KLMNO

Style

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22 , 2021. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/STYLE EZ RE C

BY ASHLEY FETTERS MALOY

Phil Bertelsen was at home on

his sofa earlier this month when

the call he had barely even dared

to hope for lit up his phone. An

attorney gave him the news:

“Who Killed Malcolm X?,” the

documentary series Bertelsen

made with Rachel Dretzin, had

not only debunked a long-accept-

ed narrative about two of the

three men charged in the civil

rights leader’s death — but it had

also helped overturn their con-

victions.

Bertelsen was elated. But the

news was embargoed. So for the

next full week, he was “like a

tiger in a cage,” he said. Still, “I

was just so filled with energy and

emotion and relief.”

Produced by Fusion TV, the six

43-minute installments of “Who

Killed Malcolm X?” raise a num-

ber of questions about the inves-

tigation of the titular leader’s

death in 1965. Muhammad A.

Aziz and Khalil Islam were con-

victed (alongside a third man,

Mujahid Abdul Halim), and al-

though both maintained that

they were innocent, each spent

more than two decades in prison.

But in response to the attention

that “Who Killed Malcolm X?”

garnered when it premiered on

Netflix in 2020, the Manhattan

District Attorney’s Office reex-

amined the case.

Islam was paroled in 1987 and

died in 2009. Aziz, 83, who was

released from prison in 1985,

reported to the New York court-

house Thursday to be formally

exonerated — the same one

where he was sentenced more

than 50 years ago. Present in the

courtroom, alongside family

members of Aziz’s and Islam’s,

were the filmmakers, Dretzin

and Bertelsen.

These recent events mark

“Who Killed Malcolm X?” as the

latest in a string of “history,

revisited” documentaries that

have spurred public reckonings

and changes within the justice

system. These projects have ush-

ered in an extraordinary new era

of filmmaking — one in which

projects may be assessed not just

on the merits of their creation

but also on the magnitude of the

action they inspire.

SEE DOCUMENTARIES ON C4

The powerful o≠-screen e≠ects of documentaries

‘Who Killed Malcolm X?,’ ‘Framing Britney Spears’ and more have spurred public reckonings and changes within the justice system

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Malcolm X speaks to reporters in Washington in May 1963. Two of the three men convicted in his

assassination were cleared last week. “Who Killed Malcolm X?” helped overturn their convictions.

BY MADDIE CRUM

The cover of Emily Ratajkows-
ki’s essay collection, “My Body,” is
all text, a staid typeface in bright
colors. There’s no photo of the
actress and model, whose star —
and notoriety — rose after she
performed
what looked
like a noncha-
lant topless
dance for Rob-
in Thicke’s
“Blurred Lines”
video. She went
on to appear in
David Fincher’s
“Gone Girl” and
launch a swim-
wear line which
she promotes
to her 28 mil-
lion Instagram
followers.
A text-only
cover is unusu-
al for a book by a celebrity, but it
aligns with Ratajkowski’s inten-
tions. “I wanted to be able to have
my Instagram hustle, selling biki-
nis and whatever else,” she writes
in her introduction, “while also
being respected for my ideas and
politics and well, everything be-
sides my body.”
She wanted, in other words, to
challenge an either-or fallacy of
womanhood: that she can’t have
both a body and a brain, can’t be
both appealing and incisive, can’t
have both a brand and a book —
not one she wrote herself, anyway.
SEE BOOK WORLD ON C2

BOOK WORLD

‘My Body’

delves into

much more

than that

MY BODY
By Emily
Ratajkowski
Metropolitan
Books. 256 pp.
$26

BY MICHAEL CAVNA

Ray Billingsley didn’t much
like his second-floor Harlem
home on Bradhurst Avenue back
then. It was affordable — this
being the mid-’80s — but he felt
isolated, and he knew crime was
a threat: “One evening while in
bed with the window open, I
actually heard three guys plan-
ning on burglarizing my apart-
ment.”
Yet this setting was also
where, later that night after
going to bed, Billingsley drew
inspiration. He awoke with a
creative burst. “I had a vision of
these two kids. I sketched them
down in the dark and went back
to sleep. That morning, I found
the first images of Curtis and
Barry.”
There they were, two cartoon
brothers — the taller one wear-
ing Curtis’s signature ball cap,
the shorter one in suspenders.
With minimal line work, he had
rendered his future.
In October 1988, King Fea-
tures launched Billingsley’s com-
ic strip “Curtis,” centering on the
11-year-old title character and
brother Barry, and featuring a
predominantly Black cast, which
was rare in syndicated comics of
the era. The family strip soon
proved popular with millions of
readers; today, “Curtis” has
about 220 print clients and 300
digital clients, according to King.
Thirty-three years later,
Billingsley smiles into his com-
SEE BILLINGSLEY ON C2

After years

of waiting,

cartoonist

gets his due

THEATER REVIEW

A play about apartheid

South Africa resonates

in modern America. C2

ADELE

The singer asked Spotify

to not shuffle her new

album. It listened. C3

CAROLYN HAX

A parent wants to vacuum

where her kid’s Lego world

sits. Does she have to? C8

BY TRAVIS M. ANDREWS

AND HAU CHU

Noah Diaz woke up at 6 a.m., exhilarat-

ed to attend his first music festival and

finally see Travis Scott perform live.

He and his buddies arrived at the

Astroworld Festival grounds at 8 a.m. on

Nov. 5, only to find a rowdy crowd already

pulling down barricades and rushing past

the covid checkpoint. A girl’s foot was

stuck between metal bars of a barricade as

people “were running over her.” Someone

began igniting small fireworks. A police

officer discharged his Taser into the sky.

Diaz felt the first pangs of anxiety. It

was 10 a.m.

“It felt doomed from the start,” said the

22-year-old Houston resident.

By the time Scott took the stage that

night, Diaz felt claustrophobic. Crowd

surges, often egged on by Scott himself,

lifted Diaz, a 6-foot-2, 280-pound former

high school football player, off his feet. He

struggled to breathe and watched people

slip under the crowd, pinned to the

ground.

“It was almost like you were in a wave

pool ... [but] drowning in human bodies,”

he said.

After the show, Diaz ripped up a paint-

ing of a previous Astroworld festival that a

friend had painted years ago. He threw his

dirty shoes in the trash and deleted all of

Scott’s music from his phone. “I don’t

SEE FESTIVALS ON C3

WHEN MUSIC FESTS

GO WRONG

Millions of Americans attend them every year, but the ones that fail share similar problems

AMY HARRIS/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Travis Scott performs during the Astroworld Festival on N ov. 5 in Houston. Ten people have died and hundreds more were

injured after crowd surges during Scott’s set. “It felt doomed from the start,” said 22-year-old festivalgoer Noah Diaz.