Screenwriter Kevin Willmott is no stranger to controversial themes.
His film credits include C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, a mockumentary about an alternate history in which the South won the Civil War, and Destination: Planet Negro!, a satirical comedy about African Americans who attempt to travel to Mars to escape Jim Crow-era oppression.
But his recent collaboration with visionary filmmaker and self-described provocateur Spike Lee might be Willmott’s most high-profile controversy yet. (Side note for readers: Willmott is a professor of film at the University of Kansas, but he has a quirky local connection. His son, Kevin II, bartends at several local establishments and sings in the band Cowboy Winter. Full disclosure: Kevin II. is a friend of this article’s author).
Willmott co-wrote Chi-Raq, a satirical musical about gun violence on the South Side of Chicago, which opens Dec. 4 in Madison.
The film has been a magnet for criticism since the title was announced (Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel petitioned to have Lee rename the film), and it stirred up fresh outrage when the trailer dropped last month.
Critics, including some in the African American community, have accused the film of trivializing gun violence and exploiting the struggles of Chicago’s poor, minority community; others dislike the comparison to Iraq and fear that the film will cast the city in a negative light.
But Willmott welcomes the controversy, saying “the more attention the better,” and that criticism is coming from people who haven’t seen the film yet. “That speaks for itself in a lot of ways,” he adds.
Willmott believes much of the controversy stems from critics misunderstanding the distinction between comedy and satire. Comedy is just for laughs, but satire “uses elements of humor to tell the truth.” He compares Chi-Raq to Dr. Strangelove, the 1964 political satire about nuclear war.
Screenwriter Kevin Willmott updated a Greek comedy to address gun violence.
The screenplay is based on Lysistrata, a Greek comedy by Aristophanes first performed in 411 BC, in which women withhold sex in an effort to stop the Peloponnesian War. In Chi-Raq, women in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood employ the same tactic to stop gang violence. It might seem a crazy concept, but sex strikes have been employed successfully throughout history — Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian peace activist, used a sex strike to help end a civil war in 2003 and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.
“I think the thing I like most about the film is that it’s about the solution — not about the problem,” Willmott says. “It’s not just another story about how bad it is in the ’hood. It’s a film about how people need to think outside the box.”
Willmott wrote the original screenplay 13 years ago and shared it with Lee, who “loved the script.” The pair pitched the film to Hollywood studios, but their efforts were unsuccessful at the time. Lee called Willmott a few years later and wanted to try again, this time with Amazon. Chi-Raq is Amazon’s first feature film.
Willmott says the recent entry of companies like Amazon and Netflix into the filmmaking and television programming business has been a game changer for the industry, pushing media boundaries and embracing new ideas.
The film’s themes are particularly timely, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the debate over how to address the issue of gun violence in America. Recent activism has increased scrutiny surrounding police killings of African Americans, but Chi-Raq addresses the issue of “black-on-black” crime.
That’s a favorite phrase among some conservatives, who argue that African Americans inflict more harm on their communities than police. But Willmott, who supports the Black Lives Matter movement, says, “You’ve got to care about human life, period. The police have to stop killing African Americans, and we have to stop killing each other. You don’t have to pick one or the other.”
