In his “mash-up documentary” Chicago 10, Brett Morgen wants to erase the distance between 1968 and 2008.

By J.R. Jones

February 28, 2008 | Screens at Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark's Century Centre, and Renaissance Place

As a Chicagoan in my early 40s, I find that the 1968 Democratic convention and the ensuing conspiracy trial are at my fingertips yet far beyond my grasp. A half-hour walk would take me from the old Grant Park band shell, where 15,000 antiwar protesters gathered on August 28, 1968, in hopes of marching to the convention hall, to the intersection of Michigan and Balbo, where Chicago police brutalized protesters on nationwide TV, to the Federal Building at Dearborn and Jackson, where Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and six other activists stood trial a year later for conspiracy to incite a riot. But the legend surrounding those events is so dense I could wander through it forever without coming out the other side.

Chicago 10, an electrifying new “mash-up documentary” by Brett Morgen, vividly reconstructs the battles on the street and in the courtroom, and it couldn’t come at a more opportune moment. (Steven Spielberg is reportedly developing a dramatic treatment of the same subject.) The parallels between 1968 and 2008 are eerie: Then as now, a big-hatted Texan had led the country into an ill-considered war and was about to shuffle off into history with U.S. forces still mired in a foreign civil conflict. Then as now, the Democratic Party was embroiled in a hotly contested presidential race, with two antiwar upstarts, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, vying for the nomination against Vice President Hubert Humphrey. If Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to duke it out through the summer, this year’s Democratic convention could be the most chaotic since then. (Coincidentally the gathering, scheduled for August 25 through 28 in Denver, will precisely mark the 40th anniversary of Chicago’s four days of violence.)

The 1968 convention changed the city, the Democratic Party, and the nation. The overkill on Michigan Avenue may be a source of shame now, but at the time a majority of Americans supported the first Mayor Daley and the police for cracking down on protesters. After more than a decade of civil rights demonstrations, antiwar marches, and rioting in U.S. cities, the political pendulum had begun to swing back to the right, and Richard Nixon rode it straight into the Oval Office with a campaign that promised to restore law and order to the country. The bloodshed in Chicago also fractured the American left into a liberal wing that still believed in nonviolence and a radical wing that resolved to pursue more aggressive tactics. With Humphrey’s defeat, the great era of American liberalism, which had started with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and peaked with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, began its long, steep decline.

The Democrats are still feeling the aftershocks of ’68 today. Back then, only 13 states held Democratic primaries, and Humphrey skipped them all, taking advantage of the party machinery to wrap up the nomination. That fueled the rage of the demonstrators, and as news of their being beaten and gassed filtered into the International Amphitheater, delegates approved a convention plank to reform the nominating process.

A commission opened up the delegate selection, leading to the modern 50-state calendar of primaries and caucuses, but it also instituted proportional representation of minorities, which helped them to dominate the party. After the landslide defeat of the liberal George McGovern in 1972 and Ted Kennedy’s failed 1980 primary challenge to President Carter, whom Ronald Reagan easily defeated that November, party centrists struck back by creating unelected, uncommitted “superdelegates” to check the insurgents. Superdelegates helped shut down Gary Hart, who ran against establishment candidate Walter Mondale in 1984, and they may yet do the same to Barack Obama.

For Chicago, the convention is a stain that will never wash away. The second Mayor Daley brought the Dems back in 1996, neatly contained pesky protesters at sanctioned demonstration sites, and smoothly orchestrated Bill Clinton’s coronation as the uncontested nominee—yet just the words “Democratic convention” still conjure images of cops busting heads and Richard J. Daley shouting at Senator Abraham Ribicoff after the senator took the convention podium to denounce “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”

Daley never backed down from his handling of the convention, even after the Walker Report—presented in late ’68 by a team that studied statements by more than 3,400 witnesses and participants, 180 hours of film, and more than 12,000 photographs—declared the melee a “police riot.” Yet the celebration that was supposed to showcase Daley’s Chicago disgraced it instead, heralding the end of an era when big-city bosses ran the table. At the 1972 convention, the Democratic National Committee replaced Daley’s handpicked delegates with a slate led by Jesse Jackson.

You won’t learn any of this from Chicago 10, because Morgen isn’t interested in measuring the distance between 1968 and 2008—he wants to erase it. When his movie opened the Sundance Film Festival a year ago, he told the audience his objective was to “mobilize the youth in this country to stop the fucking war.” Archival footage shows the MC5 rocking out in Lincoln Park, but the music is Rage Against the Machine’s version of “Kick Out the Jams,” and other key moments feature tunes by Eminem or the Beastie Boys. Scenes of the conspiracy trial are drawn from court transcripts, but Morgen has dramatized them with motion-capture animation that turns yippie activists Hoffman and Rubin into freaky superheroes. “The idea of ‘yippie’ was that politics needed to be fun,” Morgen told USA Today. “If you want to mobilize people, it’s not fun just walking around with a placard over your head. Turn it into a party, turn it into a concert—and that’s what they did.”

As trivializing as that might sound, Chicago 10 (the number includes the two defense attorneys) is actually packed with information, its barrage of colorful images culled from both amateur and news footage. Morgen opens with President Johnson announcing his escalation of U.S. forces in Vietnam, then cuts to clean-cut activists Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and David Dellinger holding workshops for the National Mobilization Against the War. Animated scenes show Hoffman and Rubin plotting to disrupt the convention with a “Festival of Life” to take place in the city’s parks. Footage of the west-side rioting that followed the King assassination and of Mayor Daley issuing his infamous shoot-to-kill order establishes the civil tension in Chicago. And a montage waggishly set to Vivaldi shows national guardsmen pouring into the city, adding to security forces that would ultimately total 25,000. To watch Chicago 10 is to be plunged back into the uncertainty of those days, as protesters massed daily in Lincoln Park and the police swept in every night to enforce the ill-considered 11 PM curfew.

The most important element of Chicago 10 turns out to be its dual narrative, which ping-pongs between convention week and the five-month trial. As a story device it works beautifully: the selected courtroom testimony tightly frames the sprawling events of those four days in August 1968, and the antics of Hoffman and Rubin—blowing a kiss to a juror, heckling the judge, bursting into the courtroom in judicial robes—provide comic relief from the escalating police brutality on the streets. Morgen accelerates the cross-cutting near the end, as the August 28 rally in Grant Park moves toward a confrontation and Julius J. Hoffman, the imperious trial judge, clashes with defendant Bobby Seale, the belligerent Black Panther leader who demanded the right to represent himself. When Seale is removed from the courtroom and brought back in bound and gagged, Abbie Hoffman leaps to his feet to denounce the travesty: “It’s the same thing as last year in Chicago! It’s the exact same thing!”

Yet Morgen’s comparison of the two storylines isn’t nearly as instructive as the contrasts between them—most notably, the dominance of archival footage for 1968 and animation for 1969. “I read something where Jerry Rubin described the trial as a total cartoon,” Morgen told the New York Times, “and I said, ‘That’s it, that’s what we are going to do.’”

Animated scenes: tear gas in the streets; Abbie Hoffman in the courtroom as Bobby Seale is dragged out. From archival footage: the police and the national guard; Jerry Rubin.

In truth the animation was a matter of necessity—cameras and tape recorders were barred from the courtroom. And it’s bolstered by a healthy amount of archival footage surrounding the trial. But Morgen has clearly seized on the notion of rendering the courtroom drama in broad strokes and bold colors, and so he focuses on the larger-than-life movement leaders: Rubin, Seale, defense attorney William Kunstler, celebrity witnesses Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg (who responds to the rival attorneys’ bickering by chanting a Hindu mantra on the stand). The undisputed star of the show, however, is Abbie Hoffman—alternately angry and gentle, thoughtful and silly, sarcastic and passionate, he’s the most attractive and fully realized character in the movie.

A dearth of usable footage forces Morgen to animate some of the convention-week events as well, like the August 26 tear-gas attack in Lincoln Park. But for the most part the protests are amply documented, and in these segments the stars are upstaged by the bit players. For those of us who weren’t there, one revelation of Chicago 10 may be the character of the crowds that turned out to oppose the war. Some fit the description of radical freaks, but most seem like normal middle-class taxpayers. “I think we all recognize we don’t have a chance against bayonets, clubs, guns, and tear gas,” says one fellow. When two sedate-looking young women are asked what they’ll do in the event of trouble, one laughs and replies, “We’ll run, very fast!” When pandemonium breaks out on Michigan, the defining image isn’t a flamboyant figure like Hoffman; it’s a middle-aged woman in a housecoat belting out “We Shall Overcome” as cops wrestle her into a paddy wagon.

Cynics delight in reminding us that Hoffman ultimately killed himself and that Rubin became a stockbroker and entrepreneur. But discrediting them personally doesn’t discredit the people they led; Morgen’s final clip of Rubin suggests that even at the height of their notoriety, they believed they were merely conduits for the popular will. “You know what to do!” Rubin tells his audience. “You know where you are, you know what’s effective! And you know that across the country there are people like you that are ready to act, and they don’t need no leader telling ’em what to do. ’Cause we’re all leaders.” The record Democratic turnout at this year’s primaries and the nearly one million people who’ve donated to the Obama campaign demonstrate once again that the movement empowers the leader, not the other way around. For dramatic purposes Morgen focuses on ten people, but the real story is the tens of thousands.   

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