Why I Wrote “Detroit”
A first person article from the screenwriter of the new movie Detroit.
A first person article from the screenwriter of the new movie Detroit.
Via Vulture, Academy Award winning screenwriter Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) has written a first person account of why he took up the project and wrote the screenplay for Detroit, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Here is a trailer for the movie:
An excerpt from Boal’s article:
In the summer of 2014, I went up to Detroit to meet a man who had been very hard to find. He was called Cleveland Larry Reed, a common enough name, but it had taken a researcher several months to dig up a working telephone number. I left a few messages. When I finally got him on the phone, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see me, let alone talk about 50 years ago.
I promised that I wouldn’t waste his time, and he eventually let me into his apartment. It looked like Larry, in his mid-60s, hadn’t been out in a couple of days, maybe longer. Living alone, not too steady on his feet, he’d fallen a long way from the glamour and ease of his youth, of electrified nights singing and dancing for the fancy crowds at the Fox Theater downtown.
In 1967, Larry was 18 years old and the co-founder of a Motown group called the Dramatics. They were a bunch of friends who had honed their playground songs into a major-league act, touring the country, opening for Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, all the huge Detroit stars. Larry was deeply committed to his music and career and didn’t court trouble with anybody, much less the police. But one night, in the summer of ’67, at the Algiers Motel in Detroit’s Virginia Park section, he had an encounter with law enforcement that left him permanently wounded — mentally and artistically.
What brought Larry down wasn’t a flaw in his character, or a bad decision made in the heat of a moment, it was shitty luck and racism. At the height of the Detroit riots, when the Dramatics fled from a canceled gig and were trying to find a safe place, Ron Banks, the group’s other co-founder, managed to make it home, and would go on in the following years to lead the Dramatics to Billboard hits. By a random twist of fate, Larry and some of the others tumbled into the Algiers Motel, where they crossed paths with a police squad that judged them by the color of their skin. The result was a night of terror from which Larry never recovered. Turn left, go home. Turn right, grab a hotel room. What separated success from failure for young black men in the late 1960s was so thin, it was almost impossible to delineate in the moment.
On that muggy summer afternoon in 2014, after spending several hours with Larry, I found a lot to respect and admire. He had, despite everything, persevered in his determination to live as an artist. He now sung for various church choirs. I left his apartment feeling deeply compelled by his story and grieving for the potential that had been robbed from him.
For the rest of the article, go here.
Twitter: @DetroitMovie, @markboal.