‘Genius: MLK/X’ editor Adam Penn: The goal was ‘not to present a museum piece’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
For its fourth outing, “Genius” doubled up. While the first three seasons of the anthology series spotlighted a single figure, “Genius: MLK/X” focuses on Martin Luther King Jr. (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Malcolm X (Aaron Pierre). And for editor Adam Penn, that created an interesting challenge.
“The overarching sort of goal with this season was not to present a museum piece. This is not a filmed textbook, which would be easy to do with these two icons,” Penn tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: TV Editors panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “So what that meant was really kind of lifting the layers and getting in there and getting really subjective with sound and with visuals and presenting the parallels and the differences in these two men who a lot of us know a lot about — but not everything — so it was kind of a fascinating experiment.”
A two-time Emmy nominee, Penn worked on three episodes of “Genius: MLK/X,” including the premiere. That hour chronicles follows King and X from their childhoods to young adulthoods. And the final result was different from the initial script, which called for a lot more intercutting between the parallel timelines.
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“Scene with Martin, scene with Malcolm, bounce back and forth. And then we put that all together and it’s like, it’s cool, it’s great, the actors are great, but bouncing around so much doesn’t allow us to get emotionally invested in these guys,” Penn explains. “So we did a lot of playing around in the cutting room and moving scenes around. We ended up kind of just going with a little intercutting at the top and then we kind of go on a run with Malcolm for a while and just get into his story, see the origins of him and his philosophy. And then we can switch gears and go to Martin, and then kind of at the end we did a little more intercutting.”
In real life, the civil rights icons only met once and “Genius” does not abuse poetic license to create additional meetings. That solo interaction was another wrinkle for Penn. In a series that wants to show that these two ostensibly different men have more in common than not, how do you make it feel whole when your leads only share physical space once?
“It was interesting because I usually take my cues in the cutting room from the performances — just the rhythm of everything and both actors had different styles. Aaron was very kind of serious and intense. And Kelvin was warmer and looser. So it was sort of a balance of kind of presenting them a little differently but also narratively there are parallels. They were both largely influenced by their fathers and their mothers somewhat too. So the parallels were narrative, but the differences were hopefully represented in the styles that we presented each storyline,” Penn shares. “They’re both the leads, so it’s important to make it feel that way, which was a challenge, but I think it worked out. And a lot of that was because of how similar their trajectories were and then you kind of watch then veer, which was really cool.”
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