The Day I Was Lost - The Life of Malcolm X: A Screenplay

Radical America

In 1965, shortly after Malcolm X's assassination, Columbia Pictures purchased the film rights to his Autobiography and approached James Baldwin to ask him to make a screenplay from it, which was rejected. On the contrary of the expected militant "success story", the story emphasizes the contradictions, the tensions of Malcolm X's life, thought and action and allows us to understand both Malcolm X and James Baldwin in their complexity, and in the contradictions of their time.

Thus, Malcolm X's hatred of "white devils" is not confined to the particular period of his life when he was supposedly a "fanatic" before converting to "tolerance." In Baldwin, Malcolm X is all at once, and until the end of his life, "Red," "Malcolm Little," "Omowale," and "El Hajj Malik El Shabbaz." These different names are all intertwined dimensions of the struggle of black Americans.

The Day I Was Lost , this "ghost film", gives us a reading of a multiple Malcolm X, through incessant back and forths between prison, racist violence, Islam, politics, loves, hatred of Whites, between Malcolm Little's childhood and the activity of the Muslim preacher involved in the movement for black liberation. It is a Malcolm of flesh that Baldwin depicts.