Rob Feld
When the editorial team of “Battle Night: Million Dollar Robbery” comes together, it’s not about assembling crew members, but about caring more about mindset.
Tom Wilson has previously worked with executive producers. “When I sat down with creator Shaye Ogbonna, we did really open it up in the way we told the story,” Wilson said. Felicia Livingston read the real story and played podcast material a few days before the interview with the team.
“My previous projects were also underway in the 1970s, and I think this is my time,” she said.
For Shaheed Qaasim, it’s all about the creative compatibility of the producers. He found that their storytelling values—especially focused on respecting real life characters—are consistent with their own. “I think it’s a priority to find storytellers with a character-first mindset,” Qaasim said.
“Battle Night: A Million Dollar Robbery,” a limited series for Peacock that premiered last year and dramatized a pivotal moment in Atlanta’s history, according to the iHeart True-Crime podcast. Against the backdrop of the legendary 1970 comeback battle of Muhammad Ali, the story follows the Chicken Man (Kevin Hart), a gorgeous liar who hosts luxurious parties for the leaders of the Black American Mafia just for the city’s most notorious armed robbery. Accused of being plotted by a gangster, the Chicken Man set out to convince JD Hudson (Don Cheadle), a groundbreaking black detective in the newly formed Atlanta police force to see the noise and find the real culprit. Next comes a tense, high-stakes game that includes intertwined character lines and interest and loyalty.
Cinemontage: Tell me about the work of Hyper-1970’s title order and how it informs the rest of the editors?
Tom Wilson: Before the filming began, our director Craig Brewer was watching “Thomas Crown Affairs” and said he loved how the on-screen panels helped move the story and keep the characters alive. It had a great feeling, and he wanted to know to combine something similar to keep the scene alive and the transition between. It really helps to build the world we are trying to inhabit. So we try to include it in the clip, and also into the main title sequence. Title order has undergone several months of change as they perfect the look and feel. It becomes a self-feeding loop – we cut the scenes to influence the title, and then seeing the version of the title inspired us to do more in the plot. It really gives everything a tone and feel.
Sheeh Qasim: Craig came up with a good idea. Splitting screens is nothing new, but they gained a lot of popularity in the 60s and 70s. Since we robbed in the 70s (but the stories all started in the 60s), it makes sense in styling, to refer to those old Hollywood moments and create a more ancient feel. I think the main title is inspired by the edits we have done. At that time, we did create an atmosphere. It doesn’t fully flesh out the design, but Tom and I have done a lot of sketches that work in storytelling. Therefore, it makes sense to keep the order in line with the title.
Movie: Once you introduce the split Filter into your storytelling grammar, which conditions or give you as a tool?
Felicia Livingston: It only allows you to see things differently. This is also a compression of time – you can tell two narratives at once. If you expand these moments, they take up more story time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work. As Shaheed said, in this case it did contribute to the aesthetics of the 70s and helped the audience during this period.
Sheeh Qasim: Aside from aesthetics, split screens offer a lot on editing. They simplify the complex story beats. You have one frame, but you can display multiple images. A good example is when we meet five gangster families under Frank Moten, Tom cuts off Montage Tom in the first episode – we can show the character’s face immediately, as well as a key message at once. The action is also great. One character can wait in the restaurant, while the other character will feel nervous when it gathers when it opens. In the second episode of my Cut we used it while the Chicken Man planned the next game – with existing moves as consistency. This is also useful for emotional rhythms. There is a JD and Chicken Man moment where they look at each other in real time in a framework. This simultaneity is difficult to achieve in editing. On the page, it’s easy to write a scene where multiple characters do things at once. But as editors, we can only be in one place at a time. Split screen allows us to display two characters in the same frame at the same time.
Tom Wilson: Essentially treating a character group as a character. If the robbers are demarcating the houses and we have people searching upstairs and downstairs, then you can think of them as a unit, which is really helpful. Same as a scene where a group sat around the table to plan. Showing everyone’s reactions immediately makes your feelings about the team unavailable through cuts between people. You can really bring them together.
Sheeh Qasim: Editorially speaking, it also provides you with the opportunity to slow down. A lot of times, as editors, we are trying to keep pace or rhythm, but if you have something like a phone, you can actually slow down. Meanwhile, since the two characters are on the screen, you will get more control to adjust the rhythm of the scene. One thing you don’t always think about splitting the screen is how much creativity is in the boundary – the amount of black space between each frame. We all take different attitudes to this, and then we are inspired by each other’s choices and incorporate those ideas into our own work.
Movie: What would that look like?
Sheeh Qasim: We went through a lot of iterations, but I remember the version with very thick black borders – a bunch of negative spaces. We did it on purpose, how much space we had left between the lens, the angle, the movement. It took some time to figure it out. Since the show was inspired by the 60s and 70s, we still have more room to play. Sometimes it will be a small image in one corner and the other will dominate. We do this on purpose. I really like what Tom does in the pilot – Five Roads separate from the center of the chicken and the surrounding four families. It creates this very cool mesh, and the boundaries themselves become part of the design. They are hidden, but important.
Felicia Livingston: Creativity happens when you think outside the box. Ultimately, our work is solving problems. Sometimes you have to do this in an unconventional way. There are many ways to explore in this process.
Movie: Let’s talk about episode three, which faces some specific narrative challenges of reshooting.
Tom Wilson: That episode was the key to the whole season. This is where the robbery takes place, so it is crucial that it has the right feeling and flow. Felicia was buried because there was a lot to be figured out upstream of the editorial. This is a stupid thing.
Felicia Livingston: We have no fragments. I think that, even from the Daily News, everyone feels this – for example, “Wait a minute, something is missing.” I have to be very respectful of Craig Brewer because he recognizes that episode three ends the first two episodes. Essentially, it’s the end of opening the arc, and he knows we don’t have everything we need to make the robbery feel huge and messy. You cannot think of it as a direct program. You have to delve into it and show the disaster that night. Most of the time, character jumps are not tracked. On the page, they make sense, but once the shot was taken, I started putting it together and everyone realized – oh, that wasn’t very feasible. So we keep refining and refining until we know what we need. Once we know this, we see that it must be bigger to make the end of the first narrative unit fully land. There are a lot of reshoots, which becomes a daily discovery process. I kept playing new shots until a week before we locked the cut. It was challenging, but in the end, everyone was happy with it.
Movie: I think you have a lot of coverage?
Tom Wilson: It’s a mix. There are many roles, and there are many to keep your life. Sometimes we have a lot of coverage. At other times, they can only reach one location in an hour of daytime and can hardly get anything. This is where using the panel becomes very helpful. We can make it look as if there are many different settings. They also don’t have much time to shoot boxing sequences, and Shaheed did some great work to reshoot. You didn’t even notice it – he blended the movements so smoothly and cut between the different attractions in the auditorium. Additionally, the auditorium requires a lot of visual effects to make it look bigger. Sometimes we have a lot, sometimes we do have to be creative. It’s a feat that you have to make sure the audience’s eyes and brains turn it to the right place at the right moment.
Sheeh Qasim: One of the cool things about streaming is that it is a slightly loose platform that gives us more creative freedom. We can use split screens as a toolbox to enhance storytelling content. Through them, we told a lot of the fairs and we made some good transitions. We did look at what we did in the 60s and 70s. “Thomas Crown” Brian de Palma’s “Carrie” and even “Woodstock” documentaries – they all have a great purpose for splitting screens. It’s an old-fashioned technology, like a split refractive machine, where you can have one person in the focus and another person in the background. This is basically a split screen. Today’s editors have been using split screens, including invisible screens. Like, if you have two characters talking and the camera is locked, but you want to tweak the performance a little, you can split it into the middle and make the edits invisible. We use a lot of visible split screens, but we also use invisible screens, just like daily edits.
Tom Wilson: This is a lot of experiments. Shaye and Craig would say, “This works for me. I’ll go back to the Pilot Episode 7 and Eight and think, “Okay, this works here, let’s reshape something earlier and make people feel more cohesive.” “It’s not about the rules. It’s about discovering what the style of this story needs and keeping it consistent. It’s all about telling the story through these characters – we have a lot of great people and we want them to live like people you want to follow. I’ve been joking about that whenever I get into trouble on a scene, I cut out Don Cheadle because he’s always doing something amazing and getting involved every second.
Sheeh Qasim: This is a very good point. There are a lot of backwards. We’ll find something along the way and go and say, “Wait, we need to rewind the second (or the third (or the first episode) and then make adjustments.” The interesting thing is that usually very good cuts don’t get people’s attention. But here we’re doing editing, which makes sense. That’s fun. Another thing about Craig Brewer – he’s a music thinker. We’ve done a lot of cuts to the rhythm of the song. If you notice the rhythm of the editing, a lot of it is in the beat. Not everyone edits this way, but I think it’s really cool when it’s so precise. That’s one of my favorite things.
