Did you hear the one about the armed robbery that occurred at an Atlanta house party after Muhammad Ali’s landmark 1970 comeback fight? If not, it’s OK; “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” creator and showrunner Shaye Ogbonna had very little information himself.
“I knew probably less than 1% because it was a little bit before my time,” the writer of series including “The Chi” and “The Penguin” said. “But when it first showed up on my radar, two things happened. Number one, I wasn’t
surprised because it sounds like a story that would take place in Atlanta around that time, and second, I was also not surprised to know that a lot of my family members from that generation not only knew about it but knew someone who had some type of connection.”
Peacock’s eight-part miniseries leans into 1960s/’70s crime films like “The Thomas Crown Affair,” with a healthy mix of Black action dramas often referred to as Blaxploitation. The story is told through the lens of community leader and
side hustler Gordon “Chicken Man” Williams (Kevin Hart), who throws a massive post-bout soiree in honor of gangsters Frank “the Black Godfather” Moten and Richard “Cadillac” Wheeler (Samuel L. Jackson and Terrence Howard), only for the party to be held up at gunpoint by a group of thieves with an eye on the wealthy clientele.
“Nothing in popular culture had really zeroed in on that fight,” Ogbonna said of the bout that marked Ali’s return to the ring after a three-year ban from fight-
ing due to his resistance to the military draft. A 2020 iHeart podcast of the same title broadened awareness and became the root point of adaptation for the limited series. The story had added resonance for Ogbonna as an Atlanta native, especially its setting in an era when the city was known as the “Black Mecca.”
It was one of the few times in that period of American history when Black prosperity was given a showcase in the South, partly thanks to the media attention and political machinations surrounding Ali’s legendary match against Jerry Quarry. “My workplace is a very big element of my work,” said Ogbonna, who has directed films such as the 2022 Thandiwe Newton-starring thriller “God’s Country.”
“Craig Brewer, our amazing director, gave me a great compliment. He called me a regional filmmaker, meaning that where I’m from is a big part of the work I do. I happened to be a product of the people that were involved. So for me, it was a duty to be able to tell this origin story of how Atlanta came to be. [It was] the combination of the business and political worlds, but also the hustlers and the shadow world. All of them came together to build this Atlanta that we see today.”
Ogbonna was blessed with a cast that includes Don Cheadle as the real-life detective J.D. Hudson, a former nemesis of Gordon’s who becomes an indispensable ally, and Taraji P. Henson as Gordon’s crafty, streetwise mistress, Vivian, who stands by his wild schemes. A unique aspect of “Fight Night” is how most of the actors have been costars in the past: Hart and Henson in the “Think Like a Man” films, Henson and Howard in “Hustle & Flow” and TV’s “Empire,” Howard and Cheadle in “Crash,” and Jackson with everybody.
“Their prior experiences working together really helped to add different dynamics and textures to the characters and the storylines,” Ogbonna said. “It was cool, because we all came into it like a family.” And Hart, who also served as an executive producer on the project, gets to stretch in a way no previous role has
allowed. Here he’s a sweaty, desperate wheeler-dealer for whom we root because his nature is so forgiving and well-meaning.
“I’ve always been a fan of comedians as actors,” Ogbonna said of Hart, comparing him to Eddie Murphy and Mike Epps, both notable for slipping into roles on both sides of the comedy/ tragedy mask. “And with Kevin, I always knew he was a great dramatic guy. He did not want to do the funny version of the Chicken Man character. He wanted to do the real version of it, the guy who was between a rock and a hard place while also being aspirational in a time when these things are happening in the city that he loved.”
This story first ran in the Limited Series & TV Movies issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
Read more from the Limited Series & TV Movies issue here.
