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topicnews · September 4, 2024

At “Fight Night” Peacock robbery with acting heavyweights

At “Fight Night” Peacock robbery with acting heavyweights

The heavyweights, literally, in “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” — an eight-episode true-crime drama premiering Sept. 5 on NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock — are Muhammad Ali and Jerry Quarry, the professional boxers whose Oct. 26, 1970, bout at Atlanta’s Municipal Auditorium laid the foundation for a climactic series of robberies, murders and lynchings.

Away from the boxing ring, viewers of “Fight Night” will meet another category of heavyweights – acting heavyweights.

The project’s star-studded cast includes Terrence Howard, Taraji P. Henson and Samuel L. Jackson, who also starred in Craig Brewer’s first two major films: “Hustle & Flow” (in which Howard and Henson play pimps and prostitutes, respectively) and “Black Snake Moan” (in which Jackson plays an embittered blues musician who chains Christina Ricci to a radiator).

In that sense, “Fight Night” represents something of an extended professional family reunion for the actors and Memphis-based Brewer, who directed the first two and last two of the eight episodes and is one of the series’ executive producers.

While filming a scene with Howard and Jackson on a hotel balcony earlier this year, “I said to Terrence, ‘You don’t know how moved I am today. Seeing you two together, you mean so much to me,'” said Brewer, 52.

Howard may have been similarly moved. He was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar in 2005 for his role as a soulful pimp who becomes a wannabe rapper in the Memphis-set film “Hustle & Flow.” His role in “Fight Night,” however, is even more extravagant: He plays “Cadillac” Richie, a wig-wearing, cane-toting gangster and accomplice of New York mob boss Frank Moten, the so-called “Black Godfather,” played by Jackson.

The following trailer contains language that some viewers may find offensive.

Brewer said, “I said to Terrence, ‘You have to be creative, just like DJay (in ‘Hustle & Flow’), and he said to me, ‘I think I want my hair to look like Bee Gee’s,’ and I was like, ‘Whaaaat?’ But he pulled it off.”

As for Jackson, “Sam is perhaps the best teacher I’ve ever had when it comes to directing actors. It’s a combination of getting out of the way of the actors and engaging them at the level they need to be engaged at. When the camera pans to him, you just feel the audience smile. ‘I know this guy, he’s going to entertain me, and he’s worked for decades to give me everything he’s got.'”

Like most of the main characters in Fight Night — including the main antagonists Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams (Kevin Hart), a money dealer whose partying routine turns to disaster, and JD Hudson (Don Cheadle), Atlanta’s first black police detective — Richie and Moten were real people. (Henson — who reteamed with Howard and Brewer in episodes of the hit TV series Empire — plays Williams’ real-life lover, Vivian Thomas.)

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The true story behind “Fight Night”

“Fight Night” is an adaptation of a 2020 podcast produced by Will Packer, the veteran filmmaker who is also an executive producer on the Peacock series. Brewer said, “This is a really amazing story that involves a real-life situation with a fight between Muhammad Ali, a party that was thrown with all these gangsters, and how someone thought it would be a good idea to rob the party. It’s a story that’s been on people’s lips in Atlanta for years, but it’s not known nationally.”

Or as the on-screen text at the beginning of the first episode puts it: “BASED ON SOME SHIT THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.” (In fact, the S-word is on full display onscreen: If Fight Night were released in theaters, it would be rated R for profanity and nudity.)

The armed robbery of more than 200 boxing fans depicted in “Fight Night” occurred during a party at the “Chicken Man’s” house that attracted numerous crime bosses and other crooks who had come to Atlanta from all over the country for the fight.

The much-hyped fight was particularly significant because it was Ali’s first professional heavyweight bout in three years, after being suspended from boxing for refusing to report for military service. Fight Night features Ali as a main character (played by Dexter Darden), and the series dramatizes the tension created by the presence of an athlete described here by a non-fan as a “racist traitor.”

According to a 1970 New York Times article, the robbery’s victims were lured to the house with “engraved invitations,” where “the robbers met the partygoers as they arrived, herded them into a basement and forced them to strip and hand over their money and jewelry.” Soon, both police and vengeful gangsters were on the robbers’ trail.

Craig Brewer’s “Fight Night” inspiration

“Fight Night,” produced by Kevin Hart’s Hartbeat Productions and Will Packer Media, is Brewer’s first work behind the camera since the Eddie Murphy sequel, “Coming to America 2,” which was shot just before the COVID-19 lockdowns and essentially didn’t play in theaters but instead streamed on Amazon Prime, where it was a huge hit. (According to ratings service Nielsen, viewers spent 1.4 billion minutes (I watched the film during its first week of release in March 2021.)

“It all happened very quickly,” Brewer said of “Fight Night.” He said he started scouting locations in December, “and basically moved to Atlanta in January.” Filming of the eight episodes (or “rounds,” as they’re called here) took place from Feb. 12 to mid-June, with Brewer responsible for what he called “the big hard work of establishing what the show is going to be like. The feel and the mood and also the editorial style.”

That atmosphere includes colorful 1970s costumes and production designs, authentic Atlanta locations, and a funky score by Memphis native Scott Bomar, recorded—at a relatively breakneck pace—at Sam Phillips Recording Service with local musicians who worked at times in the style of Bomar’s Stax-like soul-jazz band The Bo-Keys.

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But even as Fight Night revisits the past, it also looks to the future. Several characters are portrayed as “visionaries” who see Atlanta’s potential as a “black mecca” – an “empire” built on “black wealth.”

Brewer said that while he was “obviously very inspired” by the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, which were integral to his 2019 Netflix film “Dolemite Is My Name” starring Eddie Murphy, the “surprising inspiration” for “Fight Night” was Norman Jewison, the director of films as diverse as “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Rollerball,” “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Moonstruck.”

Brewer said that when he saw the original 1968 version of “Thomas Crown: The Adventures of Thomas the Crown,” which Jewison directed with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, “I saw him use these panels” – split screens and other graphic devices that occasionally divide the frame into panels with different images, like the pages of a comic book.

“The way it was done was like a storytelling device, and I realized I could use these panels and blocks and split screens to speed up the action in ‘Fight Night,'” he said.

“Also, at the end of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ there are these great filters that make the lights look like stars, so we incorporated those into the fight scene with Muhammad Ali.”

Jewison (who Brewer never met) died on Jan. 20 at age 97 while Brewer was preparing “Fight Night.” Brewer said, “There will only be a handful of directors who stop the presses when they die, and Norman Jewison wasn’t really one of those directors, but then when you start mentioning his films, they’re all over the place. He was always looking for the truth and always loved the stories he loved, regardless of whether people thought he should be part of those stories,” including “Fiddler on the Roof,” about a Jewish community in Tsarist Russia (Jewison was Protestant, not Jewish), and the racial justice dramas “A Soldier’s Story” and “The Hurricane.”

“I feel a certain kinship with him,” Brewer said. “Sometimes I’m a curiosity to people because the projects I work on are stories that have a lot of African-American characters. I tell people the truth, which is, ‘I like working with the best.'”

According to Brewer, one of those “best” now includes Shaye Ogbonna, the creator and head writer of the “Fight Night” series. (Ogbonna is also a fan who has borrowed images from Brewer’s films to promote the series.)

Brewer said Ogbonna’s script convinced him to tackle “Fight Night” because “it’s a great script based on sports and politics and crime and the streets, but most of all, it’s regional. It was an Atlanta story told by an Atlanta guy who loves Atlanta as much as I love Memphis. So it was a natural fit.”

“Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” on Peacock

The first three “rounds” of Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist will premiere on Peacock on Thursday, September 5. The following five episodes will air weekly on Thursdays from September 12 to October 10.

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