Word: gast
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...Leon Gast's documentary details the next step in Ali's career: Act III of a great and poignant pageant. This was the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 fight with George Foreman in Zaire. That country's dictator, Mobutu Sose Seko, had laid out $10 million of his country's puny resources to play host to the fight and a festival of African and Afro-American music. "We left Africa in shackles and fetters and chains," said promoter Don King in a spume of eloquence. "We are coming back in an aura of splendor and scintillating glory. The champions...
Also there was Gast, hired to make the movie by a firm called International Film & Records. After the fight he could not reach IFR for postproduction funds. Later he learned that the company's sole shareholder was Stephen Talbot, Finance Minister of Liberia. Talbot had died in a plane crash; his associate was executed in a Liberian coup, as Gast learned when he saw a TIME photo of the man standing before a firing squad...
...Gast eventually won rights to the 400 hours of footage, but could find no investors until, in 1986, David Sonenberg, a manager of rock talent, volunteered. After transferring the deteriorating film stock, Gast and filmmaker Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman) completed the film in 1994, hoping to promote it with a sound track CD comprising music from the festival stars (James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba) and new groups like the Fugees, who laid down a rap track over Ali's incantatory doggerel. But no one wanted to distribute the movie--until it won the documentary prize...
...afflicted with Parkinson's syndrome, his grace palsied, his old raffish rhetoric muted. The King is a physical pauper now, and at his sight we age and ache. His mind, however, is not so impaired, nor is his taste for raillery. Ali recently saw the film and phoned Gast to express his appreciation. The champ also said he remembered Gast: "You're the skinny, ugly guy that was with us in Africa...
...white America's fondness for him. His refusal to serve in the Army made him the Vietnam War?s most famous conscientious objector and deprived him of work for three years at the peak of his craft. Then Ali returned to lose the heavyweight belt to Joe Frazier. Leon Gast's documentary details the next step in Ali's career: Act III of a great and poignant pageant. This was the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 fight with George Foreman in Zaire. "Ali's charisma makes the film," says TIME's Richard Corliss. He hectors in poetry...