Malcolm X (1992)

By 1991 Spike Lee's Malcolm X was roughly five million dollars over its budget, and Warner Bros., which had capped the running time it wanted at under three hours, stopped financing the production and handed it to the completion bond company that guaranteed the film would be finished on schedule. Lee had already been paid two million dollars for directing and had put half his own salary back into the film. Facing a studio unwilling to fund the length he believed the subject required, he turned to a list of prominent Black Americans and asked for outright gifts, no strings attached, to close the gap himself.

Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Tracy Chapman, Janet Jackson and Prince all wrote checks. Two calls closed it. Lee told Magic Johnson what he needed, and Johnson gave it; when Lee later mentioned Johnson's gift to Michael Jordan, Jordan matched it on the spot. Lee held a press conference in Harlem publicizing the donors and the amounts, an unusual and pointed way to put a studio's decision in public view. Warner Bros. reclaimed the film from the bond company the next day and resumed financing it. The finished film ran 202 minutes, the length Lee had wanted, and Denzel Washington received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

The film's religious arc follows a documented conversion, break and second conversion. Malcolm Little was incarcerated in Massachusetts in the late 1940s on burglary charges, and it was in prison that his brother introduced him by letter to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. He emerged in 1952 as Malcolm X, rose quickly as a minister and the Nation's most visible spokesman, and built its Temple Number Seven in Harlem into one of the movement's largest congregations over the following decade.

The break came from within. Malcolm learned that Elijah Muhammad, whom he had presented publicly as a model of moral discipline, had fathered children with several of his own secretaries, private conduct the Nation's own teaching held its members to a stricter account than that. Silenced by the Nation after remarks about President Kennedy's assassination, Malcolm formally left in 1964 and undertook the hajj to Mecca. There he prayed alongside Muslims of every race, an experience he described as reordering his understanding of Islam entirely, and returned as El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, a Sunni Muslim advocating a less racially separatist politics than the Nation had taught him. He was assassinated in Manhattan on February 21, 1965, by gunmen with ties to the Nation of Islam he had left less than a year before.