A Couple of Real Fighters

Will Smith is dancing around the boxing ring, throwing a few practice jabs before shooting a scene, when he notices a pesky newspaper columnist leaning against the ropes, taking notes. “Is there a journalist out there?” he shouts, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Because I need me a journalist to whup!”

It’s Smith talking, but the breezy braggadocio is all Muhammad Ali--circa 1964, young and pretty, training at the legendary 5th Street gym in sultry Miami for his first heavyweight championship bout with Sonny Liston, the astounding upset that catapulted Ali to stardom. The first thing Ali did after whupping Liston was bark at the sportswriters ringside: “Eat your words!” Muscles bulging, bulked up to a heavyweight-class 220 pounds, Smith waves his gloves at me.

“I always wanted to fight me a journalist,” he says, perfectly mimicking Ali’s trademark antic bravado. “But they always disappear when I’m ready to practice my new punch!”

Chewing gum, a rolled-up script in his hand, director Michael Mann, a feisty welterweight, climbs into the ring and starts to bob and weave himself, showing Smith how he wants him to move as Smith spars with Al Cole, a former heavyweight titlist. Mann watches the two men bounce around the ring, then turns to a makeup woman. Gesturing toward Smith, he says, “We need more sweat.”

With Michael Mann, less isn’t more. He’ll do 40 takes to get a key shot--and he’s spent $109 million to make “Ali,” the upcoming Sony film that Mann hopes will capture the spirit of a man who was not only a global sports hero but also an irresistible force of social change.

“This isn’t just Michael’s fight movie,” says Ron Silver, who plays longtime Ali trainer Angelo Dundee in the film. “For Michael, this is a story about the ‘60s, race relations, Vietnam and rebelling against the system.”

The movie, which completed shooting May 27, opens with Ali’s improbable Liston victory and ends in Zaire a decade later with the fabled “Rumble in the Jungle” between Ali and George Foreman. The set here has the sweaty, testosterone-drenched air of a real gym, crowded with actors, their real-life counterparts and a jumble of extras who look like they stepped right out of a Neil Leifer photo essay on the fight game. Jamie Foxx, who plays Ali’s mojo man Bundini Brown, is at ringside hanging out with Silver and Jeffrey Wright, who plays Ali’s best friend, photographer Howard Bingham.

Brown is dead, but the real Dundee and Bingham, who is one of the movie’s producers, are around, clearly enjoying this trip down memory lane. Dundee, who gave Smith pointers on the champ’s ring repertoire before the movie started shooting in January, is sold on the actor’s transformation. “Ah man, forget about it,” he says. “Will’s from Philly, I’m from Philly, he’s legit. He bounces, he moves. If he ain’t Ali, he’s sure a close second.”

On the set the spotlight is on Smith, who has assumed Ali’s 500-watt personality and sculpted physique. But the center of gravity is Mann, the creator of “Miami Vice” and director of such films as “Heat” and “The Insider.” At 58, he remains an intense perfectionist famous for doing whatever it takes to achieve total authenticity, even if it means blasting out a plate-glass house facade with live ammunition, as he once did while shooting “Manhunter.”

When it turned out the 5th Street gym had been torn down, Mann reconstructed it on the second floor of a warehouse here, adorned with vintage photos of the boxers who trained there. Ali’s 1964-era Miami home still exists, so Mann insisted on shooting a key scene outside the house, even though it was directly in the flight pattern of Miami International Airport, meaning that a jumbo jet went roaring over the house every 90 seconds. After the 23rd take, I teased Michael Waxman, Mann’s longtime assistant director: “Couldn’t you get the airport to change the flight pattern for a few hours?”

“Oh,” he said casually. “We did that on ‘Heat.’ We needed to get a shot at midnight one night, so we sent over some T-bone steaks to the controllers and got them to fly the planes in over the ocean until we were finished.”

Wooing a few flight controllers is one thing, but persuading moviegoers to see the film when it opens in December is a daunting challenge, especially since the bio-pic genre has been fraught with peril in recent years, plagued by media controversy and box-office failures. Sony, which is releasing “Ali,” was so worried about its profit potential that the studio pulled the plug on the film for a tumultuous week last fall until Mann and Smith agreed to bring the budget back into line and assume partial responsibility for any overages. Sony also cut its risk by sharing the budget with foreign investors who will handle the movie’s overseas distribution.

It’s no surprise that Mann and Smith were willing to put themselves on the line to make the movie. Stars and directors love bio-pics, which give them the opportunity to tackle prestigious, bigger-than-life stories. But too often, even the best films in this genre end up telling us more about the director’s personal obsessions (Oliver Stone’s “JFK” or Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull”) than about the subjects themselves.

Worse still, audiences have been hard sells--why pay $9 to see “Nixon” or “The People vs. Larry Flynt” when you can stay home and see documentaries for free everywhere on cable TV? There have been a few hits, but usually they’ve been low-budget surprises like the Tina Turner story, “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” or films about relative unknowns like “Erin Brockovich” or “Patch Adams.”

Still, Sony Chairman Amy Pascal is optimistic, believing that “Ali” shares a similar theme with the genre’s hits, even if it’s about one of the most famous people in the world. “It’s a great underdog story,” she says. “And if you look at the movies that have worked, they’re often about an underdog who fights the system and wins. People identify with that--they want to see a hero who wins. And that’s Ali. He’s a hero to the whole world.”

However, movies about real people have been a fat target for armchair critics. The barrage of attacks against the 1999 film “Hurricane” no doubt hurt Denzel Washington’s best actor hopes for an Oscar for his stellar portrayal of Hurricane Carter. (Kevin Spacey won for “American Beauty.”) Mann himself has experienced this sniping firsthand. “The Insider,” which chronicled how “60 Minutes” sold out whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand during his battle against Big Tobacco, was criticized by everyone from CBS’ Mike Wallace to Disney czar Michael Eisner, who was quoted saying he wished he hadn’t even made the movie.

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Mann says he’s put that all behind him. In fact, he claimed not to remember a Times story that criticized the film--until I reminded him that The Times had run a long letter he’d written complaining about the piece. “I guess I have a selective memory,” he says dryly. “I prefer to remember Kenneth Turan’s [positive] review. Let’s just say that a lot of people fell under the influence of the extremely charming Mike Wallace, who can manipulate the media better in his sleep than I ever could.”

Actually, Mann doesn’t think the media are too critical of filmmakers who dramatize history. “It’s valid to ask questions, and I personally believe I have the obligation to be authentic. You can’t manipulate reality. The excitement and adventure come from capturing what actually occurred. What you should really ask is: Did the person who made the movie do a good job or a bad job?”

Mann says that Ali and his wife, Lonnie, read and offered comments on the final script, though they did not have script approval. “They’re not interested in a sentimentalized version of Ali,” he says. “It does a disservice to Ali. He’s a man who makes mistakes like all of us. If you glorify him, you diminish him.”

The Ali film has been in the works, blowing hot and cold, for at least a decade. Several writers, who now share story credit, penned scripts while various producers and directors, including Oliver Stone, Scott Rudin and Barry Sonnenfeld, pursued the project. In late 1999, Sony sent scripts to Mann, Steven Spielberg, Curtis Hansen and Spike Lee. By early last year, Mann had the project, with Smith on board to play Ali.

With Mann at the helm, it was clear that the movie would not be a facile portrait of Ali. Mann is the rare American director who makes movies that are both visually exciting and intellectually challenging. A student of both politics and pop culture, he makes his case for Ali’s place in 20th century culture with allusions to everyone from Bob Dylan to historian Frantz Fanon. In some ways, Mann has also lived the same history as Ali. He was a student at Wisconsin in 1963 when he first heard Malcolm X speak, which was roughly the same time Ali fell under his spell. Shooting a scene in which Malcolm, played by Mario Van Peebles, preaches to a crowd of young Muslims, Mann has a copy of “Malcolm X Speaks” tucked under his arm, with key lines of his speeches underlined in red ink.

The shooting script, now credited to Mann and Eric Roth, uses Ali’s life to probe the complexities of race in America. It shows the Ali who was owned by a phalanx of wealthy white Louisville businessmen, as well as the Ali who befriends Malcolm X and becomes a black Muslim, but is forced to choose sides when Elijah Muhammad breaks with Malcolm X. But it also shows him womanizing and belittling his black boxer rivals.

“No one at the studio ever said we had too much politics,” Mann says. “With Ali, the politics is the drama.”

For Mann, the key line in the script is when Ali, asked about his conversion to the Nation of Islam, says something you could imagine hearing from Holden Caulfield, John Lennon, Randle McMurphy or any other icon of ‘60s-era rebellion: “I don’t have to be the way you want me to be,” he says. “I’m gonna be what I want. And I’m free to think any way I want.”

It is the essence of Ali’s appeal, his own personal declaration of independence. An old ‘60s rebel himself, Mann identifies with Ali’s fight to carve his own fresh path in the culture.

“The movie is a high-wire act for all of us,” Mann says. “But the degree of difficulty is what makes it exciting. The challenge was how do you tell history from the inside out? How do you get inside Ali’s shoes? And it wasn’t easy, because you’re trying to put yourself inside someone who’s a [expletive] genius.”

“The Big Picture” runs each Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.