In Defense Of Ryan Murphy’s James Baldwin.

Yeah, Capote’s Baldwin was a magical negro that existed in the author’s decaying mind. Which made Murphy’s capping their encounter as a dream sequence…pretty much work?

For those wondering if James Baldwin actually dished with Truman Capote in the 70's, Sedat and Angela Pekay have a documentary for you. Between 1966 and 1973, the gifted Turkish photographers and editors struck up a friendship with the literary icon reeling from some of the biggest traumas of his life. Medgar Evers wasn’t just a civil rights comrade but a genuine Progressive/non-homophobic friend who was gunned down in the back by Byron De la Beckwith in 1963. The seventh street baptist church was the hub of the area Baldwin and Bayard Rustin had been trained to canvas until it became the place where four black girls were murdered by a fire bomb. The final straw was the murder of Malcolm X, who had made it a point to strike up a closer friendship with Baldwin after he was excommunicated from the Nation of Islam.

You can see the effect of the Pekay’s friendship had on Baldwin in James Baldwin, From Another Place. In his other documentaries of the time, (Baldwin’s N*gger, Meeting The Man) he is haunted, angry, and wary-eyed, looking to either eviscerate the off-camera…