Building a mosaic of the 1992 L.A. riots
Source: Los Angeles Times
On April 29, 1992, a furious seizure gripped Los Angeles and shook it violently for four terrifying days. John Ridley, then a recent New York transplant, spent much of that time quarantined in his Fairfax district neighborhood, where he huddled on street corners with petrified neighbors and denied rides to white friends looking for his protection. (As a black man he felt no safer from the random brutality and rioting.) An attempt to escape via LAX was thwarted by the unrelenting chaos, and he ultimately had to turn back through the charred and broken cityscape.
Ridley has spent the last year researching and reliving that historic convulsion, which left 54 people dead and $1 billion in property damage in its wake, for a screenplay tentatively called "L.A. Riots" that Spike Lee is attached to direct for producer Brian Grazer at Imagine Entertainment.
Lee and Ridley had previously been developing a law enforcement drama called "The Night Watchman," for which Ridley had been researching the Los Angeles Police Department and its Rampart Division scandal. When that movie stalled a year ago, Lee asked Ridley to write a script for a film about the riots, so Ridley expanded his research, dug up reams of documentation and tracked down some of the people who were affected at the street level.
But the knotty multiethnic cultural history of Los Angeles pointed to something more comprehensive — a film with a scope more like Anna Deavere Smith's documentary play "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992," which was made into a TV movie in 2001.
Rather than merely focus on the 1992 riots, Ridley's suspenseful script begins with a prelude about the Watts riots of 1965 and then highlights notable aspects of the complex racial and political environment — the murder of black, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins by a Korean American liquor store owner two weeks after the Rodney G. King beating, the maneuverings that went into moving the trial of the police officers accused of beating King to a courthouse in Simi Valley, the ominous but ignored warnings police officers were delivering to their superiors, the National Guard's lack of preparedness — that allowed that explosive rage to sweep through the city again 27 years later.
"The idea is to try to get as accurate a picture of how this happened as I can," Ridley says. "Beyond race and the hot-button issues, it's just these little things together that allow for chaos. It was a Katrina-type systemic failure. Literally and figuratively, it wasn't just a black and white problem."
Public figures such as LAPD Chief Daryl F. Gates and Mayor Tom Bradley are referenced, but mostly the film will follow ordinary Angelenos affected by the public outrage triggered by the acquittal of the four white officers who beat King. "It's not 'Crash,' where these individuals all weave in and out of each other's storylines," Ridley says. "It's more of a mosaic."
Both Lee and Ridley have well-earned reputations for being provocateurs.
Lee's most recent film was his pointed HBO Hurricane Katrina documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts." And Ridley is a novelist ("Love Is a Racket," "A Conversation With the Mann"), screenwriter ("Undercover Brother," "U Turn") and TV writer ("Third Watch") who lately has gone very public with his feelings about race in controversial essays for HuffingtonPost.com, Time and Esquire.
But Ridley insists that provocation is beside the point when telling a story with such deep reverberations.
"To me this story is so real and so true that you don't need to go out of your way to be provocative," he says. "There's a level of balance in that everybody is a little embarrassed, everybody is a little outraged."
