A Fight That Went the Full 15 Rounds

Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell are warily circling each other, like fighters in the ring, a young giant with rippling muscles and a lightning-quick jab versus an aging sports commentator with wobbly legs and a bad toupee, two men equal only in their blustery braggadocio and gift for gab. They’re doing the dozens, teasing each other with a tornado of street-corner taunts.

“Honestly, champ, I fear for your survival,” Cosell says with his uniquely stentorian diction. “It is well known that George Foreman can knock a man out with either hand.”

“Howard, I can lift your wig up with either hand. Does that make me special?” says Ali, throwing a jab in his stinging Kentucky drawl. “They got you fooled, Cosell.”

“I’m only trying to be objective,” Cosell replies.

“Howard,” Ali retorts, “your career’s so directly related to me being great I oughta declare you on my tax returns as a dependent.”

Since we’re on a movie set everyone knows this is really Will Smith and Jon Voight (under about 10 pounds of prosthetic makeup), not a sparring match between the real Ali and the late great ABC sportscaster. But the fun of it isn’t just how eerily close the two actors come to capturing the real thing, but that their insults are all improvised: Smith and Voight are entertaining the crew the way club comics would perform after-hours sets for the band, keeping the juices flowing until “Ali” impresario Michael Mann is ready to start shooting the night’s final scenes.

The setting is a parking lot outside Miami’s Orange Bowl stadium, which Mann is using as backdrop for a scene in “Ali” in which the former champ cajoles Cosell into putting him on TV to hype a comeback that will lead to the epic Rumble in the Jungle showdown in Zaire with George Foreman.

It’s hard to take your eyes off Smith. He walks and talks like someone who was a champion of the world. When he rehearses his scenes with Voight, he bobs up and down, gliding across the set like someone free from the force of gravity. Ali’s longtime trainer, Angelo Dundee, said he was sold the first time Smith stepped into the ring. “Forget it,” Dundee says. “He bounces, he moves. If he ain’t Ali, he’s a close second.”

Watching Smith wrapped up in Ali character is instructive, especially if you’ve questioned the wisdom of making a $105-million biopic about a long-retired boxer whose most ardent admirers are middle-aged, not exactly the prime moviegoing audience these days.

Sony Pictures’ “Ali” project, which debuts nationwide Christmas Day, is something of a crapshoot. Smith, 31, is an immensely popular movie star, but his younger fans won’t have an easy time seeing an R-rated movie (the film has several offending expletives, which Mann has refused to cut, despite intense studio lobbying).

There are other hurdles: Ali’s life is a daunting story to tell, especially now, during a time of renewed patriotism; Ali refused to be drafted during the Vietnam War and gave up his heavyweight boxing title because of it. Biopics rarely make money, and Mann is a filmmaker who’s never had a blockbuster hit, despite his impressive artistic credentials (“The Insider,” “Thief,” “The Last of the Mohicans”) and enormous appetite as a director. This night, for example, he’s lighted up the entire Orange Bowl just to use as a backdrop to a scene set outside a mobile TV truck.

It was Mann who finally got Smith to commit to making the movie, something such top-drawer talent as Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and Barry Sonnenfeld couldn’t do. In fact, it took nearly a decade for the film to get made, going through a string of directors and writers who had been involved with the project.

“I’d turned down the part over and over,” Smith explained during a break in filming. “And for one reason: I was petrified! I honestly didn’t think I was smart enough to understand how to play Ali. Everyone would come in excited about the movie till they talked to me, and then they’d go away, thinking, ‘This guy is an idiot.’

“I was too embarrassed to say I didn’t feel intellectually prepared to tackle the work. And the script by Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson was so good and had such depth that it scared me even more.” Mann’s reputation is as a ferocious taskmaster, but after one meeting with the director, Smith was in. Mann, 58, established a “curriculum” of studies to help Smith prepare for the part. “Michael had me develop a fighter’s point of view of the world, taking my body to the limit physically in ways that would help develop my mental and spiritual state,” Smith recalls.

For months on end, the actor practiced a grueling daily regimen. He would get up and run each morning at 6. After breakfast, he’d spend hours in the gym, building up his body and learning boxing technique. After a lunch break, Smith would devote himself to Islamic studies and dialect speech training. At night, Smith watched half-hour tape loops of Ali fight footage prepared by Dr. James Puffer, a former U.S. Olympic team physician who runs UCLA’s sports medicine department.

“I had a few boxing movements that were awkward for me,” Smith says. “So Michael got [Puffer] to help me develop the connections between the synapses in my brain. I’d sit in a dark room and watch the tapes before I went to bed and again as soon as I got up in the morning.” Just for good measure, Mann told Smith his ears stuck out too much, so the actor spent an hour each day having his ears encased in a prosthetic mold so they’d look less prominent.

Smith became Ali, inside and out, his personality sassier than ever, his body a chiseled 220 pounds, up about 30 pounds from his normal weight. One day, filming at a replica of Miami’s fabled Fifth Street Gym, Mann prepared a shot of Smith working out in the muggy gym. The director signaled Smith to start a round of push-ups, letting him do about 25 reps before telling his camera operator that he was ready to get the shot. Turning to Smith, Mann said coolly, “You ready?” Smith, already bathed in sweat, just as coolly responded: “You ready?”

Smith says he had no problem coping with the notoriously perfectionist director. “My father was in the Air Force, so I learned very young that everybody dies when two people are in charge. With my dad, I could give him all the information I wanted, but once the mission started, you turned your brain off and did what he says to do. So if we had a difficult day of doing boxing footage, and Michael came to me at the end and said, ‘You got one more take in you?’ I’d say, ‘I can do this all night. Until your voice can’t say “action” again, I’ll be ready.’”

Even when the cameras weren’t rolling, Smith stayed in character. Just as he and Voight were concluding their Ali-Cosell joust, Smith spotted Charles Shufford, a real-life 235-pound boxer who plays George Foreman in the film. Shufford playfully glowered at Smith, his balled-up fists the size of summer melons. Smith glowered right back, boasting, “George Foreman, I’m gonna hit you so many times you’re gonna think you’re surrounded!” Voight put a hand on Ali’s shoulder, as if trying to break it up.

“Don’t touch me, Cosell,” Smith cackled. “I’m too pretty to be touched by someone as ugly as you!”

Before Mann shoots a scene of Smith sparring on the Fifth Street Gym set, he huddles with Angelo Dundee. Would it be appropriate, he wonders, for someone in Ali’s corner to give the fighter some water during a break in the action? Dundee is the guy to ask. Now 80, he’s the legendary boxing trainer who ran the Fifth Street Gym and was in Ali’s corner from his earliest days as a pro.

“Sure,” he tells Mann. “There’s just a proper way to give him water and an improper way.” Mann asks Dundee to explain the correct etiquette. “You stand in the corner,” Dundee says dryly. “And then you B.S. with him and then you give him some water.”

Filmmakers often give an obsessive attention to detail, but it’s especially important to “Ali,” the most expensive biopic ever made and a film whose box-office potential--and Oscar hopes--hinge in part on its believability. Remaking history has been a big movie bugaboo. Director Norman Jewison’s “The Hurricane” (1999) was lambasted for playing fast and loose with the truth about the life of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Critics of “The Insider,” Mann’s own 1999 film about Big Tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand, included CBS’ Mike Wallace and Disney czar Michael Eisner, who was quoted as saying he wished he hadn’t even made the movie.

Mann insists that he’s put past travails about “The Insider” behind him, but he still seems a tad antsy: When we sit down for a formal interview in his trailer one night, Mann has a tape player ready to record the entire session.

Sometimes philosophical, often pugnacious, Mann is never dull. He’s a filmmaker who relies as much on his intellectual grasp of a subject as on his emotional understanding of it. He knows Ali’s life story as well as any biographer. When he shoots a scene of Ali watching Malcolm X preach, Mann has a dog-eared copy of “Malcolm Speaks” in his back pocket. When I ask one day about a striking photo of Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, boxing underwater, Mann knows not only the photographer’s name and where it was taken but also the picture’s back story: that Dundee, who had met a Sports Illustrated photographer doing a piece on water sports, persuaded him to include his then-unknown boxer, boasting that Clay trained underwater when in actuality he didn’t even know how to swim.

“Michael is an artist who’s also a meticulous scientist,” says Gusmano Cesaretti, his longtime visual consultant--Mann calls him “my minister of taste”--who, before filming, spent a month in Africa studying the local architecture and cityscapes to create the feel of ‘70s-era Zaire. “If he needs a rock, he’s not happy to just have the rock. He wants to learn its chemical composition and understand why it’s shaped the way it is. He wants to see inside the rock.”

Whenever I visited the “Ali” set, the real-life characters were on hand, watching the actors who play them in the movie. Ali came to visit a few times--he’s seen about an hour of footage so far but won’t see the entire film until Wednesday’s premiere--as did Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, the champ’s corner man, played in the film by Paul Rodriguez. Howard Bingham, Ali’s old friend and personal photographer, was always around--he’s an executive producer of the film--taking photos and keeping an eye on Jeffrey Wright, who plays Bingham in the movie. Dundee visited regularly in Miami, watching Ron Silver portray him as he looked in the ‘60s, when he wore white guayabera shirts and had a modified comb-over that Silver calls “the Dundee swirl.”

Mann insisted on shooting in real-life locations. He filmed outside Ali’s 1964-era Miami home, even though it was directly below the flight path for Miami International Airport, meaning that a jumbo jet screamed overhead every 90 seconds. Filming a Sam Cooke nightclub scene on Chicago’s South Side, Mann found the actual club, the Tiger Lounge, which had long ago been converted into a furniture store. Mann had his crew remove the furniture, build some new walls and transform it back into a nightclub. “There’s a specificity to the Tiger Lounge or Ali’s home in Miami that you can’t find anywhere else,” Mann explains. “The real places just have some kind of magic, so you go, ‘Why wouldn’t I want to shoot here?’”

This pull of history is just as strong for Bingham, an L.A. photographer. When Ali visited the set in Miami, Bingham drove him around the old neighborhood, stopping by Ali’s favorite barber shop and the site of a local pool hall where Bingham had taken pictures of Ali shooting pool with actor Jackie Gleason before the 1964 bout in which he beat Sonny Liston to win the world heavyweight title.

When I notice Bingham taking picture after picture while Mann is filming outside Ali’s old house, I tease him about shooting so much film. He pauses for a moment, thinking of a way to explain his feelings. “I was here,” he says finally. “This was me.”

“Ali” has five producers, two executive producers and two co-producers, not to mention five credited writers, which gives you some idea of how difficult it was to get the movie made. Everybody’s story offers a different spin, but let’s start with the most unlikely participant, Paul Ardaji, a soft-spoken Palestine-born advertising executive who hired Ali in the late 1970s as a spokesman for a Toyota campaign in the Middle East.

Ardaji remained friendly with the champ and, in 1992, at Ali’s 50th birthday party, persuaded him that it was time for an ambitious Ali film. Ardaji got an 18-month option on Ali’s life story and recruited Bingham as a fellow producer, knowing Bingham’s presence would ensure Ali’s continuing support for the project. Nearing the end of his option, Ardaji still had no takers.

As a last resort, he sent out two dozen copies of sports photographer Neil Leifer’s book of Ali photos to a host of top filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Barry Levinson and Jerry Bruckheimer. The move paid off. Within days, producer Scott Rudin was pursuing the project. Rudin’s interest attracted the attention of Sony Pictures, which sent Ardaji a stern warning letter, insisting that the studio owned the residual rights to any Ali project based on its involvement in a 1977 Ali film, “The Greatest,” which starred the champ.

After much legal wrangling, Sony took control of the project and put heavyweight producer Jon Peters on the film. In 1994, Peters hired Gregory Allen Howard, who later wrote “Remember the Titans,” to pen the first script. Although highly regarded at the studio, the script didn’t attract any A-list talent and languished on the shelf.

When Amy Pascal assumed power at the studio in early 1997, she put Ali on the front burner. A biopic fan, she met with Rivele and Wilkinson, who’d written “Nixon” for Oliver Stone. Pascal offered them their choice of three plums: Ali, John Lennon or a Paul Verhoeven-directed life of Christ. The writers chose Ali.

They met with Ali and his wife, Lonnie, at the champ’s home in Michigan. Although slowed by Parkinson’s disease, Ali hadn’t lost his playful spirit. Before they sat down to lunch, Bingham warned the writers that Ali sometimes dozed off and not to take it personally. “So we’re talking and Ali dozes off,” recalls Wilkinson. “And I’m not paying any attention when he suddenly goes ‘AWHRRGH!’ and scared me. He wasn’t asleep--it was all a practical joke.”

The writers fashioned the script for Smith, who was everyone’s first and last choice to play Ali. They sent the completed 187-page script to James Lassiter, Smith’s partner. Within weeks, Smith had agreed to consider doing the movie. Barry Sonnenfeld, who’d worked with Smith on “Men in Black” and “Wild Wild West,” was initially attached to direct. But after “West” took a critical beating--even Smith now describes it as “a bad movie”--the creative team fell apart.

Pascal sent the script to a handful of elite directors, including Spike Lee, Curtis Hanson and Mann. When Smith spoke with Mann, he was sold. Mann met with Rivele and Wilkinson.

“He’d offered us ‘The Insider,’ so we knew each other,” Rivele recalls. “He said, ‘I’ll see you in three weeks,’ but the next thing we read was that he was working with Eric Roth.”

Mann and Roth, who had co-written “The Insider,” focused the story on a pivotal 10-year period framed by the 1964 Liston fight and the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle. Mann’s vision for the film, which included shooting for six weeks in Africa, proved so costly that Sony pulled the plug on the movie for a tumultuous week in fall 2000. The studio ended up getting Graham King’s Initial Entertainment Group to put up $65 million for the foreign rights to the film. Mann and Smith also agreed to put up a healthy chunk of their salaries (Mann got $5 million and Smith got $20 million) to pay for any cost overruns.

Once filming began this spring, Mann was in control. He hired A. Kitman Ho as his line producer, but when the two clashed, Ho was replaced before the film went to Africa. Peters made one brief visit to the set. Ardaji was around a lot, but Mann barely spoke to him. Mann doesn’t let anyone interfere with his artistic vision. Interscope Records paid $2.5 million for the film’s soundtrack, but Mann didn’t like R. Kelly’s “The World’s Greatest,” the label’s choice as the first single, and refused to put it in the movie, forcing Interscope to run a disclaimer on the CD saying, “Not all tracks appear in the motion picture.”

Mann hasn’t given in to the Motion Picture Assn. of America either. He says he won’t cut a few expletives to get a PG-13 rating. “The language in this movie is completely appropriate for anyone from the age of 12. If there’s a problem over a couple of words that are absolutely common in the vernacular, the responsibility is on the shoulder of the rating board. I’m not going to mutilate any scene in my film to fit their standards.”

“I learned a new expression on this movie that is all you need to know about Michael Mann,” Ardaji says. “It’s his way or the highway.”

But because of Mann, “Ali” has a political complexity rarely seen in today’s simplistic Hollywood cinema. The movie doesn’t pull many punches, painting an especially unvarnished picture of Ali’s relationship with the Nation of Islam. It portrays Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad and his son Herbert as cold-blooded opportunists who declared war on Malcolm X and largely viewed Ali as a lucrative meal ticket. Ali, who consulted on the movie from its inception, voiced no complaints, even though he remains a devout Muslim. Smith defends the film’s warts-and-all portrait of the Nation of Islam, saying it reflects Ali’s feelings. “The Nation of Islam saves young black lives period, and Ali knows that. But in any organization there’s going to be a certain amount of dissension and human frailty, and Ali wouldn’t deny that either.”

What Mann is most interested in is capturing how Ali was transformed by the political tumult of the ‘60s. One of the film’s most affecting scenes shows Ali in Africa on a morning run, followed by a stream of children. He suddenly stops, transfixed by a crude street mural that portrays him as a heavenly boxing spirit, fist raised, having flattened all of the oppressors of the downtrodden: white policemen, black soldiers, planes, tanks and tsetse flies. His willingness to sacrifice his career for his beliefs had not gone unnoticed: The brash, untutored boy from Louisville had become a universal symbol for the power of one man’s belief in himself.

“There’s an Everyman quality to Ali,” says Mario Van Peebles, who plays Malcolm X in the film. “All he was saying was, ‘Don’t step on my feet, and if that makes me a revolutionary, so be it.’ By holding his head up, he helped changed the world.”

In “Ali,” the champ, flying to Africa for the first time on Ghana Airlines, pokes his head into the cockpit of the plane, and is startled to see that both the pilot and co-pilot are black. “Hey, man,” Ali jokes. “Where they put the real pilot? What you doin’ up here?” Smith admits he had much the same reaction when he went to Mozambique this year for the Rumble in the Jungle segment of “Ali.”

“Every thing I knew about Africa was a good solid 80% false,” he said the other day over coffee at a country club he belongs to near his Ventura County home.

“I was embarrassed when I got there and realized there were tall buildings and Mercedes and big cities and fine women. When I got off the plane, the first 10 women I saw, well, one was more beautiful than the next. It was all I could do not to cry. As stupid as it sounds, I didn’t know they had beautiful women and black presidents and that you can be in Johannesburg and not know you weren’t in New York City. I almost didn’t take my computer because I didn’t realize that I could get on the Net.”

When Smith’s coffee comes, he sweetens it with three bags of sugar, just as Ali does in the movie. He stares for a moment out the window at the perfectly manicured golf course. “I was thoroughly appalled that I was so miseducated. I thought Africa was full of lions and tigers and people walking around the streets with spears. But it has the best and the worst of everything. It’s like God visits everywhere else, but he lives in Africa.”

Even though Smith has shed a lot of his “Ali” physical bulk in the six months since shooting was completed, he has retained his character’s gift for spellbinding monologues. But the experience of inhabiting Ali had a more profound effect: It’s made him more aware of the outside world and the challenges it poses. The actor and his wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith (who appears in the film as Ali’s first wife, Sonji), recently bought a house in South Africa and plan to live there for a year with their three children, although Smith will continue to work on films in the States. His next movie, “Men in Black 2” comes out in July.

“I need my family to be there,” he says. “Nelson Mandela is 80 years old, and I’d like to live near him and have my kids near him for a small piece of our lives.”

In Smith’s eyes, Ali and Mandela are icons who’ve shared similar ordeals, having been persecuted for standing up for their beliefs. He doubts that he, as an actor, will ever confront challenges as weighty as the ones his heroes faced.

“If I learned anything making this movie,” he says softly, “it’s that individuals are shaped through trials and turmoil. I want the world to be different because I was here, but I don’t know if I’ll have the kind of life experience that will allow me to find out the kind of person I’m capable of being. Greatness isn’t created; it’s demanded.”

Smith touches his handsome, unlined face. “You don’t know whether you have a strong chin or not until someone hits you with a good left hook. You don’t ask to be hit. But once you are, whether you can stand up and take another hit--well, that answers a lot of things.”

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Patrick Goldstein is a Times staff writer. He can be reached at patrick.goldstein@latimes.com