Aaron Sorkin remembers the day, 14 years ago, when he was summoned to Steven Spielberg’s house and offered a job. “He told me he wanted to make a movie about the riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the trial that followed,” he says. “I left not knowing what the hell he was talking about.”
Sorkin was seven years old when Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Rennie Davis, and other counterculture activists spearheaded a massive protest in Chicago’s Grant Park against the Vietnam War. What started as a peaceful demonstration turned into a televised bloodbath when baton-wielding, tear-gas-spraying Chicago police and National Guard troops turned their fury on the crowd. The wild, infamous six-month trial that followed in 1969—in which the organizers were accused by President Nixon’s Department of Justice of criminal conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot—was a three-ring circus presided over by the blatantly biased Judge Julius Hoffman. The unjustness of the spectacle helped radicalize millions of disaffected American kids.
I was one of those kids. I was living in Berkeley in 1968, dodging Vietnam with a brief stint in graduate school (at that time enrollment kept you safe from the draft, though that exemption was soon to change), and can still vividly recall my fury as I watched the scenes of mayhem inside and outside the Democratic convention hall. About a dozen of us were gathered at the home of my old friend Winnie, glued to his black-and-white TV, on our feet in outrage as we watched the cops pummel the protesters, whom we regarded as our comrades. We cheered as Abe Ribicoff, the Connecticut senator, went off script at the podium and condemned the “Gestapo tactics” of the Chicago police, and gasped as the cameras turned on the enraged, malignant Mayor Daley shouting back anti-Semitic profanities that lip readers would never forget. That August night was a defining generational moment for many of us. Two years later I found myself living in a geodesic dome in a commune in the mountains of southern Colorado, attempting to live in what we naively called “a postrevolutionary world.” In our countercultural bubble, we assumed everyone watching the convention shared our feelings of revolt, but the spectacle in Chicago, as history showed us, had an unintended effect. It was the “law-and-order” Nixon who got elected.
Once Sorkin dove into the research, he was hooked. Spielberg, feeling that the story had an urgent political resonance, wanted the movie to come out before the 2008 election, but a 2007 Writers Guild strike wreaked havoc with everyone’s schedule, and the project was suspended. Paul Greengrass was later set to direct, but that, as well as subsequent attempts, fell through. Then a year and a half ago, Spielberg sensed the time was right to resurrect The Trial of the Chicago 7, which Netflix will release on October 16. Little did he know how right he’d be.
Having seen Molly’s Game, Sorkin’s first film as a director, Spielberg encouraged the screenwriter to take the reins himself. Now the idea was to unveil the movie before the 2020 election, and Sorkin tweaked his screenplay to underline the uncanny similarities between then and now, two eras of fierce American polarization. To illustrate he tells me about an old photograph taken outside the courthouse in Chicago, in which pro-government counterprotesters were holding up three signs: “American Love It or Leave It,” “What About White Civil Rights?”, and “Lock Them Up!”
Hollywood’s highest-profile and highest-paid writer, Sorkin is a specialist in verbal pyrotechnics. From The West Wing and The Newsroom to The Social Network, Moneyball (cowritten by Steve Zaillian), Steve Jobs, and Molly’s Game (which gleefully, gabbily disregards the edict against voice-over narration), he artfully rides the zeitgeist on waves of fast, funny, flamboyant oratory. Having first made his name with a courtroom drama (A Few Good Men), he returns to a true-life court case. The transcripts of the trial are colorful in themselves, but you can be assured that Sorkin’s rendered history in his own voice. The Trial of the Chicago 7 will not feel like a docudrama. It will be history snappily Sorkinized.
Sorkin has boiled down the trial into a movie that will run just short of two hours. “For me that’s a short!” he says. “It’s a great courtroom drama.” But the trial was just one of three stories he wanted to tell with the movie. The second was the evolution of the riot. “How did we go from what was supposed to be a peaceful anti-war demonstration to this incredibly bloody and violent confrontation?” The third, “more personal and emotional” strand is a kind of love story, the bond that developed between Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden, “two people who didn’t get along very well at the beginning and came to have a lot of respect for each other.” You can expect comedy, but, says Sorkin, “in our movie we use that humor to fool you for a second before we punch you in the gut.”
Sorkin’s screenplay attracted a dream cast, all of whom worked for scale. Sacha Baron Cohen, the only actor remaining from the original Spielberg ensemble, plays Yippie firebrand Abbie Hoffman, the trial’s court jester. Eddie Redmayne, who says that “working with Aaron was on my bucket list,” plays the more buttoned down Tom Hayden, the veteran of SDS and the Free Speech Movement, but better known to Redmayne’s generation as the former husband of Jane Fonda. Frank Langella is the villainous Judge Hoffman. Jeremy Strong (Succession’s tortured Kendall Roy) is anti-war activist Jerry Rubin, cofounder of the Yippies. Mark Rylance is defense lawyer William Kunstler, pitted against Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s prosecutor, Richard Schultz. Black Panther Bobby Seale, who was infamously bound and gagged in the courtroom, is played by Aquaman villain and Watchmen costar Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Michael Keaton is Ramsey Clark, the attorney general under the previous LBJ regime, which had come to the conclusion that it was the cops, not the protesters, who had caused the riots. This was an opinion the judge didn’t like, or allow the jury to hear. Marveling at his cast, Sorkin says, “It was like driving a Ferrari. My one job was making sure they were all in the same movie.”
On many shoots actors can work for months without sharing a scene. On Chicago 7, the entire cast and 300 extras were packed into a simulated courtroom in Paterson, New Jersey, watching one another’s every move. “It was fantastic,” Baron Cohen recalls. “We’d do a take and when we stopped, 300 extras were cheering and applauding. I felt like I was watching a brilliant Broadway production.” Langella, looking down on the scene from his judge’s perch, planned to keep a chilly distance. “I wanted them to truly hate me,” he says. That lasted a day. “I so fell in love with all of them that I went and introduced myself to every one of them,” says Langella. “I would have missed so much if I had kept to myself.”
They might have meshed into an ensemble, but every actor had his own process. Some insisted on remaining in character, whereas Baron Cohen, Langella says, “was capable of doing superb work seconds after telling me a dirty joke. Mark [Rylance] concentrated on his tape recorder, going over and over his lines.” Langella was amazed by Redmayne’s focus: For three weeks he sat in the courtroom without a single line to say, but never lost his concentration.
The most die-hard Method actor was Jeremy Strong, who once worked as Daniel Day-Lewis’s assistant and seems to have inherited his role model’s relish for total immersion. Filming the riot scenes on location in Grant Park, he insisted, before the cameras rolled, that a former Chicago cop playing one of the storm troopers hurl him to the ground before every take. “Jeremy begged me to spray him with real tear gas,” adds Sorkin. He declined.
Casting the man who created Ali G and Borat as Hoffman, an activist clown who used in-your-face confrontation to create radical political theater, seems uncannily apt. “We both have that element of Jewish chutzpah,” says Baron Cohen. The material hit his own political sweet spot: As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had written his thesis examining Jewish involvement in the Black civil rights movement in the early ’60s. He dug deep into the research to answer a question that has hung over Hoffman’s legacy: Was he a buffoon or a true radical? “He used absurdist methods, but his aim was true and pure,” says the actor. “I fell in love with him.” He thinks Hoffman became Sorkin’s mouthpiece, delivering a message “about the need to protest vociferously against evil and injustice.”
Sorkin wouldn’t necessarily agree with the mouthpiece part. He sees equal value in Hayden’s more measured approach, comparing their philosophical divisions to the split between the progressives and the moderates in today’s Democratic Party. As a writer, he has to burrow inside everyone’s point of view, becoming a kind of ventriloquist, just as Langella knew that, to be convincing, he had to completely identify with Judge Hoffman’s inflamed partisanship.
Langella sees the movie as a throwback to the kinds of multicharacter, intensely verbal dramas that used to be the staples of Paddy Chayefsky and Gore Vidal, movies like 12 Angry Men, The Best Man, and Network. Chayefsky’s hortatory screenplays, like Sorkin’s, tended to overshadow the directors who filmed them: They were secular sermons that riffed on the hot-button social issues of the day. Like Vidal, as much essayist as dramatist, Sorkin’s best work feeds off the body politic. Hollywood doesn’t make many of those films anymore, but the tradition lives on on cable, in such shows as The Wire, Succession, and Sorkin’s own TV work.
The Chicago 7 actors tend to get a little hyperbolic when talking about Sorkin. “The words are so brilliant. They’re gold dust,” says Redmayne, who says he felt great sadness when the shoot was over, as he’d never get to speak his lines again. Langella, the veteran of some 75 movies and innumerable plays, says, “The man can write about as well as any living writer I’ve done.” Upping the ante, Baron Cohen proclaims him the greatest living screenwriter: “He’s as talented as Shakespeare. And a lot more consistent—he hasn’t had a Titus Andronicus.”
Luckily, The Trial of the Chicago 7 finished shooting before the pandemic. When I spoke to Sorkin, he was working remotely on the final postproduction details. There’s a built-in audience among boomers who lived through those turbulent times, but will younger audiences respond? That was a question everyone was pondering at the start of May, when I interviewed Sorkin and his cast. But that was before the killing of George Floyd and the unprecedented, nationwide protests that flooded the streets and galvanized the country. Now those who will be watching those recreated scenes of 1968 police violence in Grant Park will have fresh visions in their heads: of peaceful protesters near the White House clubbed and gassed as the president strolled to St. John’s Episcopal Church for his Bible-wielding photo op. For me it was déjà vu: Housebound, quarantined, and as furious as I’d been in Berkeley, I watched (this time in color) as the overarmed troops were ordered into a one-sided battle.
Many of those younger protesters have probably never heard of the Chicago Seven, but they will recognize the direct line of political outrage that courses from 1968 to 2020. Donald Trump and his advisers clearly hear the echoes too, and seem to think that resurrecting the Nixon “law-and-order” playbook will work the same electoral magic. But times, and demographics, have changed: Their 52-year-old playbook has grown musty and blood-stained.
I went back to Sorkin in mid-June—just after Trump delivered his fearmongering tirade to a more-than-half-empty Tulsa auditorium—to see how he felt his movie fit into the new national mood. “The movie was relevant when we were making it,” he wrote in an email. “We didn’t need it to get more relevant, but it did. The polarization, the militarization of the police, the fear of Black activists, even the intramural battle between the left and the far left. To say nothing about [Black Panther] Fred Hampton being murdered by the police during the trial. At this performance the role of Mayor Daley is being played by Donald Trump.”
If one of the aims of the movie was to get its audience enraged and engaged, that job has been accomplished by a short, deadly amateur video shot on the streets of Minneapolis. We’re there. “I wish I could release it today,” Sorkin wrote of his movie. “Unfortunately, I’m confident that when we release it in the fall it’ll be just as timely.”
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