By Rob Feld
When the editorial team behind “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist” came together, it was less about assembling a crew and more about aligning a mindset.
Tom Wilson had worked with the executive producers previously. “When I sat down with Shaye Ogbonna, the creator, we really hit it off in terms of how we approach our storytelling,” Wilson said, noting a shared emphasis on using character to drive exposition. Felicia Livingston read up on the true story and binged the podcast source material just days before her interview with the team.
“My prior project had also taken place in the 1970’s and I felt this was my era,” she said.
For Shaheed Qaasim, it was all about creative compatibility with the producers. He found their storytelling values—particularly the focus on honoring real-life characters—deeply aligned with his own. “I think finding storytellers that have a character-first mentality was a priority,” Qaasim said.
“Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist,” a limited series on Peacock that premiered last year and was based on the iHeart true-crime podcast, dramatizes a pivotal moment in Atlanta’s history. Set against the backdrop of Muhammad Ali’s legendary 1970 comeback fight, the story follows Chicken Man (Kevin Hart), a flamboyant hustler who throws a lavish afterparty for the leaders of America’s Black mafia—only for it to end in the city’s most notorious armed robbery. Accused by the gangsters of masterminding the heist, Chicken Man sets out to clear his name by convincing J.D. Hudson (Don Cheadle), a pioneering Black detective in the newly integrated Atlanta police force, to see past the noise and find the real culprits. What follows is a tense, high-stakes game of interwoven character lines and interests and shifting loyalties.
CineMontage: Tell me about working that hyper-1970’s title sequence into the narrative and how it informed the rest of the editing?
Tom Wilson: Right before shooting started, our director Craig Brewer was watching “The Thomas Crown Affair” and said he loved how the panels on the screen helped move the story along and keep the characters alive. It had a great feeling, and he wondered about incorporating something like that to keep scenes alive and transition between places. It really helped build the world we were trying to inhabit. So we tried to incorporate it into the cuts and also into the main title sequence. The title sequence went through months of variations as they refined the look and feel. It became a bit of a self-feeding loop—the way we cut scenes influenced the title, and then seeing versions of the title inspired us to do more of that in the episodes. It really fed the tone and feel of everything.
Tom Wilson, picture editor. PHOTO: Courtesy Tom Wilson.
Shaheed Qaasim: It was a great idea that Craig came up with. Split screens weren’t new, but they gained a lot of popularity in the ’60s and ’70s. Since we were doing a heist set in the ’70s—but the story starts in the ’60s—it made sense stylistically to reference those old Hollywood moments and create a more vintage feel. I think the main title was inspired by the editing we were already doing. By then, we had really created a vibe. It wasn’t fully fleshed out design-wise, but Tom and I had already done a lot of sketches that were effective in the storytelling. So it made sense to keep that consistent with the title sequence.
CineMontage: Once you introduce split screen into the grammar of your storytelling, what does it condition or give you as a tool?
Felicia Livingston: It just allows you to look at things differently. It’s also a compression of time—you can tell two narratives at once. If you expanded those moments, they’d take up more story time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, like Shaheed said, it really contributed to the ’70s aesthetic and helped immerse the audience in the period.
Felicia Livinston, picture editor PHOTO: Courtesy Felicia Livinston.
Shaheed Qaasim: And beyond the aesthetic, split screens offer a lot editorially. They simplify complex story beats. You have one frame but can show multiple images. A great example is the montage Tom cut in episode one when we meet the five gangster families under Frank Moten—we could show a character’s face, where they’re from, and key information all at once. It’s also great for simultaneous action. One character can be waiting in a diner while another drives up, creating tension as they converge. In episode two, which I cut, we used it while Chicken Man is planning his next game—integrating flashbacks with present action. It’s useful for emotional beats too. There’s a J.D. and Chicken Man moment where they look at each other in real time, both in one frame. That kind of simultaneity is hard to do in editing. On the page, it’s easy to write a scene with multiple characters doing things at once. But as editors, we can only be in one place at a time. Split screen lets us show both characters in the same frame, at the same time.
Tom Wilson: And to treat groups of characters as one character, essentially. If the robbers are scoping out the house and we’ve got people searching upstairs and downstairs, you can treat them as a single unit—which can be really helpful. Same with a scene where a group is sitting around a table planning something. Showing everyone’s reactions at once gives you a sense of the group that you can’t get by cutting from person to person. You can really bring them together.
Shaheed Qaasim: And editorially, rhythmically, it also gives you an opportunity to slow down. A lot of times, as editors, we’re trying to keep pace or rhythm, but if you’ve got something like a phone call, you can actually slow things down. With both characters on screen at the same time, you gain more control in adjusting the rhythm of the scene. One thing you don’t always think about with split screens is how much creativity lies in the borders—the amount of black space between each frame. We all approached that differently, and then we’d get inspired by each other’s choices and incorporate those ideas into our own work.
Shaheed Qaasim, picture editor. PHOTO: Jazmine Sanchez.
CineMontage: What would that look like?
Shaheed Qaasim: We went through so many iterations but I remember versions with really thick black borders—lots of negative space. We were being intentional with how much space we left between shots, the angles, the movement. That took time to figure out. Since the show is ’60s and ’70s inspired, we had a lot more room to play. Sometimes it’d be a tiny image in one corner, and another would dominate the screen. We did that intentionally. I really loved what Tom did in the pilot—the five-way split with Chicken Man in the center and the four families around him. It creates this really cool grid, where the borders themselves become part of the design. They’re hidden, but important.
Felicia Livingston: Creativity happens when you think outside the box. At the end of the day, our job is solving problems. Sometimes you have to do that in unconventional ways. There are so many avenues to explore in this craft.
CineMontage: Let’s talk about episode three, which faced some specific narrative challenges that took some reshoots.
Tom Wilson: That episode was the linchpin of the entire season. It’s where the robbery occurs, so it was crucial that it had the right feeling and flow. Felicia got buried with it because there were so many things upstream from editorial that had to be figured out. It was a doozy.
Felicia Livingston: We didn’t have the pieces. I think very early on, even from the dailies, everyone felt it—like, “Wait a minute, something’s missing.” I have to give so much respect to Craig Brewer because he recognized early that episode three wraps up the first two episodes. It’s essentially the finale of that opening arc, and he knew we didn’t have what we needed to make the robbery feel as big and chaotic as it had to be. You couldn’t treat it like a straight procedural. You had to dive deep and show the calamity of that night. Mostly, it was character beats that weren’t tracking. On the page, they made sense, but once the footage was shot and I started putting it together, everyone realized—oh, this just doesn’t quite work. So, we kept refining and refining until it became clear what we needed. Once we knew that, we saw it had to be bigger to fully land the end of that first narrative unit. There were a lot of reshoots, and it became a day-by-day discovery process. I kept getting new footage up until a week before we locked the cut. It was challenging, but in the end, everyone was happy with it.
CineMontage: I imagine you got a lot of coverage?
Tom Wilson: It was a mix. There are so many characters and so much to keep alive. Sometimes we had tons of coverage. Other times, they’d get to a location with only an hour of daylight and could barely get anything. That’s where using the panels became super helpful. We could make it look like we had a bunch of different setups. They didn’t have much time to shoot the boxing sequence either, and Shaheed did some amazing work reusing shots. You don’t even notice it—he blended the action so smoothly and cut between different spots in the auditorium. Plus, that auditorium needed a lot of visual effects work to make it look bigger. Sometimes we had plenty, and sometimes we really had to get creative. You have to make sure the viewer’s eyes and brain are going to the right spots at the right moment—and that’s quite a feat.
Shaheed Qaasim: One of the cool things about streaming is that it’s a slightly looser platform, which gives us more creative freedom. We could use the split screens as a toolbox to strengthen the storytelling. A lot of exposition was told through them, and we had some great transitions. We did research what was being done back in the ’60s and ’70s. “The Thomas Crown Affair,” Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” even the “Woodstock” documentary—they all had great uses of split screen. It’s an old-school technique, like a split diopter, where you can have one person in the foreground in focus and another in the background. That’s basically a split screen. Editors today use split screens all the time—including invisible ones. Like, if you’ve got two characters talking and the camera’s locked off, but you want to adjust a performance slightly, you can split it down the middle and make the edit invisible. We used a lot of visible split screens, but we also used invisible ones—just like editors do every day.
Tom Wilson: It was a lot of experimenting. Shaye and Craig would say, “This works for me, this doesn’t. Maybe make the split screens more organized—or less. Try it more chaotic, try it more structured.” I would go back into the pilot while working on episodes seven and eight, thinking, “Okay, this works here, let’s reshape something earlier so it feels more cohesive.” It wasn’t about rules. It was about discovering what this story’s style needed to be and keeping that consistent. And it was all in service of telling the story through these characters—we had so many great ones, and we wanted them to feel alive, like people you’d want to follow. I kept joking that any time I had trouble with a scene, I’d just cut to Don Cheadle—because he’s always doing something amazing, engaged every second.
Shaheed Qaasim: That’s a really good point. There was a lot of going backwards. We’d discover something later in the process and then go, “Wait, we need to rewind to episode two—or three, or one—and make adjustments.” And what’s interesting is, usually a really good cut doesn’t draw attention to itself. But here, we were doing editing that did—intentionally. That was fun. One more thing about Craig Brewer—he’s such a musical thinker. We did a lot of cutting to the beats of songs. If you notice the rhythm of the editing, a lot of it hits right on the beat. Not everyone edits that way, but I think it’s really cool when it’s that precise. That was one of the things I enjoyed most.
