Rick Kogan: Few complaints with the 'Chicago 7' movie, but it was all different when I was there

Most of my friends were not out to change the world. Most of my friends just wanted to get high or listen to some music or dance and otherwise partake of what was happening in the parks when the Democratic National Convention came to town in August 1968.

The troubles and, indeed, terrors that attended those bygone summer days form the flashback background for writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” a film now available on Netflix and that has been in theaters for the past few weeks. It is a fine movie even as it manhandles reality for the sake of drama and tears.

The film is, of course, of intense interest to Chicago, a city ever given to chest-thumping superlatives and hyperbole — tallest, windiest — and its citizens, ever protective of our collective image and given to assailing any film or TV makers who mess with us: There is no West Clark Street!

The logistical problems with this film are relatively minor and it takes advantage of the short time spent filming here. The area of Grant Park, across the street from the Conrad Hilton Chicago that was the scene of the bloodiest clashes between protesters and police, looks good and right, especially since it was embellished with old archival footage.

I was there that Aug. 28 night of what would be called, for the nearby east-west street, the “Battle of Balbo.” I was working in the basement of the Hilton on convention nights, answering phones and fetching coffee and cigarettes for reporters and editors. With most of the newspaper folks inside the International Amphitheatre to cover the actual convention that would lead to the nomination of Hubert Humphrey for president, I was standing in the relative safety of the hotel lobby and that is where I watched and was sickened by the clashes in the street.

You’ll see that in the film, a lot of fake blood that looks fake, except when real in old clips.

Other local scenes, and there aren’t many, could have been shot in any town. The courtroom, where most of the film’s action takes place, could have been on Mars.

I was in the real courtroom, taken there on a few random days by some reporter friends I had made during my stint at the Hilton. It was one of my first experiences with a trial of any sort and, though I vividly remember the packed room, the faces of the defendants and of Judge Julius Hoffman, this was when I also got my first taste of what a real trial was like.

Real trials are so deliberate and tedious that they often compel reporters covering them to work crossword puzzles during much of the proceedings. Trials are not what you see on “Law & Order.” Or what you have seen on other films by Sorkin, even though some of his best work has taken place there. He wrote “A Few Good Men” and the hit play adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He is adept and artful in making his Cliffs Notes version of reality, focusing on courtroom moments that are the most amusing, contentious or revelatory.

The trial of the Chicago 7 lasted more than 150 days, from late 1969 into early 1970. Among the most dramatic of those was when Judge Hoffman had marshals gag defendant Bobby Seale and handcuff him to his chair. The film will have you believe that this was done in reaction to Seale’s making an impassioned speech in court about the assassination of his Black Panther colleague Fred Hampton and others in an early morning raid. In real life, Seale was chained to his chair on Oct. 29, 1969. Hampton was killed in the early morning of Dec. 4.

And not to spoil the movie’s powerful ending, but Sorkin’s way is not the way it happened.

I assume if you are reading this story and the other offerings in this Chicago 7 package, that you have more than a passing interest in the movie and maybe the events it dramatizes.

Fine, go see the movie if you haven’t. My colleague, critic Michael Phillips, gives it a well-reasoned three-star review, noting that it will “certainly hit home for Chicagoans who remember 1968 and 1969.”

True enough, though that depends on how old you were then.

I have been asking some old friends, then teenagers, what they remember from that time and those events and their collective answers might be lumped in a “not much” pile.

It is not my place to diminish the movie for what it should have been. It has taken more than 15 years to get to the screen and I can only imagine the dozens of versions considered. What is there is what is there.

Memory, of course, is subjective and so I might have appreciated a glimpse into the lives (or at least the backgrounds) of one or two of the jurors; a look at some of the activities and parties visited by some of the defendants when not in court; the curiosity seekers and hotshot national writers who were drawn to the trial; more than a glimpse of Mayor Richard J. Daley

I could go on but that would be the stuff of another movie and I am content to live what we have.

There is a long bookshelf offering everything you wanted to know about the Chicago 7 but were afraid to ask. There is the playfully titled “The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities : Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial” (Harper & Row, 1970). There is the recently published (to coincide with the movie, of course), “The Trial of the Chicago 7: The Official Transcript” (Simon & Schuster). Going on sale Tuesday is “The Trial of the Chicago 7: The Screenplay” (Simon & Schuster).

I have not read those but I can steer you to two fine books on the Chicago 7 shelf that I have read. They were written by the late John Schultz, a longtime and influential professor at Columbia College: “No One Was Killed: The Democratic National Convention, August 1968” (University of Chicago Press, 1969) and “The Chicago Conspiracy Trial” (first published in 1970 and revised many time since by University of Chicago Press).

Like movies?

There is also the remarkable “Medium Cool,” the Haskell Wexler film that is a fictional story about the adventures of a TV cameraman while giving us striking documentary footage about the riots during convention. Ebert and Siskel named it one of the greatest movies of 1969.

Don’t have a lot of time?

Then go to find the stunning 13-minute piece of an uncompleted documentary about the trial on Media Burn. The work of Bob Hercules and Joel Cohen, with Tom Weinberg, it focuses on the two most controversial and, in their ways (purposeful and not), clownish figures in the Chicago 7 trial, those Hoffmans, activist Abbie and Julius — not related.

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(Rick Kogan is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.)

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