There are plenty of people out there who the film world is interested in making biopics about, but not many of them are about people who are perhaps best known for killing someone. However Lenny Abrahamson, director of Frank, What Richard Did and the upcoming (and much buzzed about) Room, is planning a film about boxer Emile Griffith, who is perhaps best known for causing an opponents death in the ring, in a match that was shown on live TV.
Griffith was also bisexual, something that back in 1962 he needed to keep a closely guarded secret, as homosexuality was illegal and at the very least the revelation of the truth would have ended his career and seen him vilified.
On March 24th, Griffith was due to take on Benny “The Kid” Paret in a televised bout at Madison Square Garden, where they would battle for the welterweight title. However at the weigh-in things got ugly when Paret grabbed Griffith’s butt and used an homophobic slur against him.
In the actual match, the opponents seemed relatively evenly matched until the12th round, when Griffith cornered his opponent and pumelled him with a series of 24 blows, until the referee stepped. Paret slumped against the ropes and never regained consciousness, dying 10 days later in hospital.
Deadline reports Abrahamson as commenting, ‘It is so rich that it’s hard to know where to start. As a character study, Griffith is incredibly compelling. There was a gentleness and innocence about him, and he never seemed conflicted about his sexuality; indeed he found joy in it. He inhabited two worlds — the underground gay scene in New York in the ’60s and the macho world of boxing. The societal stigma at that time was dreadful and created a crushing pressure on him.
‘You look at how closely his two worlds intersected. Just how different are they, when the sport is such a celebration of the male body and the beauty of its athleticism. Go one step further, and inject the tiniest sense of sexuality, and people are up in arms. Griffith himself once said a quote that just floored me. ‘They forgave me for killing a man, but they couldn’t forgive me for loving a man.’ That to me was so powerful and such a crazy contradiction. And it is still relevant today.’
Abrahamson will co-write the screenplay (his collaborator hasn’t been named) based on the Donald McRae book A Man’s World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith.
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