Los Angeles Journal


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2008-02-28

by John Esther

Interview: Brett Morgan

Summary

Chicago 10: Revolution Revisited

Article

You got to hand it to (or hate) history. If you miss a series of tragic events the first, second or third time, they are bound to come around again in some similar form.

Forty years ago the country was bogged down in a foreign country after the United States illegally invaded another country under fabricated fear-mongering pretenses. The approval for the executive administration was low. The president would not be seeking another term. As democrats and republicans sought their party’s nominations, revolution was manifesting itself in the streets and it would culminate during August in Chicago where the Democratic National Convention took place.

As thousands of concerned citizens from across the country blew into the Windy City, local fascistic officials ensured there would be no peaceful protesting. Instead there would be a policy of police protesting the peace. With the proper-ty authority in place, the police whipped out their batons and started doing some hippie hitting. But when the cameras caught cops clubbing civil insubordinate citizens acting within their civil rights, many people were rightfully outraged. Leftist scapegoats were needed.

To add buffoonery to blunder, Chicago’s un-finest picked the eight most charismatic leaders of the protest – Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, John Froines and Lee Weiner – to stand trial along with the Black Pather Bobby Seale. Together, along with famed attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, composed the Chicago 10.

A sweet (“groovy”) new film by writer-director Brett Morgan (The Kid Stays in the Picture), Chicago 10 uses animated and stock footage formats along with contemporary tunes from Rage Against the Machine, Beastie Boys and others to recreate the joy, sorrow and angst of that infamous trial against Hoffman (voice by Hank Azaria), Dellinger (voice by Dylan Baker), Rubin (voice by Mark Ruffalo), Seale (voice by Jeffrey Wright), Hayden (voice by Reg Rogers), Davis (voice by himself) and the others.

It was an animated charade of justice lead by the historically discredited Judge Julius Hoffman (voice by the late Roy Scheider) and the hysterical prosecuting attorney Thomas Foran (voice by Nick Nolte). What a joke.

Yet considering the similarities between the year 1968 and 2008 those jokes are now (still) on (with) us.

In this exclusive interview I spoke to Morgan about the film, the times and negotiations between personal and political survival.

Los Angeles Journal: What filmmaker would not want to make this film?
Brett Morgan: That’s a good question. It’s got everything you could want as a filmmaker. It’s got imagery that’s totally visceral and emotional. It’s an embarrassment of riches, really. The broader context is that there is a war going on. It seemed a good time to look back at ’68 and see what lessons could be learned or had.

LAJ: Regarding personal and public empowerment.
BM: The message of the film is about empowerment. It’s all about the fact that these three guys – Jerry, Abbie and Paul – were sitting around an apartment smoking pot, watching television and going, “Hey, man, let’s go to Chicago. Let’s create this piece of epic theater.” Boom! Eight months later they put on one of the greatest pieces of political theater ever stage on U.S. soil – with a cast of thousands. There’s something really empowering about that. You and I can sit here – I don’t want to incite a riot [laughs] – we need one more person, it takes three – and I can go, “You know what? I have a great idea. At the DNC this year let’s do blah, blah, blah.” And you’re like, “Yeah, Man, let’s do it.” Then we go ahead. That’s kind of ingenious. I love the sense of fun and theater these three brought to Chicago. Protest doesn’t have to be boring. You can make it fun and entertaining -- which is what Chicago 10 is meant to be, an entertaining and moving film that’s irreverent and hopefully funny and can get across some important political ideals.

LAJ: A feature version of Michael Moore’s documentaries.
BM: If Abbie were alive today he’d be doing what Michael Moore does, make films. What Michael does so successful is use entertainment to get these bigger messages out there. When working in documentary film, no one really wants to see a sobering movie. The one glaring exception to the rule is An Inconvenient Truth. Short of that, documentaries coming from a strong place politically tend to fail at the box office because they’re not entertaining. Do you really want to see Taxi to the Dark Side on a Friday night in a theater or would you rather watch it on a Sunday night at home?

LAJ: Especially with the youth, whom I imagine this film is geared toward with the animation and the music you are using.
BM: Our generation is not going to change this country. I’m married with three kids. Most people at our age are at a different point in our life. Historically young people brought about change. They have the time and the energy to do it. That’s not like you and I should be complacent, but I have found other ways to protest, i.e. making this film. If social change is up to young people, for whom this story is totally foreign to, I wanted to make a film in a language they could understand. It would have the soundtrack of their lives, not their parents’ lives. Ultimately they’re not looking at their grandparents on the screen, they’re looking at their brothers and sisters on the screen. Since I’m not doing interviews with 70-year-old men who were there, they can now see their parents as people their own age and identify with them on that level. It was very important for me to give the film a youthful energy from the beginning. Also, I had no interest in doing another documentary about 1968. It’s been done to death. There’s no more room for a traditional montage of all these important, sort of trivialized, moments of the time. With this film I was taking the canvas of 1968 and making a film about today the way Baz Luhrumann made a film about Romeo & Juliet and set it in Mexico City. I’m not a historian. If you want a broader history of Chicago, read a book. In 1200 pages you can put the context you want into it. In a 90-minute film what I want to do is offer the visceral experience of Chicago by exploiting what film is uniquely suited for. I am very committed to theatrical non-fiction. What I’m trying to do is create these experiences. I describe The Kid Stays in the Picture as “a Disney ride called Bob Evans.”

LAJ: There is a lot of live footage in your film. Vietnam was the first televised war. Forty years later we see film, particularly documentaries, showing us what the experience of life is now and in the present. It has not been like that until recently. Is it because of the war? Cheap filmmaking? The corporate media are unreliable?
BM: I don’t know if I can answer that film. Documentarians tend to be political. When a war happens, which hasn’t happened for us in a couple of generations – the first Gulf War was a day – documentarians have a chance to use their crafts to do something. That’s why you see people dropping their vanity or apolitical projects and feeling like, “This is what I can offer. This is how I can help. I’m not going to enlist. I may not be good with a gun, but I’m good with a camera.” We’re living in charged times and as documentarians you inherently want to document it.

LAJ: How has making this film changed your life?
BM: [Long Pause]. I may be too close to it to answer that.

LAJ: Were you inspired?
BM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was totally inspired by Abbie. I was forced to ask myself on a daily basis how far am I willing to go? It radicalized me to a certain extent.

LAJ: Do you see any contemporary activists in the same category as Abbie Hoffman and the others?
BM: No. I’m sure they’re out there and not getting the media coverage. Abbie almost invented the sound bite. He knew how to play the media so brilliantly. They loved him. They were drawn to him. The only activist who’s gained notoriety over the last six years is Cindy Sheehan and I can tell you right now she doesn’t inspire me to drive across the country to Crawford, Texas, and hang out with her.

LAJ: The film opened Sundance Film Festival 2007 and here we are a year later with the release date. Was that something planned to coincide with election year?
BM: If I had my way, it would have made more sense to open the festival this year. By the time our distribution paperwork was done it was spring 2007 and they were talking about releasing the film in August. And I was like, “If we’re going to release the film in August why not wait until primary season?” It’s now peak primary season. Movies suck around now. It would be the best chance to have a cultural impact.

LAJ: You have done socially engaging films and you have also done commercials for corporations like Nike and Kellogg’s, which do not have the best reputations for political responsibility. How do you negotiate the contrast?
BM: It’s very easy for me to rationalize. From an artistic standpoint I love doing commercials. I work with the greatest cinematographers on the planet. It’s like my film school. Secondly, the money I make doing commercials subsidizes me to go off and make films like Chicago 10 or On the Ropes. For me it’s like taking money from The Man and putting it to good usage. There are certain places where I’ll draw the line. I was asked to do a recruitment film for the army and there was no way I could rationalize it. I tried to rationalize it [Laughs]. It was going to be a piece of propaganda so I couldn’t rationalize it. I’m not Robert Greenwald. I go back and forth. My next film is about Kurt Cobain, which is not a social issue film. Then the next film is about Iran Contra…And Kellogg’s Smart Start Cereal is pretty good!