[This is a reread. I originally read this book when I was 18. But as this is the first time I'm reviewing it on this blog, according to my new rules, I'm doing it as a video only review.]
One of the differences between reading this book in 1996 and reading it now is that now you can look everything up on Wikipedia.
The book is packed with all sorts of references to the culture, people and events of 1969, but if you were born after 1969, it can sometimes be a bit confusing trying to figure out what Abbie Hoffman is talking about.
The best example of this is Abbie Hoffman's relationship with the rockband The Who. All throughout Woodstock Nation, it is very apparent that Abbie Hoffman has some sort of grudge against The Who. And it's also apparent that there was some sort of incident that happened with Abbie Hoffman and The Who at Woodstock, but it's a bit hard to work out what exactly happened (especially since Abbie Hoffman is deliberately writing Woodstock Nation in a satirically over-the-top tone, so it's often unclear what is real and what is satire.)
But now it's the year 2025, and you can just look that stuff up on Wikipedia. And because this is an interesting little bit of random trivia, I thought it would make for a perfect entry in my Interesting Random Facts series.
At Woodstock in 1969, Hoffman interrupted the Who's performance to attempt to speak against the jailing of John Sinclair of the White Panther Party. He grabbed a microphone and yelled, "I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison ..." Pete Townshend was adjusting his amplifier between songs and turned to look at Hoffman over his left shoulder. Townshend shouted "Fuck off! Fuck off my fucking stage!"[25][26][27] and reportedly ran at Hoffman with his guitar and hit Hoffman in the back, although Townshend later denied attacking Hoffman.[28] Townshend later said that while he actually agreed with Hoffman on Sinclair's imprisonment, he would have knocked him offstage regardless of the content of his message, given that Hoffman had violated the "sanctity of the stage," i.e., the right of the band to perform uninterrupted by distractions not relevant to the show. The incident took place during a camera change and was not captured on film. The audio of this incident, however, can be heard on The Who's box set Thirty Years of Maximum R&B (Disc 2, Track 20, "Abbie Hoffman Incident").
...a couple of observations about this:
1) The incident took place during a camera change? Ah man, what are the odds of that? Too bad it wasn't captured on film, it would have been a great edition to the Woodstock movie.
2) Back in the Calvin days, my friend Brian Bork actually had a copy of the box set Thirty Years of Maximum R&B, and I remember listening to that audio when I borrowed the album from him. (This was about 3 years after I had read Woodstock Nation.) So at the time that did at least help me to put the pieces together on what this incident actually was.
If you don't happen to have a copy of The Who's Thirty Years of Maximum R&B handy, you can, of course, find the audio of the incident easily available on Youtube. Here's one Youtube video which apparently has some of the visuals as well:
So, there you go. An interesting little detour through pop culture history: Abbie Hoffman, The Who, and John Sinclair.
But for anyone who's not a 1960s nut, I guess the next question is: Who the heck is John Sinclair?
John Sinclair is interesting in that he's not really well remembered today, but during 1969, he was a huge cause celebre among the counter-culture movement. Abbie Hoffman talked about him a lot. And John Lennon even wrote a song about him.
John Sinclair was the leader of The White Panthers and he became a cause celebre when:
Arrested for distribution of marijuana in 1969, Sinclair was given ten years in prison. The sentence was criticized by many as unduly harsh, and it galvanized a noisy protest movement led by prominent figures of the 1960s counterculture.
And his case certainly attracted a lot of high profile celebrities. See also from Wikipedia:
The severity of his sentence sparked high-profile protests, including an infamous incident at the 1969 Woodstock Festival wherein Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman jumped on the stage and seized a microphone during a performance by The Who. Hoffman managed to shout only a few words about Sinclair's plight before he was forcibly ejected from the stage by guitarist Pete Townshend.[39][40]
With a more successful protest, attended by Stevie Wonder and Bob Seger, John Lennon performed his new song "John Sinclair" on television[41] and recorded it for his next album, Some Time in New York City (1972),[42] though by that time Sinclair had been released.[43] With "directness and simplicity", said one critic,[41] the lyrics lament Sinclair's intended harsh punishment: "They gave him ten for two—what else can the bastards do?"[41] The event drew 15,000 sympathizers. Sinclair drew a 9+1⁄2-to-10-year prison sentence in 1969 from Detroit Recorder's Court Judge Robert Colombo for giving two joints to undercover officers. He served 29 months but was released a few days after Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger and others performed in front of 15,000 attendees at the University of Michigan's Crisler Arena.
Back in the 1990s, when I was first learning about all this history, I remember thinking to myself: Okay, it was unfair that he got 10 years for 2 joints. But lots of people get unduly harsh sentences for drug possession all the time. What made this case so special? And given all the other things that were going on at this time, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Cambodia, the My Lai massacre, the civil rights movement, Fred Hampton's assassination, etc, given all that, why did John Sinclair in particular get so much attention from all these movement celebrities at the time?
And I still wonder this, actually. I don't know, maybe you just had to be living through those years to understand.
(In my started post, I had claimed this was a reread. And indeed, I definitely remember reading the introduction to this book--as I mentioned here. But the more I got into this book, the more I started to realize that most of this book was unfamiliar. I'm now pretty sure that years ago I only read the introduction to it, and didn't read the whole thing, and then later got it mixed up in my mind with another Abbie Hoffman book--Woodstock Nation, which I did actually read from cover to cover. So, I've decided I'm not going to count this as a reread after all. At any rate, because this is my first time reviewing this book on this blog, according to my new rules, I'm doing it as a video only review.)
Steal This Book is, in a way, a manual of survival in the prison that is Amerika. It preaches jailbreak. It shows you where exactly how to place the dynamite that will destroy the walls. The first section--SURVIVE!--lays out a potential action program for our new Nation. The chapter headings spell out the demands for a free society. A community where the technology produces goods and services for whoever needs them, come who may. It calls on the Robin Hoods of Santa Barbara Forest to steal from the robber barons who own the castles of capitalism. It implies that the reader already is “ideologically set,” in that he understands corporate feudalism as the only robbery worthy of being called “crime,” for it is committed against the people as a whole. Whether the ways it describes to rip-off shit are legal or illegal is irrelevant. The dictionary of law is written by the bosses of order. Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.
Community within our Nation, chaos in theirs; that is the message of SURVIVE!
We cannot survive without learning to fight and that is the lesson in the second section. FIGHT! separates revolutionaries from outlaws. The purpose of part two is not to fuck the system, but destroy it. The weapons are carefully chosen. They are “home-made,” in that they are designed for use in our unique electronic jungle. Here the uptown reviewer will find ample proof of our “violent” nature. But again, the dictionary of law fails us. Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime. False advertisements win awards, forgers end up in jail. Inflated prices guarantee large profits while shoplifters are punished. Politicians conspire to create police riots and the victims are convicted in the courts. Students are gunned down and then indicted by suburban grand juries as the trouble-makers. A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression. Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy. If we internalize the language and imagery of the pigs, we will forever be fucked. Let me illustrate the point. Amerika was built on the slaughter of a people. That is its history. For years we watched movie after movie that demonstrated the white man’s benevolence. Jimmy Stewart, the epitome of fairness, puts his arm around Cochise and tells how the Indians and the whites can live in peace if only both sides will be reasonable, responsible and rational (the three R’s imperialists always teach the “natives”). “You will find good grazing land on the other side of the mountain,” drawls the public relations man. “Take your people and go in peace.” Cochise as well as millions of youngsters in the balcony of learning, were being dealt off the bottom of the deck. The Indians should have offed Jimmy Stewart in every picture and we should have cheered ourselves hoarse. Until we understand the nature of institutional violence and how it manipulates values and mores to maintain the power of the few, we will forever be imprisoned in the caves of ignorance. When we conclude that bank robbers rather than bankers should be the trustees of the universities, then we begin to think clearly. When we see the Army Mathematics Research and Development Center and the Bank of Amerika as cesspools of violence, filling the minds of our young with hatred, turning one against another, then we begin to think revolutionary.
Be clever using section two; clever as a snake. Dig the spirit of the struggle. Don’t get hung up on a sacrifice trip. Revolution is not about suicide, it is about life. With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was meant to live. Your body is just one in a mass of cuddly humanity. Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines, and in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. The duty of a revolutionary is to make love and that means staying alive and free. That doesn’t allow for cop-outs. Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power. We are not interested in the greening of Amerika except for the grass that will cover its grave.
******************************************
For better or for worse (probably for worse), this passage had a big impact on me when I first read it at age 18. I was unfortunately influenced by some of Abbie Hoffman's outrageous pronouncements like:
To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.
...which at the time caused me to think it was okay to steal from a supermarket if you could get away with it. (Sigh, what an idiot I was.)
During my college years, I was fond of quoting this section. My email archive reveals that on December 2nd, 1996, I actually copied this out into an email I wrote to a friend. I included this introduction at the time:
Here’s some food for thought for you. It is a passage from Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman (Yippie founder, and one of the Chicago eight--but you probably already knew that.) Take note—I don’t agree with everything he says. I am in total agreement with him when he points out the problems in American society (or Amerika as Abbie puts it, but I’m not sure what the unconformist spelling stands for) however I part ways from him regarding his violent solutions. Here it is:
....and then I proceeded to quote the entire above section.
I also quoted a line from this section in my Chimes article on the Death Penalty from 1999 (see here and here):
“Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime.” -- Abbie Hoffman.
....which I now also look back on with embarrassment. For one thing, quoting Abbie Hoffman in a political article only encourages people not to take you seriously. But even beyond that, this quote wasn't really about the death penalty. Abbie Hoffman was talking about the difference between killing in war and killing in peacetime. In my mind, it was related to the death penalty because I equated "murder in a uniform" to a uniformed officer executing the death penalty, and "murder in a costume" to the person receiving the death penalty. But I think I was stretching things a bit too far.
But put a pin in all of that for right now. When I finish this book, and get around to reviewing it, I'll talk more about the politics of it. For now, I want to forget about the politics, and focus on how effective this prose is.
I was taking a freshman English class at Calvin College at the time, and every week we had to bring in a piece of writing that we liked to share with the class. I brought this piece in. I edited it slightly. I cut out the meandering parts and just kept in the punches. And, because this was Calvin College, I changed "we will forever be fucked" to "we will forever be deceived". If memory serves, my edited version was something like this.
We cannot survive without learning to fight and that is the lesson in the second section. FIGHT! separates revolutionaries from outlaws. The purpose of part two is not to change the system, but destroy it. Here the uptown reviewer will find ample proof of our “violent” nature. But again, the dictionary of law fails us. Murder in a uniform is heroic, in a costume it is a crime. False advertisements win awards, forgers end up in jail. Inflated prices guarantee large profits while shoplifters are punished. Politicians conspire to create police riots and the victims are convicted in the courts. Students are gunned down and then indicted by suburban grand juries as the trouble-makers. A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression. Slumlords allow rats to maim children and then complain of violence in the streets. Everything is topsy-turvy. If we internalize the language and imagery of the pigs, we will forever be deceived.
Until we understand the nature of institutional violence and how it manipulates values and mores to maintain the power of the few, we will forever be imprisoned in the caves of ignorance. When we conclude that bank robbers rather than bankers should be the trustees of the universities, then we begin to think clearly. When we see the Army Mathematics Research and Development Center and the Bank of Amerika as cesspools of violence, filling the minds of our young with hatred, turning one against another, then we begin to think revolutionary.
Surprisingly (this was Calvin College, after all), the professor actually liked it. After I got done reading it aloud, she commented, "A very powerful piece. And what makes it so powerful? It's that parallel structure."
And, I think I agree. If you read the above passage aloud, and you emphasis the words dramatically, and get into the rhythm of the parallel structure, then it can be a very effective piece of rhetoric.
Sidenote: In the sentence:
A modern, highly mechanized army travels 9,000 miles to commit genocide against a small nation of great vision and then accuses its people of aggression.
...I was never sure if "its" was meant to refer to the army or the small nation. That is to say, I wasn't sure if "it's people" was supposed to mean "its own people" (i.e. the people of the country that the army is from, or in other words, American citizens) or if "its people" is the people of the small nation. Back in college, I thought it meant the former, but rereading it now, I think it's probably the latter.
So, if we're scoring this passage on its prose style, maybe take off one point for an ambiguous pronoun.
I think it's fair to say my obsession with radical politics has somewhat faded with age (a fairly common trajectory, I think), but because of my youthful obsession, I still maintain at least somewhat of an interest in this trial still now.
I've also been anticipating this movie for years. Reports that Steven Spielberg and Aaron Sorkin were working on a movie about the Chicago trial have been around for years (this movie had famously been stuck in development hell since 2006) and over the years, whenever I was browsing the web or reading about this trial on Wikipedia, I would see reports that an all-star Hollywood version of this story was in development. "Wouldn't that be cool to see?" I often thought to myself. The names attached to this movie have changed several times over the years, and at a couple points, it looked like this movie would never come out. And to be quite honest, I forgot about the whole thing. But then a couple weeks ago, I started seeing reviews of this movie popping up on Youtube. It was on Netflix now, people were saying.
"This movie looks really cool," I said to my wife. "It's a pity I'm not going to be able to see it anytime soon. It's only on Netflix." "My friend has a Netflix account he's not using," my wife replied. Well, problem solved! Plus, the wife and baby were travelling this weekend, so I had the apartment to myself and for once had the peace and quiet to actually sit down and watch a movie. So here's the review.
The Review Man, I could go on for hours about all the stuff Aaron Sorkin gets right, and all the stuff he gets wrong. I mean it, there is so much to talk about here.
Instead, I'm going to try to talk about this movie in very general terms, and not nit-pick every little historical detail. (Even though I totally could!) [Short version: Basically none of the historical figures in this movie are portrayed accurately. Sorkin has distorted the original history in order to make an identifiable character-type out of each historical figure, that he can then use to create cheap drama. In reality, Rennie Davis was never so nerdy as Sorkin portrays him, Jerry Rubin was never so chill, Tom Hayden was never so uptight, David Dellinger was never so boring, Abbie Hoffman's quips were never so sharp, Richard Schultz was never so nice, et cetera.]
In general terms then... The thing about the Chicago 7 trial is we actually have the transcripts of the court proceedings. In most historical movies, the screenwriters have to imagine what the historical characters might have said, but in this case, you don't have to imagine anything. We have the actual transcripts of what they actually said. Therefore, most dramatizations of this trial just use the transcript. The movies Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8 and Chicago 10 that I mentioned above were dramatizations made using the trial transcripts.
Aaron Sorkin has chosen to completely re-write the trial. In some cases, he has kept the essence of the dialogue the same, but has re-written it so that it flows differently. In other cases, he's completely changed the actual history. At first, this struck me as sacrilege. But then, I thought about it, and I thought, "Well... why not?" After all, we already have movies about the Chicago 7 that are based on the transcripts. If you want to see a movie based on the transcript, you can just go and watch: Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8. But there's no point in hiring Aaron Sorkin, the most talented screenwriter alive, and having him just re-use the transcript. Let Sorkin do his thing. Let him completely re-write it so that every character is now talking in the famous quippy Sorkin dialogue. Why not? It's not historical, but it's entertaining.
Now, the thing about Sorkin is that sometimes he can be brilliant, and sometimes he can be really cheesy and corny. Charlie Wilson's War and The Social Network are examples of Sorkin at his most brilliant. The Newsroomand Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip are examples of Sorkin being corny. But, even when Sorkin gets corny, he never gets boring. As I wrote in my review of The Newsroom:
Aaron Sorkin may mess up a lot of things, but he still understands the mechanics of screenwriting very well. Each episode may be terrible objectively if you focus on the plot, but Aaron Sorkin still knows how to keep the dialogue snappy and he knows how to keep the forward momentum of the story going. So the show may be terrible, but it never really gets boring. And, I have to confess that even while I was rolling my eyes at how cheesy the plot was, I still kept watching it.
Much of that was true of The Trial of the Chicago 7. Sorkin manufactures a lot of cheesy plot points that were not historical--Jerry Rubin gets his heart broken by an undercover cop who pretends to be in love with him, Rennie Davis has a girlfriend who doesn't know he's a protest leader, Richard Schultz actually is secretly conflicted about his job, et cetera. None of this is historical, and all of this is really cheesy and corny but... but it kind of works as entertainment. The snappy Sorkin dialogue keeps the plot moving, and once again: "...even while I was rolling my eyes at how cheesy the plot was, I still kept watching it." And the Sorkin dialogue works. The one-liners work. (This movie got a chuckle out of me on more than one occasion). The dramatic moments are slightly corny, but they work.
All that being said, it's interesting to compare this film to a film based off of the actual transcripts. Compared on a scene for scene basis, the actual history is way more dramatic than Sorkin's re-writing of it. There are several examples, but the most obvious example is the Bobby Seale incident. The actual transcripts of Bobby Seale and Judge Julius Hoffman arguing over whether or not America's Founding Fathers were slaveholders is way more interesting than the dialogue Sorkin creates. And the story of Bobby Seale being bound and gagged in court is way more dramatic in the actual real history. In Sorkin's version, Bobby Seale is only bound and gagged momentarily. In the actual history, Bobby Seale was struggling against his gag and restraints for 3 days in the court.
And yet... although on a scene by scene basis, the actual history is more compelling than fiction, when looking at the movie as a whole, Sorkin's version is far more entertaining and watchable than the more historically accurate versions of this story. This is because Sorkin understands the importance of pacing, momentum, character arcs, and dramatic climaxes. He has to sacrifice historical accuracy to get these things, but it works as drama. The scenes of Bobby Seale struggling against his gag--getting re-gagged and rebound by the bailiffs, and the many scuffles that broke out on the trial floor--would have made for very interesting drama. But it would also have slowed the movie down. In Sorkin's version, Seale is only bound and gagged for a minute, and then this instantly moves the story on to the next phase. And the whole movie is like this. The drama of the individual scene is under-played to keep the story moving. (There are so many examples where the actual trial was more chaotic and dramatic than what Sorkin showed on screen. But to show all that would have slowed the movie down.)
Final verdict: Enjoy it for the drama, don't rely on it for historical accuracy. For historical accuracy, check out Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8
Rating: 8 out of 10 Stars. That's me being slightly generous to this movie. It should probably lose another point for being overly cheesy in places, and possibly another star for all the history it gets wrong, and yet... and yet it's all good entertainment. 8 out of 10 it is.
Update: October 19, 2020
Okay, I can't resist. Let's get into some of the historical nitpicking a little bit:
* The real life story of Rennie Davis getting beaten unconscious by the Chicago police was actually way more dramatic in reality than it was in Aaron Sorkin's version. I'm genuinely puzzled as to why Sorkin re-wrote history to make that confrontation a lot more watered down than it actually was in real life. Why would he do that?
* Fred Hampton was not actually a part of the Chicago 8 trail in real life. So I'm a bit conflicted about how Sorkin shoe-horned his story into this movie. On the one hand, the assassination of Fred Hampton is the pre-eminent example of "Stuff that every American should know, but that no one ever teaches you in school" So on the one hand, I'm glad more people are learning about his story because of this movie. But on the other hand, this movie is over-stuffed already, and it doesn't really have time to tell Fred Hampton's story. (The movie doesn't have time to really emotionally process Fred Hampton's death, and it never even attempts to explain why he was assassinated.) Plus, dramatically, it interferes with Bobby Seale's story. In reality, Bobby Seale didn't have his outbursts because of Fred Hampton's death, he had his outbursts because he was so frustrated with Judge Hoffman. And by making the outburst be about an outside element, it undermines the drama of the conflict between Seale and Hoffman. Plus... for some reason, in Aaron Sorkin's movie, Bobby Seale makes a really big deal of saying that Fred Hampton was shot first in the shoulder before he was killed. But this was not by far the most outrageous thing about Fred Hampton's death. The most outrageous thing was that he was shot and killed in bed while he was sleeping. So why does Aaron Sorkin's script make a big deal out of the fact that he was shot in the shoulder, and not even mention that was killed sleeping in bed?
* John Froines, and Lee Weiner were obviously the odd-men-out in the Chicago 7, in that they were the only members of the 7 who were not actually leaders of the anti-war movement. It seems to be a bit of a mystery how they even ended up being indicted with the rest of them. Aaron Sorkin shines a spot-light on this oddity by putting it right in the dialogue of his script. In Sorkin's script, John Froines and Lee Weiner will occasionally ask each other how they ended up being in the same group as the others. (And I think Sorkin is right to highlight this--especially for younger viewers who are new to the history, it's a nice little way of conveying the information that these two weren't celebrities in their own right, but everyone else in the trial was.) In Sorkin's script, Abbie Hoffman later says that John Froines and Lee Weiner were only put on trial so that they could be "give backs" to the jury--that is, the jury is meant to acquit John Froines and Lee Weiner, so that they will feel less guilt about convicting the rest. This makes about as much sense as anything (I mean, why else would these two be part of the trial?) but the problem is that it doesn't seem to be borne out by the actual trial transcripts. The government prosecutors were not playing softball with John Froines and Lee Weiner--the government prosecutors (in real life) tried really hard to prove that John Froines and Lee Weiner were inciting violence at the protest.
* In Sorkin's version, life-long pacifist David Dellinger finally snaps and punches a deputy during a confrontation at the trial. Oh, the dramatic irony! And right in front of his wife and son too! It's a really cheesy unhistorical Sorkin moment, but it kind of works as cheesy drama, I guess. But if you look at the actual trial transcripts, in real life David Dellinger was accused of getting a bit physical with the court deputies during some of the confrontations with Bobby Seale. So if you want to have a dramatic irony moment with David Dellinger losing his cool, why not incorporate it into the Bobby Seale parts? It would be truer to the real history, and I think it might also work better in terms of drama.
* It's probably unfair to criticize this movie for everything it left out, right? Because any dramatization of the Chicago 7 trial has to leave out a lot. You can't possibly include everything. So all the counter-culture celebrities and singers who testified, the confrontation with Mayor Daley on the witness stand, Alan Ginsberg chanting "Om" in the witness stand, the Vietnam War Moratorium day, and the scuffle over the American flag and the Viet Cong Flag on the defense table.... all of that would have made great drama, but I guess all of that has to be left out. The movie's too long already. In real life, the increasingly vicious verbal sparing between William Kunstler and Tom Foran was much more dramatic than any of Sorkin's dialogue, but I guess you have to cut that out too.
Major describes a cocktail party as an example of how relationships between white radicals and Panthers deteriorated. Black Panther David Hillard was there, who had already “pointedly questioned [Stew] Albert’s and Hayden’s understanding of Marxist-Leninist principles” (112), and, Major implies, found them to be lacking. When Hayden was asked to speak, Hillard jumped up and asked: “Yeah, goddamnit, get up and explain why you’re out on the streets and Bobby is in jail” (114). Hayden sidestepped the question by attacking the racist nature of America’s courts. Major condemns him.
“The question actually was why Hayden was not in jail. Bobby had been indicted, tried, placed in chains, and was subsequently sentenced to four years in jail for contempt of court as the result of a casual speechmaking excursion into the scene of hippie-involved political mayhem. Hillard’s words implied that if Hayden and his fellow defendants were really the revolutionaries they claimed to be, they would have closed ranks and stood on their conspiratorial constitutional rights when Bobby Seale was denied the right to represent himself, and if necessary to force the court to chain them all. It didn’t happen” (114).
Hillard was unimpressed by Hayden’s answer, and began to question him angrily. Stew Albert, a revolutionary writer who Major also dislikes, tried to smooth things over, but Hillard answered, “Fuck you, Albert, you jive-ass revolutionary. We can do without you and your shitty writing” (115). The conference finally ended with Hillard and the rest of the Panthers storming out.
Major asserts that:
“Hillard--in fact the Panthers generally—were very unhappy about this indictment, as it was a direct result of the Panthers association with white radicals. The indictment was a confirmation for a number of black people of their belief that a black-white radical alliance could only bring trouble to the Panthers” (109).
This is the type of dramatic confrontation that Sorkin could have milked for a lot of mileage, no? And it would have added yet another dimension to Sorkin's portrayal of a fractured and squabbling defense. Part of me really wishes Sorkin could have included this scene in his movie. But the other part of me knows that the movie was too long already.
This is another movie I've been wanting to see for a while, but had to wait until I was back in America. (Unfortunately it never made it to the Japanese video stores).
And, although one always hesitates to admit publicly how much of a geek one really is, I am well acquainted with subject material.
Being a history geek, and having an interest in radical politics, I've read a lot about this trial. In fact, back in my college days the Calvin library had (presumably still has)a book containing the entire transcripts of this trail, and I read through most of it.
I've also seen dramatic presentations of this trail in the past. Which is no surprise as this trial has been dramatized many times in the past, and I'm sure will be dramatized many times in the future.
Once I sat through a TV movie based off of the trial transcripts. (Again this was back in my college days). Although I couldn't tell you now who made it, or what it was called, I remember finding it very interesting at the time.
"Steal This Movie!" (W) also comes to mind as another film that dealt with this subject.
And various other documentaries I've caught on TV or on video over the years.
I guess all this raises the question: why sit through it again?
To which I don't really have a good answer, other than that I love watching historical documentaries, and often this love will cause me to sit through material I'm already familiar with.
Also, it's always interesting to see how a new movie handles familiar material.
So, right, onto the review.
As you probably already know, much of this movie is animated.
That struck me as an odd choice when I saw the previews, but now that I've watched the movie I can understand why they did that. It allows them to mix in re-created animated scenes with archival footage relatively seamlessly, and still keep the same look for each figure.
In this respect the film is much more of a documentary than anything else. The court room scenes are all re-created, but half the movie (or more) is made up of archival footage.
Making use of the archival footage, the film seeks to document both the trial and demonstrations at the Chicago Democratic National Convention that resulted in the conspiracy trial.
In doing so, the film bites off a bit more than it can properly chew.
Most documentaries will focus on either the demonstrations or the trial. For example, the TV movie I remember seeing back in college focused all 2 hours only on what actually happened inside the courtroom.
Certainly one can understand the impulse to try and put them together (the story of one is not really complete without the story of the other). But in this case the result is that neither one is dealt with adequately. And there are all sorts of gaps in the narrative.
Well, perhaps at this point I should remind myself that the purpose of historical movies is to introduce people to the topic, and try to get them interested in it so they can continue learning on their own. It's impossible to fit everything into 2 hours anyway.
That being said, here are some of the gaps I noticed in the film:
The entire film revolves around protesting the Vietnam War, and yet the film never includes any of the reasons why people would be against the War.
When the war was actually going on, the consciousness about what was actually happening was pretty high. In the years since, younger generations have been raised on a sort of white washed version of Vietnam, which omits a lot of the uglier details like the the carpet bombings of civilian populations, children being burned with Napalm, villages being massacred, et cetera.
To get into all of that would have been a subject too vast for a 2 hour film, but they might have at least touched on it. Given it, say 5 or 10 minutes. Without this background, it's a little hard to understand why emotions were running so high in the first place.
Instead the war itself becomes almost a side issue, and the movie becomes a commentary only on the freedom to protest. (Which I guess is still a noble enough theme in and of itself)
Another noticeable gap is that the film never explains the significance of any of the players. Most of the members of the Chicago 8 were already celebrities in their own right before the trial even started. If the purpose of this film is to introduce a new generation to history, some of this might have been touched on.
The courtroom trial scenes themselves contain many omissions. Again, it's impossible to do everything in 2 hours, but I thought the testimony of Mayor Richard Daley at least would have been worth including.
With all the stuff they cut out, I'm a little bit confused about some of the stuff they left in. It sometimes seemed a bit random.
As did the ending of this movie. It just ended very abruptly.
Anyone interested in getting the full story of the trial would do well to read a book, or check out the actual transcripts (link here).
If you click on the link, you'll notice first of all that the witness list for the trial reads like a "who's who" of the 60s. All sorts of celebrities showed up to testify. (Something not really included in the movie).
And if you read the actual transcripts of some of these witnesses, you see a whole lot of interesting dialogue and disruptions also not included in the movie.
All that being said, not a bad little movie. Some parts of it were very well cut together, and generally they did a good job of keeping the energy up with a high adrenaline soundtrack. Hopefully this high energy will catch the interest of younger people, and make history seem more exciting to them.
Final comment: When a film like this gets an "R" rating, it really does make you wonder if the MPAA rating system is broken. Especially with all the really violent PG-13 movies out there ("Die Hard" comes to mind).
Seriously, if "Die Hard" gets PG-13, but a movie about people peacefully protesting against a war gets rated R because of a few 4 letter words, what does that say about our culture?
I'm not sure if any one still pays attention to these rating systems or not, but I can only hope that no one was stopped from seeing this movie because of a bonehead move by the MPAA.
