“I knew how unsung he was and how undeservedly missing from the history books he was. So when Dustin Lance Black sent me the script that he and Julian Breece had written, I was already predisposed to be very excited about trying to get Bayard’s story on the screen,” recalls “Rustin” producer Bruce Cohen about marginalized civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. We talked to Cohen and fellow producer Tonia Davis as part of our “Meet the Experts” film producers panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Rustin (played by Colman Domingo) was the architect of the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. But Rustin has long been left out of the story of the civil rights struggle because he experienced dual oppression. He suffered racism as a Black man, but within his movement he also faced homophobia as a gay man. Through all that, though, “he was witty, he was intelligent, he was charming,” says Davis. “And he used each of these tools to get his way, which is also what needed to happen.”
“One of the most important impacts that we want the film to have is that people will know who Bayard Rustin is, that he will regain his rightful place in history,” Cohen adds. “The dream is that he’ll be taught in schools as he should be, that he’ll be part of the March on Washington story moving forward.” They also insisted on crafting an entertaining film that would live up to “this joyous, charismatic, wildly entertaining, extremely funny human being … We got the strong sense that if we didn’t make the movie as entertaining and fun and joyous as Bayard himself, he’d come back from the grave and kick all of our butts.”
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