In a brilliant career spanning more than four decades, director, screenwriter and producer Oliver Stone has carved out a niche as Hollywood’s resident muckraker.

Stone is famous for his brazen, investigative portrayals of American culture and history.

“Wall Street” is a scathing expose of capitalist class greed. “JFK” convinces viewers that Kennedy’s assassination was unequivocally an inside job. “Natural Born Killers” hysterically bashes our grotesque tendency to romanticize anything that gets our attention in popular culture, even murderers.

This is why the story broken by Variety last Thursday is so intriguing. Reportedly, Stone is in talks with DreamWorks to direct a Martin Luther King Jr. biopic starring Jamie Foxx as MLK.

Abraham Lincoln is the most recent historical figure to be dramatized in a biopic, specifically Steven Spielberg’s 2012 “Lincoln.” Much like the perception of Lincoln as the moralistic savior of our country, the perception of King as a Gandhian civil rights crusader is overwhelmingly positive. Given his disdain for the elementary school textbook version of American history, it’s curious why Stone would consider a project with such an obvious consensus.

The likely answer: Stone can balance King’s deservedly lofty legacy with the underground part of his story that few people know about. The director can also use this history to make a larger, Stoneian point about civil freedom.

MLK’s underground story goes something like this: The government was not always on his side. Like most great activists, he was branded a radical, the government synonym for activist, before political leaders took up his cause.

As the most vehement “radical” in a galvanizing era of activism, King was subjected to unlawful surveillance by a paranoid state.
After forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, MLK was targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s infamous Counter Intelligence Program, nicknamed COINTELPRO, until his death in 1968.

The bureau uncovered skeletons in King’s closet, particularly his numerous extramarital affairs. In 1977, U.S. federal judge John Lewis Smith Jr. ordered all surveillance audiotapes and transcripts of King to be sealed from public access until 2027.

With this documented but hidden history, Stone can illuminate MLK’s flaws, which all great biographers must do. He can also examine the radical to activist transformation in popular media that characterizes a leader who sparks policy change. It’s a transformation that’s contingent on the government appeasing the cause, and King is its modern poster boy.

By making this larger point, Stone would be reinforcing King’s positive legacy and altering our perception of history, just as Spielberg did with “Lincoln.”

The brilliance of “Lincoln” was Spielberg’s portrayal of the president as remarkably deft, underhanded and borderline Machiavellian side-dealer, essential qualities for a great politician.

But our perception of Lincoln as a savior remained unchanged. We just learned a lot more about why we view him in this positive light.
Similarly, Stone would be showing us why we perceive King as the greatest and most important activist in modern history: By remaining steadfast in his cause, MLK convinced state officials that they were actually dead wrong to pursue him as an enemy of the state.

Even for Stone, challenging the rightful perception of MLK as an all-time hero would be a fool’s errand. But, Stone probably wouldn’t consider the project if there weren’t a government-related underbelly to bring to light.

Hollywood’s muckraker may be on the verge of his most audacious project yet. Let’s hope he brings this, and even more history, to life.

Jarrad Saffren is a senior political science major. He can be reached at jdsaffre@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @JarradSaff.

Published on October 16, 2013 at 1:57 am