Leon Gast obituary

Ali was a highly controversial figure in America because of his association with the black nationalist Nation of Islam movement and his refusal to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, but in Zaire he quickly attained hero status. However, boxing aficionados claimed that at 32 he was way past his best. Foreman, who was 25, had won all his 40 fights (37 by KO) and had destroyed Joe Frazier (obituary November 8, 2011), who had beaten Ali in the “Fight of the Century” at Madison Square Garden in 1971. Ali was expected to be similarly humiliated.

Yet Gast shows Foreman being drawn into Africa’s heart of darkness. Early shots show his awesome power as he hits the heavy bag. Slowly he is cast under the spell of Ali’s jivetalk and the Zairean masses urging “Ali, bomaye” [kill him].

Foreman was taciturn and distrustful of the media. He never quite recovered from arriving at the airport in Zaire with two Alsatians, which were associated with the brutal Belgian overlordship of the Congo. People were surprised to find that he was black, having been told by Ali (obituary June 6, 2016) that he was white. Foreman does not feature enough in the film for the audience to build up any depth of insight into, or sympathy with, the man. That was Foreman’s own fault, said Gast, because he denied him access. “He was sullen, except when he was angry,” Gast recalled. “He [Foreman] was totally psyched out by the way that people reacted to Ali, how they rooted for Ali and against him. I think, in the end, it all just got to him.”

Ali and Foreman join Gast, right, and David Sonenberg, executive producer, with their best documentary feature Oscars in 1997 for When We Were Kings

REUTERS

Ali viewed Gast disdainfully as a “A skinny, ugly guy, chasing me around Africa with a camera”, but he could not resist talking to Gast’s lens. “He was the perfect subject. He was never too tired to talk, and whenever he saw a camera, he just wanted to perform,” Gast told the Chicago Sun in 1997. “He’d say things like, ‘If you guys want a beautiful scene, I run every morning by the river. Be there at 5.30am when I come around the bend.” Even at that time there were hundreds of barefooted children following Ali.

When We Were Kings’ power is that Ali backs up his talk. The film climaxes with his eighth-round knock-out of Foreman on October 30, 1974 in front of a global television audience of a billion. For much of the fight Ali rested hopelessly on the ropes with his gloves covering his face. As Foreman pummels him with body shots, Ali goads the world champion: “Is that all you’ve got, George?” Foreman tired and Ali pounced with a beautiful straight right.

In the 22 years that followed, Gast could have done with such a counter punch to break through myriad barriers preventing the film’s release. Don King, the maverick boxing promoter, who would quote several verses of Shakespeare at a time, had persuaded President Mobutu to put up a $10 million purse for the fight to be staged in Kinshasa on the basis that it would greatly enhance Zaire’s and, perhaps more importantly, Mobutu’s profile.

Gast approached King about directing a film about the three-day music festival. It would feature James Brown, BB King and Miriam Makeba and be billed as the “Black Woodstock”. King was impressed by Gast’s chutzpah and hired him on the condition that half the 60-person crew was black. So far so good for Gast, until the first day of the festival was so poorly attended that Mobutu saved face by announcing that the second and third days would be free. Gast had been due to be paid from ticket receipts.

Ali courts the masses in Kinshasa in the lead-up to the Rumble in the Jungle in October 1974

ALAMY

Most of the musical artists, dancers, promoters and media making up the circus around the fight went home after the festival. Gast, who had boxed at high school, began to film Ali as he made up his famous boastful rhymes: “I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalised a brick — I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”

Gast had to contend with members of his crew questioning why the film was being made by a white man. King never paid him. It later emerged that the film’s British production company was a front for Stephen Tolbert, Liberia’s minister of finance. Gast flew to the west African country in search of payment only to discover that Tolbert had died in a plane crash.

Gast returned to New York with empty pockets and nearly 100km of film taking up three walls of his apartment. Over the years he worked on other films to earn the money to complete When We Were Kings and fought several legal cases for copyright of the footage.

He co-directed the 1977 documentary The Grateful Dead Movie with the band’s guitarist Jerry Garcia, an account of the band’s five-night performance at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco in 1974. He went on to make Hells Angels Forever (1983) and was beaten up for his trouble when the angels found out that the film was not entirely laudatory.

Some of Gast’s fundraising smacked of desperation. In 1980 he pleaded guilty to conspiring to smuggle 10 tonnes of marijuana a year earlier. A Nicaraguan cargo plane landed in Charleston, West Virginia, flipped and burst into flames on the runway, spilling out its contraband. Gast served five years of probation and paid a $10,000 fine.

Ali, who was lauded everywhere he went in Zaire, viewed Gast with a little disdain but couldn’t resist playing up to the camera

ALAMY

In 1990 the lawyer David Sonenberg put up $1 million to enable Gast to finish editing the film and enlisted the Hollywood director Taylor Hackford to finesse the cinéma vérité. Hackford brought in contemporary figures to analyse the events surrounding the Rumble in the Jungle, including the hellraising writer Mailer, the black film director Spike Lee and the Ali biographer Thomas Hauser.

Sonenberg commissioned the hip-hop group the Fugees to record the title music. The Fugees’ Wyclef Jean was enraptured by the footage of Ali and persuaded Gast to focus the narrative even more on the build-up to the fight. In between, the camera cuts continually to offer strange juxtapositions of arresting imagery: James Brown’s dancers shaking the contents of their denim hotpants and the sinister-looking Mobutu in his leopard-skin hat being serenaded by serried ranks of adoring women chanting his name. Plates of wriggling bugs, a popular dish in the Congo, add to the concoction. All the while, footage of classic funk and soul music at the festival provides a pulsating soundtrack.

The timing of the film’s general release in 1997 was propitious. Stricken with Parkinson’s disease, Ali had faded from public view, but his appearance lighting the Olympic flame at the 1996 Games in Atlanta brought him new popularity.

When the documentary was shown at the Sundance Film Festival that year, Gast realised that a lot of people in the audience did not know the result of the fight, adding to the excitement. The film triumphed. It was snapped up by Polygram’s Gramercy Pictures for $4 million. Even Foreman loved it.

Leon Jacques Gast was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1936 to Samuel Gast, who worked in real estate and Madeleine (née Baumann), a stay-at-home mother. He attended Snyder High School and as a teenager caught the film bug after observing the shooting of the classic 1954 movie On The Waterfront in nearby Hoboken. He briefly studied dramatic arts at Columbia University in New York before embarking on a career as a stills photographer for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Esquire.

Ali’s eighth-round knock-out of Foreman, seven years his junior, was watched by an estimated global TV audience of 1 billion people

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Gast began doing album covers for the jazz band the Fania All-Stars. Drawn into their world, he made his first film, Our Latin Thing, in 1972 about the Latin jazz music scene in New York.

He married Geri Spolan in 1991, who would work with him on his films. She survives him along with two children from a previous marriage, Daniel and Clifford; and a stepdaughter, Sara Marricco.

Sonenberg and Gast squabbled over the rights for When We Were Kings. After litigation Gast settled on one third of the profits with Sonenberg taking the rest. Gast went on to direct several more films including Smash His Camera, about the paparazzo Ron Galella (2010), and Manny (2014), detailing Manny Pacquiao’s rise from poverty in the Philippines to boxing world champion.

Nobody compared to Ali for charisma. In that respect for sure he was “the greatest” and from the moment Gast started filming Ali, he believed in him. Gast bet his friend the journalist Hunter S Thompson $100 that Ali would win. Thompson even paid up.

Leon Gast, film-maker, was born on March 30, 1936. He died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease, on March 8, 2021, aged 84