Columbus native Wil Haygood's biography of Sammy Davis Jr. to be eight-part Hulu series
The life of Sammy Davis Jr. is soon headed to a TV screen, computer monitor or tablet near you — and Columbus native Wil Haygood is helping tell the story.
Last week, the streaming service Hulu announced that it plans to make an eight-part limited series based upon Haygood’s acclaimed 2003 biography “In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis Jr.”
Actor Elijah Kelley, known for the movie musical remake of “Hairspray” and NBC’s “The Wiz Live!,” will star as the legendary singer, dancer, actor and Rat Pack member. Davis was born in 1925 and died in 1990.
In an interview with The Dispatch, Haygood — who graduated from Miami University in Oxford in 1976 and was, for many years, a writer with The Washington Post — expressed gratitude that Davis’ unique story will be told over the course of multiple episodes rather than in a feature-length film.
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“I am so happy that it didn’t end up as a singular motion picture because you have to truncate so much if it’s a two-hour motion picture, of a life this epic, of a life this broad,” said Haygood, 67, who lives in Washington, D.C. His most recent book, “Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World,” came out last fall.
How the Sammy Davis Jr. series will unfold
“In an eight-part series, one can talk about vaudeville, one can talk about Sammy’s genius, how he propelled his father (dancer Sammy Davis Sr.) and honorary uncle, Will Mastin, to keep going through the hard years of the Depression,” Haygood said. “One can write about Sammy’s complicated relationship with white women, with race. He was engaged in his life to two white women, one in Canada, and, of course, May Britt here in the U.S., and he ended up marrying May Britt.”
The series will be created and co-written by filmmaker Lee Daniels, who previously turned Haygood’s 2008 Washington Post article about longtime White House butler Eugene Allen into “The Butler,” a 2013 film starring Forest Whitaker. (Kelley also had a supporting role in that film.)
“Lee has a real gift for very complicated stories,” Haygood said. “He knows how to intertwine music and drama, and he’s very passionate about this story. I think he sees that if you tell the story of Sammy Davis Jr., the unsung story of Sammy Davis Jr., that you tell the story of America.”
A series about Davis years in the making
Davis’ life might seem to be a natural fit for a movie or limited series, but Haygood’s book took nearly two decades to finally be adapted for the screen.
In 2004, the biography was optioned by Denzel Washington, who intended to direct a feature-film adaptation.
“He held the option for about three years,” Haygood said. “I went and met him, talked to him at length, and for whatever reason — who knows why these things happen — it just didn’t happen.”
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Then, when filming wrapped on “The Butler,” Daniels asked Haygood’s agent if the author had any other material he might read and consider for film projects.
“My agent, Esther Newberg, told him that he should read my Sammy Davis Jr. book,” Haygood said. “Lee took a flight cross-country for six hours, read a lot of the book on that flight and by the time he landed, he called me and said that he found the book fascinating and that he was going to option it.”
Sammy Davis Jr.'s ties to Columbus
Haygood will serve as a producer on the series, a role he describes as helping Daniels and co-writer Thomas Westfall fill in any blanks about Davis’ extraordinary life.
“Even though it is a 500-page book, there were still a lot of things that I had no room to put in the book,” he said.
In a sense, it’s fitting that Davis’ life will reach the screen thanks to the efforts of a Columbus-born author: While researching the biography, Haygood discovered that Davis’ first appearance on stage was in Columbus, where his father was performing, in about 1929.
“It was an accident almost that Sammy was backstage and had kind of gotten lost backstage and came out onstage to be with his dad and just started dancing,” said Haygood, who was not able to pinpoint the name of the Columbus theater where Davis’ debut took place — but he has some ideas.
“I was never able to find the exact theater.” he said, “But the Black theater in town was the Lincoln Theatre.”