Shame About Ray

Though he speaks in a manner that’s careful and earnest, and sports a neat beard that’s downright schoolmasterly, director Taylor Hackford is looking mighty chipper.

It’s been sixteen years since he first walked into Ray Charles’ RPM headquarters to discuss making a feature film based on the Genius’ life. Since then, despite the full co-operation and involvement of his subject, Mr. Hackford has faced an Atlas-like struggle to bring his dream biopic into being, but finally, Ray has come to pass.
“Hollywood just isn’t interested in biography,” explains the filmmaker. “For years everyone said this is a great story but it’s for TV, right? Both Malcolm X and Ali had similar difficulties getting made, and the Ray Charles story, like those films, centres on a controversial black figure living through a turbulent era in race relations. Ray was a hard-sell. Although his life is fascinating and he’s a brilliant artist, Ray Charles was a heroin addict and could be an absolute bastard to people close to him.”
Built around an incredible performance by Jamie Foxx, Ray kicks off in the southern blues chitlin’ dives of the late 1940s, where Ray Charles Robinson, as he was then known, perfected his piano skills with yee-haw combos before hitting the blossoming jazz scene of Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Hackford’s film then backtracks into the ’30s, and the squalid ghetto of Greenville, Florida, where the younger Ray witnessed his brother drown, then gradually lost his sight. Predictably, it’s a pivotal flashback sequence.
“It haunted him through his entire life,” says Hackford. “He had something you often see with surviving siblings. A sense that his life had to be lived for two. And I think that was exacerbated by his own condition. You have to think that when a child, who has been raised in a religious background, watches his brother die at five and then loses his sight two years later, he will feel as though he’s being punished by God. And in his mind, his brother’s death was his fault because he didn’t call out to his mother in time.”
Ray Charles’ misfortune sharpened his interest in records by Count Basie and Nat King Cole, inspiring him to take up piano, and as he admitted to Hackford, he would probably never have achieved as much musically had he not lost his sight. But if guilt and disability spurred the performer on to greater heights and the virtual invention of modern soul, they also sucked him down into a spiral of smack and sexual addiction, dramatised here in nightmarish watery delusions.
“The water element in these visions is my invention,” says the director. “But it was a concise way of communicating all these personal demons and how they connected to his desire to blot everything out at that time in his life. He ended up getting busted for drugs a lot more than we show in the film. Then in ’65 there was a federal rap and the moment came when he had to choose between creativity and self-indulgence. So in typically determined fashion, he just went cold turkey and that was that.”
One can certainly sense this same singularity of purpose in Charles’ wilfully eclectic musical output. Though his later post-’65 incarnation as a mainstream celebrity and America’s Most Thoroughly Rehabilitated Drug Addict hastened a retreat into MOR schmaltz, the down and dirty Brother Ray of the late fifties and early sixties preached profane gospel in dingy halls, hijacking the call and response of the preacher-man and substituting ‘Amens’ and ‘Hallelujahs’ with the writhing ecstatic cries of ‘I Got A Woman’. He perfected this fusion of big-band and jazz, gospel and blues, spiritual and carnal on The Genius Hits The Road, his first album for Atlantic records, then defected into roots for his 1962 opus, Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music.
Ray showcases seventeen tracks from this, Charles’ most innovative period, but although the film’s musical odyssey halts in 1965, the epilogue concerns Ray Charles return to Georgia in 1979, when his version of Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Georgia On My Mind’ was declared the official state song.
“That was the one thing Ray insisted upon,” explains Taylor. “As far as I was concerned the movie was over in 1965, because after that there’s no dramatic tension. After that, it’s all gravy and the Ray Charles story is just success, success, success. But because he had been born in Albany, Georgia and because the state had banned him from ever playing there in 1961 when he refused to play segregated halls, he regarded the moment when Georgia honoured him as a favourite son as the high point of his life. Here was a man who had played in the White House for seven different presidents, but, for him, being welcomed back to Georgia was the culmination of his journey.”
While there’s an element of classic American Dream biography to all this, Ray is hardly a complete whitewash, despite the active participation of the film’s often wayward subject. Charles may have made Foxx play Theolonious Monk on piano for two hours before giving the actor his blessing, but he didn’t veto anything in Taylor’s screenplay. Of course, Ray doesn’t go into the musician’s lifelong post-smack passion for marijuana and gin, or the eleven children he fathered hither and thither, but there’s more than a glint of steel in Hackford’s depiction of Charles’ inner-torments, casual cruelties and control freakery.
“He was not an easy man,” smiles Hackford. “But he had to be tough, he had to be independent. That’s where his genius came from, but it’s also how he lived his entire life because of his upbringing. It was a classic tough love regime. Like you see in the movie, once Ray lost his sight, his mother Aretha literally showed him how to do something, helped him out one time and after that he was on his own. But you can understand why she was so hard on him. Life for a blind black man in Florida was not full of opportunities. She didn’t want him to end up being a beggar.”
Though the fifty-year-old director’s upbringing in Santa Barbara wasn’t quite as grim as his subject’s, it’s tempting to see parallels between Ray Charles’ life and Hackford’s own. Like Ray, Taylor wass raised on the wrong side of the tracks by a single mother battling poverty and breast cancer. His older brother, the person who turned him on to Ray Charles and rock n’ roll, also died prematurely in an industrial accident.
Interestingly, given his ‘live for two’ theory about surviving siblings, Taylor has considerable credentials as a rock n’ roll antiquarian filmmaker having directed The Idolmaker and Chuck Berry Hail! Hail! Rock N’ Roll and serving as a producer on La Bamba. He remains best known, however, for sensual high-concept fare (An Officer And A Gentleman, The Devil’s Advocate and Proof Of Life) and for being Helen Mirren, so you’d have to wager that he’s one contented, obedient husband.
“Oh yeah,” he nods, stiffening in mock obedience. “You betcha. Actually, I may be directing her next. It’s taken me seventeen years of living with her to pluck up the courage, so it’ll be interesting. I don’t need to tell you how fantastic she is so I’ll have to keep pace.”
Until this impeccable gentleman gets around to working with his demi-goddess wife, he’s in no doubt that his personal career high was being able to show Ray Charles a rough-cut of the movie, shortly before the singer’s death from liver failure in June of last year.
“He was so ill at the end, that we had to cancel three screenings before he was well enough to sit through the movie. It really pained me to see him. All the life and spark was gone, but he still knew what he wanted. He sat down and said, ‘Let me see my mamma.’ So I played him the reels and he started talking back to the screen, saying, ‘That’s right’ and ‘Ain’t that the truth’ to everything she said. That’s when I knew I must have done a decent job.”

Ray is out now.