The Nine Lives and Lost Promise of Marion Barry

Black triumph is a recurring theme at the Silverdocs festival that the American Film Institute and the Discovery Channel are putting on this week in suburban Washington, D.C. There are films about LeBron James (More than A Game) and Muhammed Ali (Facing Ali) and, indirectly, about Barack Obama (Convention).

The Nine Lives of Marion Barry is also on the program, set to premiere Saturday in advance of an Aug. 10 showing on HBO. But its protagonist is so deeply flawed that the film has the feel of tragedy.

On one level, the tale of the former Washington, D.C., mayor is about extraordinary grit and resilience -- the man is, after all, 73 and still in public life, representing the city's poorest ward on the D.C. City Council. But on another level, starting with footage of a compelling young civil rights leader captivating crowds in a turbulent capital city, it chronicles Barry's profound failure to live up to his early promise.

"He had the potential to be Martin Luther King's successor -- a leading political figure of our era," Washingtonian writer Harry Jaffe says in the film, directed by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer.

Instead, Barry is a punch line, a punching bag and a cautionary tale. He's also an electoral habit that some people still can't quit, despite his two decades of womanizing, drug addiction, alcohol abuse and tax delinquency.

In an interview filmed in 2003, Barry's late former wife Effi says he was one of the most brilliant men she'd ever met. Her comment and Jaffe's eye-opening observation make you wonder what might have been, for the city and the country.

Barry's life certainly began in promising American Dream fashion. He was born to Mississippi sharecroppers who picked cotton. Later, in Memphis, Barry became an Eagle Scout and attended college. He had a master's degree in chemistry and was headed for a Ph.D. when he joined the civil rights movement full time after years of campus activism.

Trained at the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, Barry came to Washington to organize field operations in 1964. He was, Jesse Jackson says in the film, "one of us" – a risk-taking young man "who had that fire." In 1974, Washington gained home rule after decades of control by white, sometimes racist, members of Congress. Barry ran for an at-large City Council seat and won two terms. In 1978 he won the first of his four terms as mayor.

Barry's third term was interrupted by what became, in Effi Barry's words, "an international fiasco," a grainy tape of Barry doing cocaine in a hotel room with a former girlfriend. He was convicted on drug charges and served six months. Incredibly, in 1994, after his conviction and imprisonment, he was elected to a fourth mayoral term.

I don't know what was more incredible, actually, that he ran or that he won. For many of us in the city, and I am a 27-year resident, it was so painful that we blocked it out. I truly didn't remember Barry's post-prison victory until I watched this film.

Barry retired in 1998 – but six years later made his comeback run for City Council. This race is the anchor of Nine Lives, intercut with flashbacks to Barry's achievements and disgraces.

There was his creation during his organizing days of PRIDE, which provided jobs for 2,800 youths. His first inauguration as mayor, when he said that "the past was too often defined by others for us, and without us," and that the city's time had come. The thrill of home rule realized, propelling black professionals to high positions in their own city. The graft and corruption that infected Barry's third term. And the addictions to alcohol, women and drugs that, as former newsman Mark Feldstein says in the film, mirrored the city's own decline during the crack cocaine epidemic.

The film shows Barry and his associates being barraged with questions as the media tried to confirm rampant reports of bad, sometimes illegal behavior. Was he having an affair with a woman named Karen Johnson? Was she supplying him with drugs? Had he ever taken any drugs? What about hush money? And the classic "How many women were actually performing sex on the mayor?"

The mayor repeatedly denied he had ever used drugs, even as physical symptoms – sweating, slurred speech -- suggested otherwise. He is shown exhorting schoolchildren not to use drugs because they mess up your mind and body. "I didn't connect what I did with what I was saying," Barry tells the filmmakers years later. "That's the complexity of the disease. It runs you rather than you run it."

Effi Barry, who died of leukemia in 2007, said Barry had become an embarrassment to his city, his family and himself. She attended every day of his trial, even the day Rasheeda Moore, the girlfriend in the hotel tape, took the stand. "I sat there," she said. "Because that was the thing to do." Soon afterward she divorced him.

So did white Washington, which offered what local political analyst Mark Plotkin calls "infinitesimal" support in Barry's 1994 race. Within a year Congress reasserted its hold on the city by naming a control board.

Why black people have kept electing Barry is a complicated question. "We can forgive a little womanizing, a little late night catting in our community, because who doesn't know somebody who isn't like that?" Adrienne Washington, a Washington Times columnist, tells the filmmakers.

But that doesn't fully explain what keeps some voters so loyal to Barry. "He has charisma but he uses his good for evil," Sandra Seegars, one of his rivals in the 2004 race, tells the filmmakers. "He's just a lost soul."

Barry's never-ending cycle of contrition and relapse is on full display in Nine Lives. On his release from prison in 1991, he told constituents: "I got caught up in alcohol and drug abuse. I hurt myself, my family and many of you." On election night 2004, he tells supporters, "With age comes wisdom." Two years later, he was sentenced to probation and drug testing after failing to file income tax returns and failing a drug test. The Washington Post described him as subdued and apologetic.

Nine Lives has been in development on and off since 2002. Funding was hard to secure, the filmmakers say, because the story is so dark. Barry has seen it and considers it balanced, they say. But "it was hard for him to watch and very emotional. The toughest part for him to watch was Effi," says Flor.

Still, Barry plans to be on hand for the Nine Lives premiere at Silverdocs. "He likes to be in the public eye," Oppenheimer says. "He loves the attention."