and the reveal that he took his own life. And it was after a lot of conversations between myself and the producers in the studio that we decided to share it with Chairman Fred Hampton and his words, and we all agreed that that was just the stronger ending.

Rashidi Hendrix: And the reaction that you got from the family, the former Illinois chapter, did they just say, “You know what, you got it. You got that on the ending.” Did they feel like that was just the pièce de résistance?

Shaka King: Well I mean, I haven’t really spoken much with them about the ending.

Rashidi Hendrix: Oh, okay.

Shaka King: But I’ve spoken with a number of Illinois chapter members about the film, and overall the response has been positive. As Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. says, “A revolutionary is never satisfied.” So there’s always critique. You’re talking about some of the most thoughtful, intelligent, critical minds this world has ever produced, so there’s no way they’re just going to watch this movie and say, “Great job.” And also they lived through it, so it’s really hard to separate what happened and this cinematic retelling, or dramatization really. But overall, they are very happy it exists. They’re happy it portrays the party in a positive light, they’re happy that it does justice to the legacy of Chairman Fred, and they’re happy that it does justice to the legacy of the US government.

Geri Cole: That is exactly right.

Rashidi Hendrix: Well that’s the irony of it.

Geri Cole: Yeah, that is exactly right. That was one of the… not hard things, but kind of hard where it’s like this is… yep, this is where we’re at. It’s always been the case. It’s always been the case.

Rashidi Hendrix: And just very timely, looking at all the events that happened in the world over the last month with the government. It’s just very, very interesting, and just very appropriate and on time. And well done, man. Well done.

Shaka King: Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Geri Cole: It’s a truly incredible film. And rather than talking about the US government, let’s end on talking about how wonderfully it portrays the Black Panther Party, and how we all need to go out and learn more about the Black Panther Party. Because it made me want to learn more about the Black Panther Party.

Shaka King: Great, I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear that.

Geri Cole: So yeah, we’re just about out of time. Shaka, thank you so much for speaking with us today.

Rashidi Hendrix: Thank you Shaka.

Shaka King: Thank you, thank you.

Geri Cole: Thank you for making this film. Yeah, it’s really incredible. Everyone if you haven’t seen it, go out and buy it. If you haven’t seen it, you shouldn’t be listening. You should watch it first and then listen.

Rashidi Hendrix: And also Shaka, I just want to say thanks for having the patience to make this movie. Because you exhibit your own personality into it, and it’s a very… movie that you have to be very patient with, because there’s so many eyes watching. And so I just appreciate that contribution. Thank you.

Shaka King: Thank you, thank you. Thank you Rashidi, thanks a lot.

Rashidi Hendrix: Absolutely man.

Shaka King: Thank you.

Rashidi Hendrix: Much love.

Shaka King: Thank you.

Geri Cole: It was lovely to meet you.

Shaka King: Take care y’all.

Rashidi Hendrix: Good night. Thank you Shaka.

Shaka King: Bye.

Geri Cole: That’s it for this episode. OnWriting is a production of the Writers Guild of America, East. Tech production and original music is by Stockboy Creative. You can learn more about the Writers Guild of America, East online at wgaeast.org, and you can follow the Guild on social media @WGAEast. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and rate us. I’m Geri Cole, thank you for listening, and write on.