Legal News

Animated Film Recreates Trial of ?Chicago 10?

By Dan Slater

The Law Blog’s heading to the movies this weekend. After we laugh ourselves silly at Will Ferrell’s “Semi-Pro,” we’re going to check out “Chicago 10,” an animated film that recreates the conspiracy trial that followed the riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Here’s the background: The movie reportedly begins in early 1968, with President Johnson escalating the draft call from 17,000 troops-per-month to 35,000. Several groups of activists, including the so-called Yippies (for Youth International Party), led by Jerry Rubin (played by Mark Ruffalo), planned to protest the convention. But they were denied permits to demonstrate, leading to a clash with police in the streets and a televised riot watched by 50 million viewers.

In an attempt to find fault, the government brought Yippies Rubin, Abbie Hoffman (Hank Azaria), Dave Dellinger (Dylan Baker), Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner to trial along with Bobby Seale (Jeffrey Wright), the co-chair of the Black Panther Party, who had encouraged demonstrators to fight back against police assaults. Presiding over the trial was the notoriously irascible judge Julius Hoffman (Roy Scheider), who denied Seale’s request to represent himself, and then ordered Seale gagged and bound to a chair when he became belligerent. Thomas Foran (Nick Nolte) was the growling lead prosecutor.

The eight were represented by radical defense lawyer William Kunstler (Liev Schreiber) and Leonard Weinglass, both of whom the judge found in contempt and sentenced to prison terms — hence the Chicago “10.”

Writing in the NYT, A.O. Scott calls the film “a narrow, glib dollop of canned history,” and says that the filmmaker, Brett Morgan (The Kid Stays in the Picture), squanders “40 years of hindsight,” trotting out “the tired mythology of the era one more time.” But the LAT is complimentary, calling it a “sterling example” of a new kind of documentary filmmaking that backs up its “arguments with eloquent images.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 29, 2008 (boomark / email).