From Zaire to Here

“Look over there,” Leon Gast hisses in an awe-struck whisper, having spotted a familiar hawk-nosed, cleft-chinned profile at a neighboring dinner table. “It’s Kirk Douglas.”

After laboring in obscurity for decades, the 60-year-old documentary filmmaker is bedazzled by his moment in the spotlight. “When We Were Kings,” his new film about the legendary 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” heavyweight championship bout in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, has just won the best nonfiction film award from the L.A. Film Critics Assn.

Now Gast is eating grilled sea bass in the same show-biz eatery as Douglas, who came to stardom playing a vicious prizefighter in “Champion.” A fight fan all his life, Gast has no trouble recalling the 1949 boxing film’s climactic scene. “Douglas gives an incredible performance,” he says. “He’s betrayed his brother and won this brutal fight and you see him in his dressing room, so bitter and angry that he punches a row of lockers with his bare hands. It’s great drama.”

“When We Were Kings,” which opens Friday (it had a brief Oscar-qualifying run late last year), has great drama too--drama so outlandish it could only come from real life. The film captures Ali at the height of his powers, casting his spell over an entire country, preaching to little kids (“We must whup Mr. Tooth Decay!”) and rapping about his pre-fight training regime (“I rassled with an alligator, I tussled with a whale, I handcuffed lightning, threw thunder in jail”).

Ali’s supporting players are no slouches either. They include a young Shakespeare-quoting Don King and the absurdly patrician George Plimpton, who mourns Zaire’s name change (“the Congo was such a wonderful name--so Conradian”). We also meet Zaire’s dapper dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, who is rumored to have executed 100 criminals on the eve of the fight as a warning to local thugs preying on newly arrived foreigners.

For sports fans, the 1974 fight was the Super Bowl of boxing. Ali was 32 and believed to be past his prime. Foreman was boxing’s reigning champion, a fearsome puncher who had demolished the highly regarded Joe Frazier and Ken Norton in previous title fights. In his first hurrah as a fight promoter, King had signed both Ali and Foreman to $5-million contracts, but had only one buyer, Mobutu, who saw the $10-million fight as a way to put his country on the map. As an added attraction, Zaire would host a music festival featuring African and black American artists, including James Brown, B.B. King and the Spinners.

Gast was hired to make a film about the festival, whose concert scenes would be interspersed with footage of the boxers preparing for the fight. Growing up in Jersey City, he’d boxed a little himself. His lack of success still baffles him. “Either I couldn’t fight a lick,” he says, “or my block had the toughest kids in the country.”

After college, he worked as a photographer for Esquire, Vogue and Modern Bride. When his photo agency started a film division, Gast began shooting commercials--his first one was for Preparation H. In the 1970s, he shot several documentaries, including “The Dead,” an early portrait of the Grateful Dead, and “Hell’s Angels Forever,” an inside look at the notorious motorcycle gang.

Relations with the Angels became strained when the bikers started dictating to Gast what footage to edit out. “I got punched out twice in fights over the film,” he says. “Individually, the Angels were good guys, but as a group they were dangerous.”

Gast frowns, falling silent. “Maybe we shouldn’t get into this--I don’t want any trouble after all these years.”

Having spent 20 years raising enough money to finish “When We Were Kings,” Gast knows what it’s like to be haunted by the past. His bad luck began two days before the opening of the Zaire music festival. Foreman’s sparring partner elbowed him in the head, opening a gash over his eye that required 11 stitches. The cut forced a six-week postponement of the fight, which nearly ruined the festival.

Mobutu wouldn’t let the boxers leave the country. But the vast assemblage of media disappeared, leaving the festival with precious little visibility. “The first night we only had 8,000 people in an 80,000-seat stadium,” Gast recalls. “Mobutu thought the empty seats would make the country look bad, so he convinced the promoters to make it a free festival.”

To make sure everyone got the message, Mobutu had army helicopters leaflet the countryside. The festival’s final two nights were sellouts. But Gast was left high and dry. The film’s financing was supposed to come from the festival’s box-office gross--once it was a free concert, there was no money to complete the film.

Gast made a living working on other documentaries--he has edited several films made by Barbara Koppel, including an HBO documentary on Mike Tyson--but his heart belonged to the Ali film. Having spent hours filming Ali, both in Zaire and later during his “Thrilla in Manila” showdown with Frazier, Gast has an intriguing insider’s view of the Great One’s mythic powers.

“Ali always did psych jobs on his opponents,” Gast says. “But Zaire was the biggest psych job of them all. He had people in Zaire believing George Foreman was white. He’d say, ‘What’s he doing in my country? Zaire is my country!’ Ali would be out doing road work at 5:30 a.m. and when a bus or a car would come by, he’d talk to them until he’d won everyone over.

“Ali thrived on the media attention. He’d work on the speed bag with six hand-held cameras right in his face and it never bothered him. Foreman couldn’t figure it out. After all, he was the champ, yet the sentiment in Zaire was 20-1 against him.”

Ali’s verbal jabs were as sharp as his punches. In a scene eventually cut from the film, Ali is seen greeting Stokely Carmichael by telling the controversial Black Power leader: “Stokely Carmichael, we don’t want you settin’ nothing on fire over here.”

Over the years, David Sonenberg, a music industry manager who had been Gast’s lawyer, put close to $1 million into the film. But he found no takers. Memories of Ali’s glory days had dimmed. “Everyone was reticent,” Sonenberg recalls. “They’d say that documentaries are the kiss of death or that Ali was some old black guy no one was interested in anymore.”

In 1994, UFA Films optioned the film rights and brought in director Taylor Hackford to view Gast’s footage. Hackford suggested filming new interviews with Plimpton and Mailer, who’d been at the fight, as well as Spike Lee and Ali biographer Thomas Hauser. Hackford shot and edited the new footage, which helped give the film a more dramatic narrative flow.

Last January, when UFA didn’t renew its option, Gast and Sonenberg took the film to the Sundance Film Festival, where it was an instant hit. Sonenberg, who’d already gotten a rave review from his hip-hop clients, the Fugees, heard snowboarders talking excitedly about Ali’s rap-style orations.

After the first screening, Gast found himself surrounded by admiring actors and eager acquisition executives. “I couldn’t believe the response,” Gast says. “I called my wife and said, ‘Honey, I think we’re doing good. Laura Dern just told me how much she loved the film.’ ”

Miramax chieftain Harvey Weinstein saw the film twice, once at a screening just for himself. Afterward he swaggered up the theater aisle, pen in hand, bellowing, “Where’s Sonenberg? Let’s do the deal right now!”

In the end, the filmmakers chose Gramercy Pictures, which paid $4 million for distribution rights. The film has a soundtrack album featuring original festival performances and newly recorded tribute songs, including “Rumble in the Jungle,” by the Fugees with A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes and Forte.

Gast is especially delighted to see the movie released with some fanfare--Gramercy is opening the film in 20 theaters in 15 cities. “For the first time in my life, I’ll make some serious money,” Gast says. “I now have the luxury of all luxuries--a garage--which is very expensive in New York City.”

Knowing how commercially unrewarding documentary work can be, Gast’s friends have tried persuading him to direct a feature film. He’s not interested. “I want to make documentaries--that’s what I do,” he says. “It’s a great thrill to see something that is life itself, happening before your very eyes.”

When Gast accepted his L.A. Film Critics award, he nervously explained that, as a documentary filmmaker, he wasn’t accustomed to using the expression, “Lights, action, camera.”

“Of course, I got it wrong,” he admits. “The director who came after me said, ‘Leon, it’s ‘Lights, camera, action.’ We never start the action until the cameras are rolling.”

But with his films, Gast never knows where the action might be. “I usually say to the camera crew, ‘Why don’t you go up the river and see if anything’s going on.’ Some days you get nothing, but some days--wow, you get some gems. There are so many great stories out there, just waiting for you to find them.”