New film version of the Chicago Trial is timely

 

Bill Knight column for 9-24, 25 or 26, 2020

 Hours before Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last Friday, unleashing Mitch McConnell’s “Lessons in Hypocrisy,” an onslaught of devilish comments by Attorney General Barr and President Trump seemed to conjure demons from another era of repression and disgrace.

Fifty-one years ago this week, the Chicago Conspiracy Trial started, reflecting a time of police brutality and protests, government overreach and socio-political division.

This month, Trump said he approved a forced sale of TikTok on the condition $5 billion be set aside to “educate people” on the “real history of our country.” That followed comments that he was setting up a “national commission” to promote a “pro-American curriculum” in schools, and that criticism of the past – even slavery – wasn’t patriotic.

The previous week, Barr urged federal prosecutors to consider filing sedition charges against protestors, an unusual charge reserved for those at war against the nation or conspiring to overthrow the government.

Conspiring and inciting to riot were the charges stemming from demonstrations during 1968’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, brought against eight anti-war, social-justice and political activists. On trial were Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden from the Students for a Democratic Society, Rennie Davis and Dave Dellnger from the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, college teachers Lee Weiner and John Froines, and Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. (Repeatedly demanding his own lawyer, Seale was shackled and gagged in the courtroom, and then was excluded by a mistrial declaration but sentenced to four years in prison for contempt.)

Now, the film “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is premiering at select theaters soon, scheduled to start showing on Netflix Oct. 16.

If ever a drama deserved to be described as “ripped from the headlines,” it’s this story, part Kafkaesque thriller, part madcap comedy. In fact, beyond the historical tale and its true-life drama, the timeliness – arguably, timelessness – is the point of the effort by Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing,” “The Newsroom,” “The Social Network”). Conducted in a contentious environment in a federal district court in Chicago, the trial was a battle between the New Left, in the form of the defendants, and the Right, represented by prosecutors and 74-year-old Judge Julius Hoffman. Outbursts and vulgar language became routine, and confrontations between lawyers, arguments between the judge and defense counsel, plus unpredictable but regular disruptions from onlookers all made the kangaroo court a circus.

Over six months in 1969 and ’70, the trial riveted the country daily. The defense featured Beat writer Allen Ginsberg chanting and reciting poetry, and even asked legendary comic Groucho Marx to testify about satire (and though Groucho said it would be “an honor,” he declined, thinking his last name would bias Judge Hoffman against him.)

Written and directed by Sorkin and produced by Steven Spielberg, the 129-minute movie promises to be as relevant as news about Black Lives Matter and federal agents abducting protestors in Portland. Sorkin penned the script in 2007 but it lay dormant until last year, when it was filmed in Chicago and New Jersey.

Starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman, Frank Langella as Judge Hoffman, Eddie Redmayne as Hayden, Mark Rylance as defense attorney William Kuntsler, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen as Seale, the ensemble cast also features Jeremy Strong, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Michael Keaton.

The film is the newest of three motion pictures tied to the aftermath of the unrest outside the convention, what the government’s National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence called a “police riot,” with “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence.”

Further, although five defendants were convicted of intent to incite a riot, and all eight were given contempt sentences by Judge Hoffman, they all were exonerated of conspiracy charges and all the convictions were eventually overturned.

They were vindicated by history.

In 1987, HBO made the 90-minute “Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8,”  a “docudrama,” meaning dramatic recreations (mostly derived from trial transcripts) interspersed with documentary footage and interviews with the actual defendants. Its stellar cast included Peter Boyle, Robert Carradine, Elliott Gould, Michael Lembeck, Robert Loggia, Carl Lumbly, Ron Rifkin and Martin Sheen.

And in 1970, the BBC produced a 150-minute movie that is relatively inferior as well as overlong, but an interesting cast makes it worth finding and watching: Ronny Cox is Rubin, Cliff Gorman is Abbie Hoffman, and Al Freeman Jr. is Seale, with Robert Loggia (here as defense co-counsel Leonard Weinglass instead of Kuntsler in the 1987 film). Because of language and the controversial nature of the show, American viewers didn’t see it until PBS telecast it in 1975.

This year, “the whole world is watching,” as it was said then. And now.