The Black Girl Magic of “A Wrinkle in Time”

“Black cinema” and “blockbuster” are suddenly becoming synonymous. “Black Panther” is already nearing a billion dollars in global box office receipts and Jordan Peele just became the first African-American to win an Oscar for best original screenplay for his surprise 2017 racially-tinged hit “Get Out;” and on March 9, Disney will release its highly anticipated film, “A Wrinkle in Time,” a $100 million film with a black female director and young black female star.

Unlike “Black Panther” or “Get Out,” “Wrinkle” is a mainstream movie with an intentionally African American face. Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 science fantasy novel of the same title, from which it is adapted, centers on a middle school-aged white girl, Meg Murray, who is battling with self-esteem issues. With the help of three celestial guides— Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who— she tries to find her missing scientist father, whom she mourns desperately, by traveling through other worlds with her brother Charles Wallace and her friend Calvin.

On the big screen, Meg is an African American girl, with Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling portraying the guides.

What viewers see on the screen is the result in large part to decisions made behind the camera. That begins with trailblazing director, Ava DuVernay.

Prior to being tapped to direct “Wrinkle,” whose $100 million budget is the largest ever for a black female director in Hollywood, DuVernay was known for quiet films like “Middle of Nowhere,” which garnered her the Best Director Award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, the first for an African-American woman. Before “Wrinkle,” “Selma” (2014) about the Voting Rights Act campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was DuVernay’s biggest budget feature film at just $20 million.

However, DuVernay took the leap only because of the opportunity provided by a black Disney executive.

“It wasn’t a likely marriage but when you have a brother inside, Tendo Nagenda, who said ‘I can see this happening’ and he imagined what it could be before I imagined what it could be,”

DuVernay said of Disney’s executive vice president of production during her acceptance speech for the African American Film Critics Association (AAFCA) Innovator Award in February. “The thing I really remember is Tendo saying, ‘Ava, imagine the worlds you can build.’”

That conversation she said “started to get me to ask questions about what I wanted to assert in that story and the real core of it was: who gets to be the hero? Because, right now, we’re in this space where we’re on the cusp of “Black Panther” and all its gloriousness and we get to re-imagine who is at the center of the story. This story, our story, she’s not a superhero; she’s not royalty; she’s not a Disney princess. She’s just a girl with glasses in a plaid shirt who ends up saving herself and her family and the universe from darkness.”

The actress who plays that unlikely hero, Storm Reid, was familiar with the story but admits to not being personally invested in it until now. “I read the book in sixth grade for a book report and I never saw myself being Meg, especially because she was written as a young Caucasian girl, so I just really never thought about it,” she said during an interview at a posh hotel in her native Atlanta last week. “But once I got the script, it all clicked and I thought it was just an amazing take on Meg.”

Even as young as she is, Reid, whose previous credits include “12 Years A Slave,” (2013), “American Girl: Lea to the Rescue” (2016) and “Sleight” (2017) has felt the sting of Hollywood limitations for actresses like her.

“There were fewer roles meant for me and fewer lead roles meant for me,” she said. That reality is why Reid especially cherishes her role as Meg.

“I feel like it was so important for me to play Meg because I’m basically representing little girls that look like me and I’m representing them in the right way because you don’t really get to see a little African American girl with glasses and curly hair save the world without superpowers,” she said.

Reid, who turns 15 in July, does see changes in Hollywood and hopes it will continue.

“I feel like we are breaking barriers, slowly but surely but, there needs to be more representation. I don’t feel like diversity should just be a thing right now. I feel like it should be a normal thing.”

As for the “black girl magic” tag that is now been extended to her but has long been attributed to “A Wrinkle in Time” director Ava DuVernay, Reid said, “I feel like people are just now recognizing our magic, but we’ve always been magic and it just recently became a hashtag.”

Stars And Creators Reflect on Arrival of ‘Black Panther’ Movie

Fans, who bought a record-setting number of advance tickets, aren’t the only ones anticipating the February 16, 2018, opening of “Black Panther,” Marvel’s historic first black superhero film.

“I’ve been waiting a long time. I was just so, so excited because this was a movie [where] we all felt a lot of ownership, that we thoroughly enjoyed making,” said Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o during the film’s January 30 press conference at the Montage Beverly Hills, the morning after its glitzy purple carpet premiere. Nyong’o plays Nakia, T’Challa/Black Panther’s love interest.

Although T’Challa/Black Panther, whose superpowers include speed, strength, night vision, claws and more aided by his country’s powerful metal, Vibranium, was first introduced in the “Fantastic Four” comic book series in 1966, months before the founding of the iconic freedom-fighting Black Panther Party, “Black Panther” is the character’s first-ever live action film.

Reportedly Jack Kirby, who created T’Challa/Black Panther with Stan Lee, took the name from the all-black U.S. Army 761st Tank Battalion of World War II dubbed “the Black Panthers.” Chadwick Boseman, well-known for his roles as such real-life heroes as Jackie Robinson and James Brown, is the first to ever play him on film, appearing in 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War” to great enthusiasm. He returns in “Avengers: Infinity War” May 4, 2018.

“Black Panther” follows T’Challa/Black Panther’s journey, in the aftermath of his father’s death, to lead his technologically advanced nation, Wakanda, which the world believes is impoverished. Featuring black actors from the United States, England and various parts of Africa, “Black Panther” is the first Marvel film set in a black-ruled nation. As such, the film challenges the negative stereotypes in which the world typically views African nations. It also raises larger questions about what a successful never colonialized African country might look like and what role it would play in today’s global landscape.

T'Challa/Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) fight as female warriors known as Dora Milaje who protect the king  look on.

Matt Kennedy. ©Marvel Studios 2018

T’Challa/Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) fight as female warriors known as Dora Milaje who protect the king look on.

The film’s larger significance was clearly important to Nyong’o and her fellow cast members— who included Boseman; Michael B. Jordan (Erik Killmonger); Forest Whitaker (Zuri); Angela Bassett (T’Challa/Black Panther’s stepmother Ramonda); “Get Out” Oscar nominee Daniel Kaluuya (W’Kabi); and more— during the Hollywood press conference where Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige and Ryan Coogler, the film’s co-writer and director, were also present.

Jordan plays the main villain Erik Killmonger, who challenges T’Challa/Black Panther’s ascension as Wakanda’s king said he only truly grasped the film’s importance after seeing it for the first time at the premiere.

“I couldn’t describe that feeling before actually sitting down and watching that film and seeing yourself on screen, not just me personally, but people that look like me in power and having those socially relevant themes but in a movie that you want to sit down and watch and enjoy,” Jordan said.

As someone from both the United States and Zimbabwe, Danai Gurira, who plays Okoye, leader of the female warriors known as the Dora Milaje who protect the king, had an even more positive response to the fictional Wakanda and its very real continent. Gurira shared that she appreciated the departure from the usual depictions of African countries as impoverished.

“You see the power and potential of where you’re from, but you see how skewed it’s viewed by the world and how misrepresented it is and how distorted it is or besieged by the world so often,” she said. “[“Black Panther” is] kind of a salve to those wounds to see this world brought to life this way and to see all the potential and power of all the different African culturalisms and aspects of our being that’s actually celebrated.”

“Black Panther” is also noteworthy for its elevation of black women in the superhero genre, be they strong like Gurira’s Okoye, humanitarian like Nyong’o’s Nakia, royal like Angela Bassett’s Ramonda or STEM geniuses like Letitia Wright’s Shuri who is T’Challa/Black Panther’s sister. That elevation was also present behind the scenes through the work of production designer Hannah Beachler, Oscar-nominated costume designer Ruth E. Carter and hair department head Camille Friend.

“How it was written is that the men are always behind the women as well so no one is undermined,” said Wright about the film and her character. “The men are not like ‘you shouldn’t be in technology, you shouldn’t be in math.’ T’Challa is like ‘go ahead sis, this is your department, this is your domain, like kill it.’”

Boseman attributes that gender balance to the vision that is Wakanda.

“The idea of the next generation being smarter, being better than you, is a concept that they would have evolved to,” said Boseman. “So even though she’s reared in the same generation, she’s my younger sister, she benefits from whatever I have. So you want your sons and daughters to be better than you were. So that concept is a Wakandan concept.”

Coogler, previously known for his independent social justice film “Fruitvale Station” and the latest installment of the Rocky franchise, “Creed,” both starring Jordan, says he was cautious not to tamper too much with the “Black Panther” spirit, so well established by the comic books in the script he wrote with Joe Robert Cole.

“You can go through our film and see something in there probably from every writer that has touched T’Challa’s character and the “Black Panther” comics, from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s initial runs to Don McGregor to Christopher Priest, Reginald Hudlin, Jonathan Hickman and Ta-Nehisi Coates,” he said, naming most of the franchise writers. “The character has got a long history and such rich stuff to mine and each writer left their own mark.”

When the film’s radicalism was singled out, Feige reminded those in the room that “Black Panther” was born radical. “Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and the whole Marvel bullpen created Wakanda and created T’Challa and created Black

Panther and made him a smarter, more accomplished character than any of the other white characters in the mid-1960s,” he said.

That integrity, Feige continued, guided this Marvel team. “If they had the guts to do that in the mid-1960s,” he said, “the least we [could] do is live up to that and allow this story to be told the way it needed to be told and not shy away from things that the Marvel founders didn’t shy away from in the height of the Civil Rights era.”