Did you know that Elgin Baylor tried to get the NBA to put a stop to Donald Sterling’s racism a whole decade before V. Stiviano leaked the audio that shocked the league?
Source: Kelsey McNeal / FX Networks
A new episode of the FX series CLIPPED is set to air Tuesday, June 25 but we had a chance to chat with the show creator and writer Gina Welch, writer Rembert Browne and director Kevin Bray about last week’s episode, which features a flashback to a decade prior to the Donald Sterling/V.Stiviano scandal when Elgin Baylor levied accusations of racism against Sterling and the Clippers organization to no avail.
Director Kevin Bray opened up about how he used Doc Rivers as a vehicle to tell the story from both a 2014 and 2004 via a dream sequence where he recalled his own early experiences with Donald Sterling and Elgin Baylor.
Source: Kelsey McNeal / FX Networks
“I think just by the nature of the structure of the episode it was trying to give equanimity to each of the characters that we’ve lived with, and giving context which I think is what’s so delicious about that episode,” Bray told BOSSIP. “You don’t usually see something like that right? It’s kind of literary to have that kind of exposure. It’s like Star Trek when they go back in time.”
“I think it was very important… You stick your finger deeper into the hole of the story, now you’re starting to think about what you watched before and you’re very excited about that you’re going to see now. How is this when he wakes up and gets off that plane and we continue, you really are kind of ramped up. As a director I’m the first fan in the seat watching this movie, so that’s me as a fan watching the show.”
“I also think that’s just a beautifully concise observation, that had Elgin’s lawsuit moved forward, the events of 2014 might have been completely different,” CLIPPED writer and creator Gina Welch added. “I think really the importance for us of having that flashback episode was to measure how long all this had really been going on. The history of it and that you know that that when it happened in 2014, it wasn’t a shock to the NBA, it wasn’t a shock to really anyone who who knew who Donald Sterling was.”
“It really humanized those people,” Rembert Browned added. “We want to know more about people before they became celebrities, before they became fodder for social media and for so that I think is super engaging.”
Have you been watching CLIPPED? What did you think about episode 4?
The first five episodes of CLIPPED are currently streaming on HULU