SPOILER ALERTS!!!
- Dave Dellinger never punched a U.S. Marshall. (His thirteen-year-old-daughter kicked one though.)
- Jerry Rubin didn’t romance an undercover cop. (The policewoman in question, awarded several minutes of dewy-eyed screen time, didn’t get a mention from Epstein, and Lukas dismissed her as “prissy.”)
- The juror reading James Baldwin didn’t get bumped because her parents received a threatening letter. (That was a mini-skirted 23-year-old, who hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place .) The Baldwin-reader remained empaneled – and defendant-sympathetic – to the end.
- Richard Schultz was no good-guy, reluctantly doing-his-duty. (Lukas described him as “snarl(ing) “and perpetually outraged.” Rennie Davis summed up the defendants’ point-of-view of him: “You’re a disgrace!” And Schultz’s boss, Thomas Foran, whom the movie barely defines, was a vengeful, bottled-up Irish-Catholic bare-knuckle brawler, who, post-trial, publically scorned the Seven as “fags.”)
- True, Ramsey Clark didn’t get to testify. But Norman Mailer did, and Country Joe McDonald sang some of “Fixin-to-Die Rag,” and Allen Ginsberg chanted and recited his poetry and that of William Blake, any of which might have made for some rewarding cinema.
- Abbie Hoffman wasn’t the only defendant to testify. Davis did too – and I bet that whole bit about Tom Hayden’s sentence structure was bullshit.
- The reading of the names of the dead occurred three weeks into the trial, not at its conclusion.
- Bobby Seale was bound and gagged October 24 (and severed from the trial November 5. Fred Hampton wasn’t killed for another month. (Which makes me suspect his presence in court in the movie was blown out of proportion to “motivate” Seale’s outburst – as if it wasn’t justified already.)
- Linda Morse, a Quaker pacifist driven to become an M-1 toting revolutionary, whom Lukas called, from the defendants’ point-of-view, their” most important witness,” didn’t make the movie.
- Judge Hoffman was 5’4″. The actor who played him was 6’4″. (Wasn’t Wallace Shawn available?)
Amidst a slew of physical mis-castings and personality mis-characterizations, adding a foot of stature to a man who could have been better played by a dung heap gnawed at me the most. It seemed emblematic of the movie’s placement of palatable entertainment over the actual grotesqueries of the time and the madness to which it drove those most engaged by it. Trial shirked conveying the full fire and fury of the bedlam within the courtroom; and while it ventured outside it to repeatedly show Hoffman delivering expository Lennie Bruce-light stand-up – it ignored the bomb-exploding, window-shattering Days of Rage which ravaged Chicago amidst the case’s progress.
The movie tipped its hand, I guess, at the start. Its focus on the draft implicitly bought into the right wing slander that the anti-war movement was about people trying to avoid military service. That sure didn’t apply to any of the women marching – or any of the men on trial. All of them were out of bullet range because of age or conscience or – I don’t know – physical (or mental) infirmity or, in Seale’s case, having already been in the Air Force. They were before the bar because they opposed the beast they believed America had become.
Look, I was in Chicago, September ‘67 through September ‘68; and anyone who knew anything about the city’s police knew how they would react if challenged. If the Seven didn’t, they were obtuse. If they knew it and thought they would achieve their own Bull Connor-in-Birmingham public consciousness-raising moment – let alone an actual revolution – they were somewhere between misguided and delusional.[2] It can’t be known if Hubert Humphrey would have bombed Cambodia and let the war drag on until 1975, but Richard Nixon did; and Chicago elected him.
I didn’t vote for Humphrey or Nixon. I didn’t get my head bashed in. I barely swallowed gas. But you know what this movie should have been? Half Vietnamese and Americans getting killed and half police clubbing the crap out of people. Maybe throw in some cities burning and then, okay, a couple court room minutes with multiple, mini-Marx Brothers running amok.
Notes
1. I had two handy. J. Anthony Lukas’s The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities is short and sweet and zips along. Jason Epstein’s The Great Conspiracy Trial is more complete, but, bloated by repeated back-ups into legal theory, local and legislative history, even theology, lumbers like a mattress-wrapped walrus. (Lucas’s book runs about 100 pp. It takes Epstein 175 to call his first witness.)
2. After the convention, 71.6% of the American people believed the demonstrators were to blame for the riots.