National Geographic’s Genius: MLK/X has given viewers a unique new perspective on two civil rights leaders this Black History Month. The double-episode finale premieres on February 22nd, and I recently got to speak with editor Libya El-Amin about her work on two episodes (Episode 2: “Who We Are” and Episode 6: “The American Promise”). Here, Libya shares her own unique path to TV editing, how her upbringing in the Nation of Islam helped her connect deeper to Malcolm X’s story, and she reveals a deleted scene that she wishes could’ve been kept in.
(National Geographic/Libya El-Amin)
Alex: Six episodes of Genius: MLK/X have aired, and you edited two of them, both of which have parallels. Was that by design?
Libya El-Amin: I don't know if they did that deliberately. I have no say over which episodes I get, so when I got the March and Washington episode, I was like, “Do they know they gave me that episode?” Because our lead editor is like a big editor. He did the pilot, and I think he did episode five. But I feel like, hopefully, you kind of disappear into it. But I also feel like I have a kind of style, so I'm really proud of both of my episodes.
Alex: When you’re submitting yourself for an editing job, is it a lot like an audition for an actor?
Libya El-Amin: Yes and no. In theory, you're not going up against as many people. They don't usually see as many editors. Unfortunately, they look at a bunch of resumés and figure out from resumés who they want to talk to. And my thing is, when I do interviews, I usually lead with my enthusiasm for the project. I do a lot of research, and then I find that thing about the project that grabs me, that makes me love and want to work for whatever the project is. Sometimes it's there, and sometimes it's not, and I think you can tell. For this particular project, they were absolutely dealing with some stuff that I was really interested in because everybody growing up knows about Martin Luther King, but the difference for me was my family was more focused on Malcolm X. Both of my parents were in the Nation of Islam, so that made my perspective a little different in that I had the general knowledge of Martin Luther King like everybody else, but I had behind the scenes knowledge of Malcolm X, which most people don't have. My father was FOI (Fruit of Islam) my mother was MGT (Muslim Girls Training), and my early years were in the Nation. It's a different perspective because I actually had that parallel, and so I treated both people with a great deal of reverence.
Alex: You edited episodes two and six. How much space are you given between wrapping one and starting the next?
Libya El-Amin: Not very much. You're doing your producer cut hoping to get to lock before you get too many dailies [from the next episode]. But you're pretty much back-to-back. That's why they do the rotation the way they do, so that you're close to locking. You may not lock, but you'll be close to locking before you get your dailies for your next episode. What you don't want is, you're in the middle of dailies for one episode, and then you get dailies for the next episode, and then you can't even come up for air. Mine were pretty back-to-back, but I felt like I had worked with the producers on the first episode enough to understand their vision and understand what they were trying to do, so that informed how I cut the next episode. And I will say the most challenging part of episode six was actually the literal March. Most people don't know that Malcolm was there at the March, which I didn't know either, so that was a really cool thing. That scene had a lot of difficulties in that they started shooting at the beginning of the day, and by the time they got to Malcolm and his side, it was night. The footage didn't match. I had to figure out a way to blend the daytime, the nighttime, plus the black-and-white footage, and get all of that to work seamlessly together. and so that was a pretty big challenge working on that.
Alex: That sequence also incorporates some archival footage from the actual March on Washington. Those complications you described, is that why much of that sequence is in black-and-white?
Libya El-Amin: Well, it's actually in a sepia. What I did was it's in color at the beginning of the March, and then you see a black-and-white TV, and then we go into the TV, and then we're in black-and-white. Then I go from that stock footage, and then we blended to not quite black-and-white, just a touch of color, so like a sepia tone, and that allowed me to match the day footage with the night footage because I pulled out all that color. It allowed me to cut to stock footage without it being startling. It let me blend all those things together.
Alex: On films, editors work very closely with the director. Each of your episodes had a different director. In the TV space, is the director as involved in the edit, or does that fall more to the showrunner?
Libya El-Amin: The showrunner handles the stuff at the end, but the director very much is deciding how we're coming into a scene and directing the actors. I had Crystle Roberson Dorsey directing episode six, and she did part of episode two. Her vision very much informed my episodes, and they did them in blocks, so she did several episodes. But that allowed you to have a continuity of vision from one episode to the other, so it doesn't jump in tone too much. And then the showrunners, they have to make sure that the through point of the whole story stays together because when I have my vision, I'm really just zeroed in on my episode, but they have to keep an idea of where the overall plot is going, or the overall theme. So scenes that I thought weren't that important, they're like, “No, no, no, no, we can't lose that scene because it's important three episodes later.”
Alex: How did you first get into editing?
Libya El-Amin: The really difficult way. I have a degree in engineering, a masters in chemical engineering, and I worked as a chemical engineer for between four and six years for 3M and then for a company called Asahi Glass. I was basically cutting TV shows to songs like people do on YouTube. Now, I was doing that before there was a YouTube, and I was entering them into contests for fan videos and stuff like that. I found that I was enjoying that more than my day job, and I was like, “What am I doing? Why am I wasting eight hours of my life doing this when I could do this for real?” So then I went to the New York Film Academy and started there. I did some internships and made my way through the whole process. I went from New York, where they did documentaries and commercials, and I was like, no, I want to do TV. So then I had to move to LA to do TV. And then there's the whole thing where you have to have your hours before you can do union work, so I had to do reality TV. I got stuck there for a while until I got into scripted. I did the really long route to get to where I was trying to go.
Alex: There’s a documentarian style at times to Genius: MLK/X. Did your experience editing documentaries help you at all on this project?
Libya El-Amin: I would say not exactly because it's scripted. Documentaries and reality and those kinds of shows, you as the editor are building the story from nothing. You're taking footage, and you're creating the story. Here, it's scripted it they they have written the words, you're following along, so it's a different thing. And the focus is different because I'm focusing on performance, I'm focusing on how the shots are coming in, making sure that this story is told in a really interesting way. I feel like it's a different muscle than doing a documentary.
Alex: That makes sense. We always hear about scenes getting left on the cutting room floor. As you were working on your episodes and trimming them to the length that National Geographic needed them to be, was there anything that sticks out as painful to lose?
Libya El-Amin: Absolutely. At the last minute, we tried to figure out how to put it back in, and it didn't work. We had this brilliant scene in episode six with Bayard Rustin. it was Rustin and Martin, and it was basically their reconciliation apology speech. It was really sweet, and it was moving, and it gave them a breath to just reconnect as characters. It was in the episode all the way till the very end where they were like, you need to cut, cut, cut. It was one of the last scenes to go. And because the movie Rustin came out, we were like, “Can we put it back in?” And they were like “No, it's too late now.” But that's a scene that I really wished everybody could get to see.
We may not have gotten to see Bayard Rustin’s reconciliation with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but there are still two more episodes of Genius: MLK/X to see, which premiere Thursday, February 22nd, at 9/8c on Nat Geo, and streaming Friday, February 23rd, on Disney+ and Hulu.