BEFORE: Al Sharpton carries over from "I Am MLK Jr.", and so do several others via archive footage. It's a different approach to documentary filmmaking tonight, basically someone licensed all the footage of Muhammad Ali appearing on "The Dick Cavett Show" and interspersed that with interviews with Cavett and a bunch of boxing experts and social pundits, creating a kind of timeline review of Ali's career. This was done for another cultural legend, but I'm not putting the two films next to each other, even though Dick Cavett is a staple of my Doc Block line-up each year. I tried to arrange the films differently, and I landed on a structure that's broken down thematically, and all attempts to re-arrange things caused the chain to break, so I decided to leave it alone.
This meant that the famous athletes section was reduced to just one film this year, after the fact I saw the way to work in "Reggie", the doc about Reggie Jackson - but I was raised to hate the NY Yankees, so I'm inclined to make him wait another year, right now adding another film would throw off my whole calendar. That's my story, anyway.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali" (Movie #4,406)
THE PLOT: The life and times of Muhammad Ali, as shown through the lens of his numerous appearances on The Dick Cavett Show.
AFTER: If this one feels like filler, that's only because it totally is. I had the whole framework set for this year's Doc Block, but then in January when I finally replaced my problematic DVR, I could burn movies from HBO and Cinemax to DVD for the first time ever with the new system, and that led me to check out HBO on Demand with a closer eye than ever before. That's where I found the two docs made from Cavett's archives - together they solved a few linking problems, but then they also kind of created another. Only by separating them could I work everything in to this year's chain that I wanted to watch, so we'll get to the other Cavett-based doc in early August. And sure, in previous years I focused on three boxing docs here, two baseball films there, and maybe four tennis films so that the max number of people could carry over. But I'm down to just ONE sports doc this year, it's fine because there's so much other ground to cover.
And hey, if we can chart Faye Dunaway's career through her husbands and boyfriends, and we can chart Liza Minnelli's life through her five post-Judy mentors, then sure, we can chart Muhammad Ali's career via his talk-show appearances. It's notable that when the champ won a boxing match, he was in great demand on the sofa circuit, and also notable that when he lost (it was rare, but it happened) he was still welcome to sit down with Dick Cavett. Cavett swears they became close friends over the years, he also swears that Ali was smarter than he ever let on, but also he's concerned that maybe the leaders of Islam were using him as the public face of their religion. The comparison is made here to Tom Cruise's relationship with the Church of Scientology, that there's some cross-promotion involved, making the celebrity seem more like an everyday sort who practices religion, also normalizing a religion that many people don't really understand.
Remember that Ali was the only three-time heavyweight boxing champion, which means he lost the title twice - and this was back in the days when any person on the street could tell you who the heavyweight boxing champion of the world was. To be fair, people didn't have the internet yet or "Star Wars" movies and TV shows, so there was a lot less competing for people's attention. Boxing's never been high on my entertainment radar, with the exception of the "Rocky" and "Creed" movies, maybe, because it's really a throwback to those gladiator games that Roman emperors put on so the public wouldn't notice they were slowly losing their rights and also taxes were going up. Just saying. Put two men (or women) in a ring and make them fight, and people will watch, that's as true today as it was in the 1960s, as it was in the 0060's A.D.
Cavett actually took credit for writing some of the rhymes that Ali used when he appeared on Jerry Lewis' show earlier in his career. Ali, of course, was known as a poet and this is the first time I've heard that maybe he didn't write all his own material. This also became a concern when he recited some of the same religious dogma on Cavett's show that people remember hearing from the head of the Nation of Islam, meaning that Ali could memorize religious theory, but maybe he didn't have very much of his own. This was also back when it was not typical for celebrities to change their names, and Ali had won a medal in the Olympics under his birth name of Cassius Clay, and after changing to his Islamic name, tended to get upset whenever reporters still called him "Clay" or "Cassius". I think Kareem Abdul-Jabbar went through something similar, but few remember that he was born as Lew Alcindor. Maybe more people change their names than we realize, and we only notice it when someone famous does it?
American society also didn't require its sports stars to be TV-friendly, I'm not sure if Ali was the exception or more like the precursor of things to come. Countless sports stars have been interviewed after baseball or football games over the years and had nothing constructive to say at all, except for how they stepped up to the plate or came out swinging or their teamwork came through for them, or else they dropped the ball entirely and really need to focus on fundamentals more. But then after Ali I think more and more sports stars started popping up on talk shows, or trying harder to get TV guest spots and movie roles, like Tom Brady did.
Again I feel like I'm doing just some clean-up work of my own, because two years ago I watched that two-part doc "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali" which took me through his whole career, start to finish, and this doc tries to do that too, but it's only got 90 minutes to work with, and maybe half of that is given over to the talk-show footage that takes up half of the film. So boxing experts and journalists are called in to tell us all what it meant for Ali to go up against Joe Frazier, or George Foreman, or Joe Frazier again. Well, thank god for that because I don't have time to watch that other doc again, or even read my review of it. Still, Ali's lifetime record was 56-3, and so none of us really have time for the 56 wins, maybe that's why this doc chooses to focus on the 3 losses.
We're also reminded that Ali didn't box for four years, between 1967 and 1971, because he was charged with draft evasion for claiming he was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, and until the case was settled he was stripped of his titled and could not box professionally. It's still a bit weird that since he wouldn't fight with a gun in Vietnam, he was forbidden to beat up a man with his fists in the U.S. and the draft board couldn't resolve those two things. Why not just make an arrangement like Elvis did, where he'd visibly serve his country but also get special treatment where he wouldn't see any actual combat, because, you know, how would THAT look if the heavyweight champ, beloved by many, got shot and killed in the war? It would do more harm than good, so better to just put him to work entertaining the troops by boxing for them or something.
Dick Cavett got to travel to Pennsylvania when Ali was training for the rematch with Frazier, and filmed remote segments showing us the cabin that Ali was living in with no electricity, just a simple kitchen set up, with a pump for water, and no television either. Ali also spent one night at Cavett's home in Montauk, which was only apparently awkward when Cavett's wife called him that night and Ali answered the phone.
Well, when David Bowie and Mick Jagger start showing up in my credits, you know what that means, the rockumentaries are coming. They only appeared here in a montage to prove that Dick Cavett had other famous people on his show, and not just boxers. New topic starts tomorrow, and remember I'm working in concert films this year, there are four more of those on the docket.
Directed by Robert S. Bader (producer of "The Super Bob Einstein Movie")
Also starring Dick Cavett (last seen in "Brats"), Thomas Hauser, Michael Marley, Larry Merchant, Randy Roberts, Ilyasah Shabazz, Clarence Taylor, Juan Williams,
with archive footage of Muhammad Ali (also carrying over from "I Am MLK Jr."), Martin Luther King Jr. (ditto), Malcolm X (ditto), Woody Allen (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love"), Jimmy Breslin (last seen in "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists"), Jim Brown (last seen in "Say Hey, Willie Mays!"), Howard Cosell (last seen in "Billie Jean King: Portrait of a Pioneer"), George Foreman (ditto), Bob Hope (ditto), Angelo Dundee, Louis Farrakhan, Joe Frazier (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Jerry Lewis (last seen in "Bob Fosse: It's Showtime!"), Joe Louis, Lester Maddox, Norman Mailer (last seen in "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Elijah Muhammad, Michael Parkinson, Sugar Ray Robinson,
Lucille Ball (last seen in "Famous Nathan"), Warren Beatty (last seen in "Faye"), David Bowie (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Stevie Wonder (ditto), Jimi Hendrix (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Katharine Hepburn (also last seen in "Faye"), Alfred Hitchcock, Mick Jagger (last seen in "Wham!"), Ted Kennedy, John Lennon (last seen in "Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story"), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Inside Job"), Paul Simon (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Frank Sinatra (also last seen in "Brats"),
RATING: 6 out of 10 awkward questions from Cavett
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