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When the couple read a treatment by Steve Rivele and Chris Wilkinson (Nixon), Lonnie sent back two requests. "One was that we be respectful to the women in Ali's life," says Rivele. "The other was to make it clear that he'd never done a bit of housework in his life." The initial screenplay, which Gregory Allen Howard (Remember the Titans) delivered in 1996, offered this fascinating insight: "The key to Ali's life was his relationship with his father, who ignored him," says Howard. "It explains his need to please older men like Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Howard Cosell and Don King."
The movie went nowhere, though, because Smith was too "terrified" to sign on. "I didn't want to be the dude that messed up the Muhammad Ali story," he says. He also had trouble relating to a man whose life had been so defined by racial injustice. "I'm a child of rap music," says Smith, who started his career in music and still moonlights as a rapper. "We've got Bentleys. We can't even relate to not being able to sit in somebody's lunch counter. I'll buy the counter and throw you out." But for Ali, Smith was always the first choice: "He's the only guy in the world who could look like me and act like me."
After a management turnover at Sony, several more rewrites were assigned while many directors, including Barry Sonnenfeld, Curtis Hanson and Spike Lee, circled the movie. Mann ultimately took the job after meeting with the Alis. "The one thing they feared was a sentimentalization," says Mann, "a teary Hallmark- greeting version of Muhammad Ali...What they didn't want is what I didn't want." When asked why he didn't choose a black director, Ali answers, "The people that made the movie, I know they're qualified. I don't care what color they are." His wife adds that "Muhammad didn't want it to be a movie just for black audiences. He wanted it to be a movie for all cultures and all people."
Mann got Smith on board by promising to guide him through the physical, emotional and spiritual training required. "Before that point, I couldn't see how I would become Muhammad Ali," says Smith. Mann kept Ali's story at manageable length by focusing only on the civil rights and Vietnam years, when Ali "occupied his most profound importance." Mann's final screenplay, written with Eric Roth, begins in 1964, when the young Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston out of the world heavyweight championship. Fresh off his victory, he publicly and unapologetically announces his devotion to the Nation of Islam--a black Muslim group that white America at the time considered a serious, militant threat--and takes an Arabic name. He's stripped of his title by the boxing commission when he refuses the Vietnam draft ("No Viet Cong ever called me n_____"). Over the course of 2 1/2 hours, the film builds to its finale in 1974, when he takes the title back from George Foreman in Zaire's Rumble in the Jungle bout--a sequence that Mann shot in Mozambique with 2,000 paid extras and more than 20,000 volunteers. The cost of Mann's epic vision: at least $105 million.