The Venice Film Festival hosted the world premiere on September 7, 2020 of Regina King’s ‘One Night in Miami’. The honor was a rarity for a black woman director.

The Martinique director Euzhan Palcy won the Silver Lion at the Venice festival in 1983 for ‘Sugar Cane Alley’. The recognition didn’t send her career into overdrive, Palcy told The Guardian in a 2019 interview. Hollywood considered her films to be “too black”.

The first US film directed by an African-American woman to be released theatrically was Julie Dash’s ‘Daughters of the Dust’ in 1991. Dash’s film, which was written, directed and produced by the artist, was featured at Sundance.

‘The Rise of Regina King’

The full force of Regina King “meets the moment’ as the December/January cover story for WSJ Magazine. King is interviewed by Clover Hope in a fashion story styled by fashion editor Alexander Fisher. Photographer Alexandra Leese captures Regina King in rich-luxury looks from Alexander McQueen, Brandon Maxwell, Max Mara, Oscar de la Renta and more. See the fashion credits at WSJ.

‘One Night in Miami’ is fictionalized but based on a real gathering of four historical Black men the night of the famous Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) v. Sonny Liston world heavyweight boxing title fight the night of February 25, 1964. Liston gave up at the beginning of the seventh round, handing his world champion title to Clay. Liston would be knocked out in the first round of a follow-up match on May 25, 1965.

The cast of ‘One Night in Miami’ centers on Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) before he called himself Muhammad Ali. None of these historical greats could stay at Miami’s beachfront hotels reserved for White people only. After scoring his boxing title upset, the cast moved onto the Hampton House in Miami. The Miami Herald shares an image of Malcolm X taking a snap of Clay in the hotel restaurant.

King on winning an Emmy with Breonna Taylor front and center:

Returning to her WSJ interview, Regina King speaks of winning an Emmy while wearing a Breonna Taylor T-shirt:

“The faces that we put on to smile and to succeed,” she says. “That shit is exhausting.”

This fiercely accurate view of race relations in America prompted the supernova talent to focus on her Black audience in directing ‘One Night in Miami’. King feels no deep need to please everyone — translated by Anne — ‘white people’.

King points to a pool scene of Cassius Clay that’s soundtracked to Donny Hathaway’s timeless cover of Ray Charles’s ‘I Believe to My Soul.’ “I was like, ‘That’s for Black people! I’m letting y’all know now: I’m not changing that!’” she says, laughing. “There’s some things that are inside jokes that, because you’re not Black, you’re going to miss that joke. And in those moments, do you think, OK, does it matter to me if the joke is missed or that beat is missed? No, sometimes it doesn’t matter.”

Damon Lindelhof, The Watchman series creator on King:

“Hollywood loves to tell the story of the overnight sensation and the ingénue...and because Regina has been acting since she was a kid, it’s depriving the system of this sense of discovery,” he says. “If Meryl Streep–level parts...were being written for Regina, she would have also won Oscars. Those parts just weren’t getting written for her, and now they are. I think there’s a whole level of filmmakers who understand that they’ve got a supernova of talent in Regina King, and in order to get her interested in your project, you’ve got to write a part that’s worthy of her.”

Gabrielle Union on her friend, King:

“When you have someone like a Regina King who has been wildly successful in everything that she’s done since she was a teenager, and you still refuse to acknowledge her brilliance and her financial contribution to this industry, that isn’t an unconscious bias. That isn’t an oversight. That is willful,” says actor and friend Gabrielle Union. “By every estimation, she has been a powerhouse for decades. So how do you ignore the powerhouse in the room?”

Leslie Odom Jr., the movie’s Sam Cooke, on King:

“I think that you see in a Regina King career the history of the business and what has been historically possible for talented Black performers, talented Black female performers,” he says. “I say that because she’s kind of been tapping on the ceiling at every level. Every rung of the ladder that has been available to her, she’s maximized all of those rungs, and so now Hollywood is ready.”

Return to WSJ Magazine for more juice on the incredibly-talented Regina King. For both the ‘One Night in Miami’ trailer, and an in-depth video interview with the film’s four stars, check out AOC’s earlier post on King and her Breonna Taylor t-shirt.

Featured