Do The Right Thing

After making two hugely acclaimed movies on contemporary international warfare, director Kathryn Bigelow turns her camera backward to the 1967 Detroit riots, where white cops played a “death game” with a group of young black men and two white women at the Algiers Motel. Reverend, professor, and writer Michael Eric Dyson returns to his family home with the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar and asks: Has anything changed?

- Kathryn Bigelow

“You think that’s him?” the director Kathryn Bigelow furtively whispered to me as yet another aging, crumpled black man passed us by.

We were in Detroit, standing outside a weathered apartment building near the waterfront. It sat in the shadow of the on-the-comeback downtown, once the fourth-largest city in the country and a teeming hive of entrepreneurial energy fueled by the automobile industry. If the apartment house didn’t quite scrape the sky, it at least pointed to the heavens in a glory that seemed to have faded eons ago.

We were looking for a man whose life story would be featured in Bigelow’s latest film about a bloody siege of police terror at a seedy motel during the epic upheaval in Detroit known as the ’67 riots. He’d been one of the victims, and Bigelow wanted to talk to him about his memories of that night to better shape his character onscreen. Although he’d spoken to her team during preproduction, he proved to be pretty elusive when it came to actually meeting. So we set out to bag a reluctant star. Call it guerrilla astronomy: Larry Reed. Black male. In his late sixties. Sang second tenor with the soul-music sextet the Dramatics before they made it big. (And to prove how big-hearted I was, I pitched in despite the fact that the eventual lead singer of the group, the great L.J. Reynolds, had tried to holler at my fiancée one night in the late 1970s in a small west side Detroit jazz spot, Watts Club Mozambique.)