Miami Twice
KEMP POWERS on turning his play, OneNightInMiami, into an Oscar-nominated screenplay
“IT’S NOT UNCOMMON for a playwright to continue tweaking their own play,” says Kemp Powers, author of One Night In Miami. And he knows of which he speaks. When the play —which fictionalises a very real evening in 1964, when Cassius Clay ( just before he became Muhammad Ali), Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown hung out at a Miami motel following Clay’s world heavyweight title win against Sonny Liston — began its run at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2016, Powers had already changed things from its debut in 2013. And when he was afforded the chance to revise the material again, turning it into a screenplay which Regina King would go on to direct, he decided to make some changes once more.
THE INTRO
“When you go into a stage play, the parameters are so different,” says Powers. “The play is all real time. It begins when they walk into the room, and it ends 85 minutes later when they leave the room. For a film, the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh man, I really need to put these guys into context.’” And so the film begins with four lengthy solo peeks at the icons in question — the first word from the play isn’t spoken until roughly half an hour in. “The stage play begins with a moment that’s not even a scene in the movie,” adds Powers.