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The perforated strips indicate the proper way to open a Federal Express box, but Leon Gast ignores them and tears into the cardboard, stripping the bubble wrap from the item inside -- a gold plate engraved with the words Broadcast Film Critics' Association Critics' Choice Award, Best Documentary: ''When We Were Kings,'' Leon Gast, Director.

As the white-haired 60-year-old filmmaker reads the inscription, his eyes well up. ''For this to happen to me now...,'' he says, his voice trailing. He is unabashedly emotional when he speaks of the success of his film about Muhammad Ali's ''Rumble in the Jungle,'' the 1974 fight with George Foreman in Zaire. Since its acclaimed premiere at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, When We Were Kings has won most of the major documentary awards and is the front-runner for the best feature documentary Oscar. After Sundance, Gramercy Pictures paid more than $4 million for the distribution rights -- an unusually high sum for a documentary -- and set its American release date for Feb. 14.

But Gast's emotional state has less to do with accolades than with the film's arduous journey. For 22 years, Kings sat unseen in his Manhattan apartment. ''There were boxes of film all over this room,'' he says, recalling the frustrations, legal wrangling, and missteps that have led to the greatest success of his career.

In '74, Gast was signed to film the events leading up to the fight, including a three-day music festival with James Brown, B.B. King, and Miriam Makeba. ''The music was going to drive the film,'' says Gast. ''Ali was going to be secondary.'' Gast shot the festival as planned, but the fight was postponed when a sparring partner cut Foreman in a workout. For five weeks, Gast and his crew hung with Ali as he traveled the country, stirring support by leading cheers of ''Ali, boma ye!'' (''Ali, kill him!'')

''All Ali wanted to do was talk,'' Gast says. And the filmmaker got it all -- from Ali's advice to kids to ''whup Mr. Tooth Decay,'' to the fighter's rhyming riffs on his upcoming victory: ''You think the world was surprised when Nixon resigned/Just wait'll I kick George Foreman's behind.''

When Gast returned to the production company with roughly 400 hours of footage, he found an empty office. Gast's lawyer, David Sonenberg, eventually traced the company's ownership to the finance minister of Liberia, whose government was overthrown in a coup. Lacking money to finish the film, Gast continued to work on it for the next decade -- when he could afford to.

''I was always playing around with [Kings],'' Gast says. ''I did hundreds of cuts. I'd have it one way, then six months later it would be completely different.'' By the late '80s, Sonenberg, a manager of music acts like Meat Loaf (and later, Joan Osborne and the Fugees), decided to produce the film himself, giving Gast a salary and insisting he treat the film as a nine-to-five job. Meanwhile, Sonenberg untangled copyright and legal issues involving fight promoter Don King and the musicians, among others. By late 1995, Gast and Sonenberg were ready for Sundance.


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