My first clue that this film was going to be "off" was the title. No one in Chicago called it the Trial of the Chicago 7. It was always the Conspiracy 7. A small point. But it lets you know what kind of mood I'm in about this.
When I was in a movie discussion group, I was the one who stood up for artistic license when my colleagues would complain about inaccuracies in films about real events. And now here I am.
I'm here because when facts are discarded as "fake news" and fake conspiracy theories are fed into the mainstream to the point that well meaning people start to believe, I see deliberate distortions of history from an alarmed perspective.
I'm not going to give away the plot. I hope you will watch the film on Netflix. I hope you will let me know what you think.
I heard Sergio Mims of the Black Harvest Film Festival tell this story about that time in history. Abby Hoffman appeared on the Merv Griffin late night talk show. He was wearing his trademark American flag shirt under his jacket. When he revealed the shirt for Merv, CBS actually blacked out the TV screen to cut off Abby.
If only the movie had captured more of that.
As you suggest, Joan, we've been overtaken by "well-meaning" or artistic distortions that fueled academic conversations back in the day. As the sportswriter "Red" Smith wrote in 1951 when he described Bobby Thompson's "Shot Heard Round the World," "Reality has strangled invention."
ReplyDeleteI could live with all that but what I didn't like is they put it in a phony phony phony courthouse.. The real one is here--couldn't they have worked the outside shots in??? yikes!!
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