Steal This Movie

Year 13, Day 86 - 3/27/21 - Movie #3,789

BEFORE: I just had to slip this one in here, as a precursor to watching "The Trial of the Chicago 7", which is now part of my plan for mid-April.  This 2000 film covers similar ground, I believe, as Vincent D'Onofrio carries over from "CHIPS" to play Abbie Hoffman, who is played by Sacha Baron Cohen in the recent Aaron Sorkin film.  I'm intrigued, and I'm down to learn more about this topic, especially after a year of protests from both sides of the political spectrum.  Reporters over the last year have been name-checking the protests and riots of 1968, so it's an excellent time to research what, exactly went down - I was a little busy being born that year - and how it was different from, say, an armed insurrection and attack on a government building. 

Today's Women's History Spotlight (just a few days left...) shines on American suffrage activist Virginia Minor, born March 27, 1824, Patty Hill, co-writer of the song "Happy Birthday to You", born March 27, 1868, Marie Under, Estonian poet and 8-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, born March 27, 1883.  Happy birthday also to Sarah Vaughan, Mariah Carey, Fergie and Jessie J, what a musical bunch. 

It's also Kevin Corrigan's birthday, he's in this film so I hit one right on the button for once, by accident - but I know now there really are no accidents.  SHOUT-OUT to Mr. Corrigan, born March 27, 1969.

THE PLOT: Five years after Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman goes underground to avoid a drug-related prison sentence, he contacts a reporter to get out the story of the FBI's covert spying, harassment and inciting of violence they then blame on the Left. 

AFTER: There's no time like the present to learn about Abbie Hoffman, because this year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Steal This Book", which this movie's title is a reference to.  (I tried to steal the movie, Abbie, but this streaming thing didn't make it possible - I had to pay $3.99 to YouTube, I hope that's OK. Maybe I should have looked harder for an illegal download.)

Hoffman was born in Worcester, MA - so that probably explains the strange accent D'Onofrio was using here, it wasn't exactly a Boston accent, was it supposed to be a New England accent filtered through New York or Chicago?  Not sure.  In high school he was already labeled as a troublemaker, atheist, Communist and vandal, the kind of kid who called the teachers by their first names, just because he knew that would bother them. This was in the mid-1950's, so if you think about teens wearing leather jackets, riding motorcycles, a bit Brando and a lot James Dean, that's probably close to the mark.  Remember in that movie "The Wild One", when someone asked Brando's character, "What are you rebelling against, Johnny?" and he answered, "Whaddaya got?"  That was probably Abbie Hoffman's attitude at the time. 

Hoffman went to Brandeis University and studied both psychology and Marxist theory, (yep, that checks...) he graduated in 1959 and headed out to Berkeley to work on his Masters.  But this is all before the flashbacks seen in "Steal This Movie", with the framing device of his second wife talking to a reporter about their times together.  The film then flashes back to Hoffman's activist work, registering Black voters in the South and then being an activist against the Vietnam War. Hoffman and his cohorts pulled stunts like tossing real and fake money down to the trading floor of the NY Stock Exchange, and marching on the Pentagon, vowing to levitate it with psychic energy, turn it orange, and make it vibrate.  Yeah, the hippies were a fun bunch, and they did like their drugs. 

The big turning point was the arrest of the Chicago Seven, where Hoffman and other activists were arrested after protesting at the 1968 Democratic Convention, charged with crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot, conspiracy and other charges resulting from protesting the war, which many perceived as anti-American.  But if you think about it, the yippies weren't killing anybody, but the government was, so who was really in the wrong?  Still, I can see both sides of things here, to some degree, so there's part of me that's trying desperately to find the contrast between the yippies protesting the Vietnam War, and the Proud Boys rioting to protest the electoral college results they didn't agree with.  Is there a fine line here?  I can't just call one group "right" and the other group "wrong" just because one seems to agree more with my personal beliefs - this feels like a rather gray area here, with both groups unhappy with the direction of the country, and protesting to try to produce some kind of change.  For that matter, can we really say there's a substantial difference between the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the Black Lives Matter protests of the previous year?  You may believe in one cause and not the other, but that probably depends on who you are and which news channel you watch, but when you get down to it, aren't all protests the same?  Wasn't our country founded on protests like the Boston Tea Party, and for that matter, the entire Revolutionary War?  

I'm more confused than ever - perhaps I should table this matter until I see "The Trial of the Chicago 7" next month.  All that really matters is that Hoffman and four others were found guilty of the riot charges, but not guilty on the conspiracy charges. Hoffman and four others were sentenced to five years in prison, but their convictions were overturned on appeal.  This is where Hoffman's story catches up with events I saw last year in the documentary "The U.S. vs. John Lennon", where there were concerts and protests in 1969 against the arrest of John Sinclair from the White Panthers Party, and then in 1971 Hoffman published "Steal This Book", which advised people how to live for free and suggested that people interrupt rock concerts to make political statements. 

Then Hoffman was arrested on drug charges - intent to distribute cocaine, and THAT'S when he went on the run.  Hey, this week started with a film where the lead character was on the run from the FBI for years, and now I'm ending the week the same way.  Hoffman changed his appearance, may have even had cosmetic surgery, and lived under an assumed name, Barry Freed, for several years, in upstate New York by the St. Lawrence River. He got involved in political and environmental causes there, because I guess you can change your appearance but you can't change who you are.  The film then details how he got a new girlfriend but also stayed in contact with his wife through correspondence, and eventually met his 10-year-old son, America, without revealing his identity to him for some time.

At some point the pendulum swung back in his favor, J. Edgar Hoover died, Nixon resigned and Carter replaced Ford as President, so liberalism and activism came back into fashion.  Hoffman finally came out of hiding in September 1980 (smart move, surrendering before Reagan got elected...) and got a one-year sentence for skipping bail, but served only four months.  Before too long he was protesting the CIA's recruitment drives on college campuses, and took up a crusade, proving in court that the CIA regularly engaged in illegal activities.  This is where things get a little blurry for me again, because protesting seems fine when the government is "wrong", but then who gets to decide what constitutes "wrong" on a national level?  Aren't there always going to be two sides to any issue, and aren't those factions always going to disagree over whether something is right or wrong? 

I think I'm on to something here, because "Steal This Movie" shows Abbie Hoffman being beaten up by Conservative rednecks for wearing a shirt with a design based on the U.S. flag, but this sequence is intercut with footage of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans singing on TV, and they're also wearing shirts with a design reminiscent of the flag.  The same people who would beat up Hoffman for wearing this shirt would probably have no problem with Roy Rogers doing the same thing, because it's not really a logical argument about disrespecting the flag, they really just want to pommel him, and they're looking for any excuse to do so.  And that's American politics for you, the other side is automatically wrong and deserves a kick in the head, and we're all really just disagreeing with the other side because we don't like them.

This film may be a good entry point into the subject matter, the political scene of the late 1960's and early 1970's - but I'm thinking it probably left a LOT of stuff out, just to focus on Hoffman and his personal life and his stunts and radical agenda.  But he was only ONE of the Chicago Seven, and there must have been other people planning protests and political stunts, so no matter how you slice it, it feels like we're maybe not seeing the complete picture here.  I look forward to the opportunity to re-visit this in about three weeks. 

Also starring Janeane Garofalo (last seen in "Wonderland"), Jeanne Tripplehorn (last seen in "Very Bad Things"), Kevin Pollak (last seen in "Special Correspondents"), Donal Logue (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Kevin Corrigan (last seen in "Results"), Alan Van Sprang, Troy Garity (last seen in "Sunshine"), Michael Cera (last seen in "Paper Heart"), Ingrid Veninger, Stephen Marshall, Joyce Gordon, Bernard Kay (last seen in "Doctor Zhivago"), Jean Daigle, Johnie Chase, Toni Ellwand, Craig Ryan, Ken Kramer, David Eisner, Todd Kozan, Panou (last seen in "Horns"), Timm Zemanek, with archive footage of  RIchard Nixon (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Jimmy Carter (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Rosalynn Carter, Richard J. Daley, Hubert Humphrey (last seen in "The U.S. vs. John Lennon"), Lyndon Johnson (ditto), Pat Nixon (ditto), Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Earl Warren, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans. 

RATING: 5 out of 10 unlabeled boxes of files