Netflix: The Trial of the Chicago 7 - Radical Protesters 1970 - Directed by Aaron Sorkin
Trial of Chicago 7 - Teaser Trailer - Dailymotion Video
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Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin
Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a historical drama streaming on Netflix. It deals with the court proceedings in 1969–70 in which organizers of protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held in Chicago, faced charges of conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. The charges brought by the Nixon administration’s Justice Department were aimed at intimidating and criminalizing political opposition.
At the center of the Chicago protests was the Vietnam War, then at its height. Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson had been elected in 1964 on the pledge he would not escalate the war (“We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home…”)—and then did precisely that. The brutal character of the imperialist intervention outraged great numbers of young people in particular, as the death toll of Vietnamese and Americans mounted daily, and led to numerous huge anti-war demonstrations from April 1967 onward.
At its convention, Aug. 26–29, 1968, the Democratic Party would select Johnson’s vice president and pro-war advocate Hubert Humphrey as its candidate in the upcoming presidential election (won by Republican Richard Nixon). Humphrey had been challenged during the Democratic primaries by anti-war candidates Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy (assassinated June 5, 1968).
Various middle-class protest organizations, including the so-called Youth International Party (Yippies), led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, a coalition of anti-war groups, announced plans to protest outside the convention. Many members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) also participated. The perspective of the protest organizers, from the most conventional to the most radical, was focused on the futile effort to pressure the Democratic Party to the left.
Provocatively, the city of Chicago, ruled by thuggish Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, had given permission for only a single afternoon rally in Grant Park on Aug. 28. Every other request by the protest organizers was turned down, effectively transforming many events into “illegal” gatherings.
During the protests, Aug. 23–28, mostly youthful crowds numbering in the thousands were savagely set upon by thousands of Chicago police, assisted by the Illinois National Guard. Over the course of five days and nights, police freely and enthusiastically used tear gas, mace and batons on the protesters, arresting many and injuring hundreds.
Dozens of journalists, along with passersby, were among those clubbed and wounded by the cops. The bloody Aug. 28 rampage, broadcast to a national television audience, was later characterized by official investigators as a “police riot.”
“The whole world is watching!” was the recurring chant from the protesters. It features multiple times in The Trial of the Chicago 7.
The violence in Chicago and the subsequent travesty of a trial—in fact, a show trial—were significant world-historical events. As Sorkin’s work shows in part, and in part only hints at, the American ruling class, still near its peak of supremacy in the 1960s, demonstrated its thoroughgoing potential for criminality and cruelty. It responded with terror and ruthlessness to the urban riots of the 1960s and the growth of mass opposition to the Vietnam war.
The original eighth defendant is Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), national chairman of the Black Panther Party, a radical black nationalist group, which at the time was coming under the partial influence of Maoism. The Panthers had a different class character than the anti-war protest movements. Their members at the time were not simply being arrested, but murdered. Seale, under indictment for a murder charge in Connecticut for which he was later acquitted, acts in a principled manner during the Chicago trial. His case is eventually severed from the others.
In his meeting with Mitchell and Foran, Schultz observes that the so-called Rap Brown Law (named after the African American radical charged with carrying a gun across state lines in 1967), under which the defendants are being prosecuted, “was created by Southern whites in Congress to limit the free speech of black activists.”
“And you’ll dismantle them [the accused], and you’ll win,” Mitchell snaps back.
The trial begins on Sept. 26, 1969 with the conservative, obviously pro-prosecution, semi-senile Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) presiding. Defense attorneys include long-time civil rights and radical lawyers William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) and Leonard Weinglass (Ben Shenkman).
“This is the Academy Awards of protests,” says Weiner. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s an honor just to be nominated.” The trial of the Chicago Seven lasted more than 150 days, into the first months of 1970.
Sorkin treats the court proceedings through a series of vignettes, selecting episodes to highlight the judge’s endless violations of the defendants’ rights. Along with overruling virtually every one of the defense lawyers’ objections, Judge Hoffman imposes a staggering 175 counts of contempt of court on the accused and their attorneys, the vast majority of which were overturned on appeal.
Other segments highlight the clownish antics of Hoffman and Rubin, who both appear in court one day, for example, wearing a judge’s black robes. During the weekends, out on bail, Hoffman performs a variety of political stand-up comedy before an admiring audience.
The defendants in the trial did not terrify the bourgeoisie, but the possibility of the American working class becoming “infected” with radicalism, like the French workers in May–June 1968, certainly did. Under the thin veneer of democratic forms lay the authoritarian, fascistic inclinations and methods that would emerge far more decisively as the crisis of American capitalism deepened and it lost its global hegemony in succeeding decades.
The prequel to Sorkin’s legal-historical work opens with footage of President Johnson announcing the dispatch of more troops to Vietnam. A reporter explains that “382,386 men between the ages of 18 and 24 have been called to duty.”
We see Martin Luther King Jr. delivering an anti-war speech shortly before his assassination on April 4, 1968, in which he explains that “it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.” Soon afterward, Robert Kennedy is shot dead.
As the film’s fictionalized portion begins, Nixon is now in the White House. His foul attorney general, John Mitchell (John Dorman), demands that his two lead prosecutors, Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Tom Foran (J.C. MacKenzie), destroy the defendants charged with instigating the Chicago mayhem.
The accused include SDS leaders Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp); the semi-anarchist Yippies’ Hoffman (Sacha Baron-Cohen) and Rubin (Jeremy Strong); David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), the pacifist head of the National Mobilization Committee; and two lesser known figures, John Froines (Danny Flaherty) and Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins).
The original eighth defendant is Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), national chairman of the Black Panther Party, a radical black nationalist group, which at the time was coming under the partial influence of Maoism. The Panthers had a different class character than the anti-war protest movements. Their members at the time were not simply being arrested, but murdered. Seale, under indictment for a murder charge in Connecticut for which he was later acquitted, acts in a principled manner during the Chicago trial. His case is eventually severed from the others.
In his meeting with Mitchell and Foran, Schultz observes that the so-called Rap Brown Law (named after the African American radical charged with carrying a gun across state lines in 1967), under which the defendants are being prosecuted, “was created by Southern whites in Congress to limit the free speech of black activists.”
“And you’ll dismantle them [the accused], and you’ll win,” Mitchell snaps back.
The trial begins on Sept. 26, 1969 with the conservative, obviously pro-prosecution, semi-senile Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) presiding. Defense attorneys include long-time civil rights and radical lawyers William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) and Leonard Weinglass (Ben Shenkman).
“This is the Academy Awards of protests,” says Weiner. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s an honor just to be nominated.” The trial of the Chicago Seven lasted more than 150 days, into the first months of 1970.
Sorkin treats the court proceedings through a series of vignettes, selecting episodes to highlight the judge’s endless violations of the defendants’ rights. Along with overruling virtually every one of the defense lawyers’ objections, Judge Hoffman imposes a staggering 175 counts of contempt of court on the accused and their attorneys, the vast majority of which were overturned on appeal.
Other segments highlight the clownish antics of Hoffman and Rubin, who both appear in court one day, for example, wearing a judge’s black robes. During the weekends, out on bail, Hoffman performs a variety of political stand-up comedy before an admiring audience.
Judge Hoffman (no relation!) refuses to let Seale either have his preferred lawyer (who is recovering from surgery) or represent himself, and then silences him when the defendant protests that his constitutional rights are being violated. After Seale denounces him in open court, the judge—in one of his most egregious acts and one that came to epitomize the ferociously anti-democratic character of the trial—has the Black Panther leader shackled and gagged so that he cannot speak out in court. In the course of binding Seale to a chair, the bailiffs administer a beating. Seale was shackled to his chair for three days of the trial!
In a sidebar, defense attorney Kunstler exclaims to the judge, “Your Honor, our defendant is gagged and bound in an American courtroom.” During the actual trial, the attorney declared, “This is no longer a court of order, Your Honor, this is a medieval torture chamber.”
(Seale’s case was eventually declared a mistrial. He was convicted on 16 counts of contempt of court, leading to a four-year prison sentence, but the charges were later dismissed.)
The defense brings in Ramsey Clark (Michael Keaton), the attorney general in the Johnson administration, to testify. Clark describes himself as their “star witness.” With the jury members sent out of the courtroom, the former attorney general points an accusing finger at the cops: “An investigation by our criminal division led to the conclusion that the riots were started by the Chicago Police Department.” In keeping with his conduct throughout the proceedings, Judge Hoffman refuses to allow the jury to hear Clark’s damning testimony.
When Abbie Hoffman takes the stand, he cites a passage from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861, “Whenever they [the people] shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” So, the prosecutor asks, “how do you overthrow or dismember, as you say, your government peacefully?” Revealing his reformist outlook, Hoffman replies, “In this country, we do it every four years.”
In the movie’s climactic scene, during sentencing, Hayden, chosen to speak for all the defendants, recites the names of the thousands of soldiers who have died during the course of the trial. (In actual fact, this reading took place near the trial’s beginning on Oct. 15, 1969, on Vietnam Moratorium Day.)
Of the seven defendants, five are convicted of inciting a riot (Froines and Weiner are acquitted on all charges), and sentenced to five years in prison. However, a different judge later overturns all the convictions, in part based on Judge Hoffman’s biases, and the Justice Department decides not to retry the case.
There are various positive features of Sorkin’s film. It is a vivid and effective—and, in certain respects, accurate—representation of an important historical episode, probably all too little known today. To its credit, The Trial of the Chicago 7 clearly sides with the accused and the anti-war protesters. It is not some fraudulently “impartial” presentation, which would amount in practice to whitewashing the crimes of the government and the police. Attorney General Mitchell (later to play a notorious role in the Watergate scandal and serve jail time as a result) is appropriately portrayed as a gangster.
The Bobby Seale sequence is chilling. Also chilling are the moments in which the Chicago cops conspicuously remove their name badges, protecting themselves against future retribution for their sadistic violence.
One of the most monstrous crimes of the period, the police assassinations of Chicago Black Panther leading members Fred Hampton (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Mark Clark in December 1969, receives rather perfunctory treatment by Sorkin. This act of cold-blooded murder, carried out execution-style in the early morning hours, shocked the country. Five thousand people turned out for Hampton’s funeral.
Sorkin’s work is obviously influenced and shaped by present-day events, including anger at the actions of the Trump administration and relentless police killings. In an interview with Esquire, Sorkin noted that the “timing of the film seems almost too perfect.”
He explained that the filmmakers ended up recreating a photograph taken in 1968 in the film’s opening scene outside the courthouse: “Some of the signs that were being held up [in the photo]: ‘America: Love It or Leave It.’ ‘Lock Them Up.’ … And then the police out in the street gassing and beating protesters right in front of the White House… I couldn’t believe it. Trump even tweeted that crossing state lines to incite violence was a federal crime. He didn’t add that there was only one time in American history that someone was charged with that crime.”
Alan Sorkin answers screenwriting questions - Dailymotion video - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7wtruz
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7wtruz
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