'His Constituency Was the Planet': Sarah Burns and David McMahon Take Us Inside the Making of 'Muhammad Ali'
With all due respect to Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Jim Brown, and Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali stands as the greatest American athlete of the 20th Century, which makes a natural fit for Ken Burns and his ever-expanding canon of American history. There has always been room for sports at Florentine Films. There's the stellar 2005 two-parter, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, which, come to think of it, works an ideal prelude to the Ali series. Jackie Robinson, the moral center of Burns’s Baseball series, also merited his own 4-hour biography in 2016. Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon (the two made the riveting Central Park Five as well), co-directed the Robinson doc with Ken, and that same creative team is behind the new 4-part, 8-hour series, Muhammad Ali, premiering on Sunday, September 19th.
Ali is certainly the most written about jock of his time, which is reflected Esquire’s vast and enthusiastic coverage, starting with Tom Wolfe’s 1963 profile (before either Ali—then still known as Cassius Clay—or Wolfe were famous), continuing in Leonard Shecter’s insightful 1968 portrait (more famous for Carl Fischer’s memorable cover), and capped by this wonderful Lion in Winter profile by Cal Fussman in 2004.
We sat down with filmmakers Sarah Burns and David McMahon to talk about Ali, why now, and why he merits the longest biographical series yet made by Ken Burns and his team.
ESQ: Florentine Films was making long documentaries before it became fashionable. How did you approach scale when it came to Ali in this particular cultural moment when podcasts and series are longer and more episodic than ever?
Sarah Burns: The joke about my dad was always about the length of his stuff. My favorite cartoon about him—he has a bunch of them hanging on his wall—was from many years ago. It’s a couple watching a TV and coming out of the TV it says, “OJ: the 270,000 part show’—or something like that—and the husband turns to the wife and says: “Ken Burns has got to be stopped.” And the fact that later there was an OJ doc that was however many hours long seems hilarious. The times have changed but that didn’t impact our approach.
David McMahon: When we made a treatment for this film, we anticipated it being six hours over three parts, which is bigger than any biography Ken had done before. There was just such a staggering amount of material. Ali is one of the most documented figure of the 20thCentury and we gathered 15,000 photographs for our editors. That’s paired down from tens of thousands more we saw. We got the end of writing the third episode and we were still in 1974. He hadn’t even fought Foreman yet! We found that Ali could not be contained over six hours.
ESQ: In many ways, the Ali you present here is really the first modern athlete.
SB: When we think about athletes today—and this is completely in debt to Ali—it’s how are you going to use the platform you have to influence the culture, speak out on political issues? Ali was breaking new ground in that department. But when his professional career started, with the financial backing of a group of Louisville businessmen, his situation was unique, being paid a salary as a boxer. Ali really admired Gorgeous George, a wrestler from the ’50s who used to preen around and talk about pretty he was. Ali took a lot from him and was a natural promoter. He was better at it than the promoters. We show how much energy he spent on the day of his first fight with Sonny Liston. It’s wild. He comes an hour early to weigh-in scene and bursts in the door ready to do his performance and nobody was there yet. So he had to go back and do it again later. Screaming and ranting. Sonny Liston is like, who is this guy? That’s when there were all these rumors that Ali had gone to the airport, and his heart was beating so fast it’s going to explode. It’s a circus and he’s orchestrating the whole thing. And his brilliance at promotion extends beyond framing the narrative of the fight, and giving the press good quotes, and making the fans love you or hate you, it’s also about how he taunts his opponents and tries to get in their head. That’s all part of his strategy.
DM: He loved being on stage and he loved cameras. He would go door-to-door and tell people about his fights. Sarah mention Gorgeous George and Ali understood—love me or hate me just come watch me, I don’t care. Put the asses in the seats, that’s the agenda. But there’s also a sincerity and generosity to him. He so young when he arrived on a big stage. I’m most interested in the point when he encounters the Nation of Islam as a teenager. He’s from segregated Louisville and he’s been left out of a lot. He’s seen his father, an aspiring artist who couldn’t get commissions end up frustrated as a sign painter. And the message of the Nation of Islam speaks to him. So, he’s got this ability to be an entertainer and an athlete but privately also finding a way to make sense of the world. And Ali is a man of faith.
ESQ: We all know about Ali the icon but you show his human side too, especially at it pertains to his extramarital affairs.
SB: We’re never going to shy away from the stuff that is less flattering and more complicated. Rasheda, one of Ali’s daughters, talks movingly about how she didn’t get to see him as much after her parents split up, but she still loved him. And despite his infidelities the ex-wives still loved him, too. The way they talk about him is with this degree of love and understanding about who he is and how he functions.
DM: He knew early on that he belonged to the world and his family had to come to terms with that.
SB: For the kids that was really difficult. Rasheda talked to us about having to share him and what that meant.
DM: His constituency was the planet. He had to tend that at the same time he had to be a dad or a husband. Sometimes, it cost him in the ring. He didn’t spend the time he needed to prepare for an opponent. He was too busy being Muhammad Ali outside of the ring.
ESQ: There are always a few talking heads in each Florentine Films production that stand out as something more than just smart and interesting but soulful and profound without being pretentious. For me, Walter Mosely, is one of those—his interviews were incredible here.
SB: Sometimes you take a flyer on interview. Mosley had written a really nice piece in the New York Times when Ali died. So I thought, cool, he has some feelings about Ali. He’s a good writer and an interesting person and maybe he’ll have something interesting to say. But at first, I thought the interview was going to be a bust. He didn’t seem that interested in rehashing things that he said in the article. He wasn’t rude and I don’t want to say he was contrarian because that’s not it. But then all of a sudden, we’re talking about Sonny Liston. I had no idea he’d have anything to say about Sonny Liston and he had incredible things to say about Sonny Liston.
DM: He didn’t seem to want to be part of over-esteeming Ali even though he had written this beautiful thing. Then he saw an opening with Liston. Sarah was conducting the interview and I was watching. When she asked about Liston, he sat up. He lit up and gave us this poetry on Liston. And then he gave us some great stuff on Ali.
SB: It’s a great gift to the film. He was more interested in talking about the stuff beyond the Ali mythology. And it changes the film in a profound way.
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