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SYNOPSIS
Joe and Max. Joe Louis (Leonard Roberts – The 60s mini series) and Max Schmeling (Til Schweiger – Driven, Investigating Sex, Der Bewegte Mann). Two legendary boxers. One, a black man. The other, white. Each carries a burden into the ring – the weight of his people, his nation, and an entire way of life. It is a weight borne reluctantly by both men: The consequence of a history neither can control. A destiny that will forever link their names in the popular imagination. They meet each other for the first time in 1936. Both are heavyweight contenders, their careers on the rise. The fight is a brutal, prolonged affair. Max Schmeling wins by a knockout in the 12th round. The repercussions are felt around the world. In an America still suffering the ravages of the Depression, Joe’s defeat is a devastating blow, especially among blacks and the downtrodden for whom Joe Louis is a source of pride and just about the only ray of hope for better days to come. Back in Germany, Max is celebrated as a national hero. Adolf Hitler himself calls Max’s victory a victory for all of Germany – living proof of Aryan racial superiority and grist for the mill of the Nazi propaganda machine.
But Max hardly fits the role that Hitler and propaganda minister Goebbels would have him play. For one thing, Max’s manager is a New York Jew named Joe Jacobs (David Paymer – Academy Award nominee for Mr. Saturday Night). And Max has no sympathy for Hitler or anti-Semitism. Ordered by Goebbels to break off ties with Jacobs, Max defies the Nazis, standing up to Hitler himself. Max tells the Führer that the only hope a German has of even getting a title fight lies in the influence that Jacobs wields with the New York Boxing Commission. If the Nazis want a German world champion, they’ll have to let a Jew lead the way.
For Joe Louis, getting knocked out by Max has served as a wake-up call. The once carefree, womanizing young man dedicates himself to training in rural isolation with a seriousness of purpose that stuns even his own handlers. Before long Joe wins the world championship. But he doesn’t feel right. In fact, he says, “I’m no champion until I beat Max Schmeling.” A Louis-Schmeling rematch is scheduled for June 22, 1938, this time for the heavyweight championship of the world.
Max arrives by ocean liner in New York, and is stunned by the virulence of his reception. In the public’s mind, Max is what Jacobs calls “Hitler’s boy.” “I’m no goddamn Nazi!” Max protests vainly to Jacobs. Deluged by hate mail and death threats, Max has no appetite either for food or for the role that fate and the mass media have cast him to play. On the night of his most important fight, Max enters the ring a shaken, troubled man. Joe Louis, in the best shape of his life, is there to greet him with only one fear. “I’m scared,” he confesses to his trainer Jack Blackburn (Richard Roundtree – the original Shaft), “scared I’m gonna kill that man tonight.” He nearly does. In one of the most awesome performances in the history of the sport, Joe Louis defeats Max Schmeling in less than one round, sending Max to the hospital with his vertebrae cracked in three places.
Joe sneaks past police guards to visit Max alone in the hospital. Each man has stood over the other in triumph. Joe says it will take a third fight to know the true victor. But they both know that world events won’t let that happen any time soon.
Max bids farewell to Jacobs and America, a country Max still loves even if it no longer loves him. No longer the hero, but now a social outcast, Max returns to Germany where the situation is increasingly dire. That November brings the infamous night of terror known as Kristallnacht – The Night of Broken Glass. Throughout Germany and Austria, marauding mobs burn books, ransack synagogues and savagely attack Jews in their homes and on the streets. At no small risk to his own safety or that of his lovely wife, the movie star Anny Ondra (Peta Wilson – La Femme Nikita TV series, A Girl Thing, Mercy), Max provides refuge that night to the Jewish family who have been his neighbors and friends for years, managing to hide them just before the arrival of a squad of SS storm troopers.
War breaks out, leaving Joe and Max on opposite sides. Joe consents to donate his earnings from several fights to the U.S. war effort. He enlists in the Army and appears in propaganda films. Max sees somewhat more dangerous action as an infantryman in the thick of the German invasion of Crete.
War’s end finds both men in financial difficulty. Max has lost everything, and tries his hand, with little success, as a mink farmer. And Joe, the victim of bad advice and sleazy managers, finds himself over a million dollars in debt to the government for failure to pay taxes. Max’s fortunes begin to turn one day with the visit from an American, Jim Farley. Farley’s a former member of the New York Boxing Commission, about the only one of the commissioners to have treated Max squarely in his boxing days. Farley’s no longer in the fight business. Instead, he’s working for Coca-Cola. The company wants Max to serve as a spokesman and help introduce their soft drink to the German market. Max is reluctant. His country is no longer interested in him, he thinks. But he gives way, and a new life opens up for him.
Several years later, as a successful Coca-Cola executive, Max is in America and decides to take a train to Chicago in search of his old opponent. He finds Joe in a barroom in the black ghetto of Chicago’s South Side. The bond between the two men is stronger than ever. Alone they can relate to each other as they never could inside the boxing ring, which they realize was always crowded with far more than just the two of them. As to who might have won that third fight of theirs – it’s too late now to answer the question, a question which will forever tantalize fans of the sport.
Shooting start: 07.05.2001
The Official JOE & MAX Website
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