Chapo Trap House - UNLOCKED: 465 - Sorkinverse: Rise of the 7 feat. Dave Anthony and Josh Olson (10/23/20)

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

We’re joined by Dave Anthony and Josh Olson of The West Wing Thing podcast to discuss Aarons Sorkin’s latest attempt to recontextualize American politics as people getting epically owned by logic in court rooms: The Trial of the Chicago 7. Check out The West Wing Thing here: https://westwingthing.libsyn.com/ And check out their West Wing Reunion special, featuring many Chapos, on their patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/TheWestWingThing

$100,000 ransom I don't understand a ransom you mean to take to rip off this city for a hundred grand it's a it's a groovy thing to do what are you kidding what are they gonna do with it anyway would you have done it what would you have taken a hundred thousand dollars to call everything off I would have taken a hundred thousand dollars as to calling it off well how much is it worth to you to call it off call off what you've done it for a million revolution yeah what's your price my life okay hello everybody it's Chaffo we are back and we've got a stacked show for you today to discuss Aaron Sorkin's latest masterpiece The Trial of the Chicago Seven and what do you know it there's seven of us here it's Matt Christman Felix

Biederman Amber Frost me will menaker Chris Wade on the boards and joining us our Chaffo certified Aaron Sorkin experts bad boy Josh Olson and America sweetheart Dave Anthony from the West Wing thing and soon to be hosting the upcoming West Wing thing West Wing reunion so we've got our Sorkin experts on deck and we are all on trial or rather we are putting Aaron Sorkin on trial for his crimes against humanity the film is The Trial of the Chicago Seven about the famous Trial of the Chicago Seven there's a lot to talk about in this movie I want to thank Josh and Dave for being here but I think we should just begin by sharing our just our overall impressions of the movie just just in a circle here I'll lead it off I may risk absolute ostracization

from this podcast but up until the very end of this movie I thought it was mostly pretty watchable and entertaining it was a good cast boo yeah all right I mean obviously we can get into the various travesties against history that Aaron Sorkin is guilty of perpetrating but the thing about the thing about this movie though and Sorkin in general is I really think that like it's the courtroom setting in which his particular talents are put to best use because you know Brendan made this point about a few good men is that like a trial is the only time in the real world where sort of like epic snappy dialogue does have real-world consequences and you can actually own someone with their own logic in a way that actually matters so it's just sort of like

yeah there's yeah there's a really good point yeah it's so it's like it can hit this the Sorkin isms contained in a trial setting I think blunts the worst edges of it but I mean they still come through without a doubt and we can get there because the ending of the movie is when it became actively nauseating fairly well entertained throughout like the first two hours or so so that's me Josh what's your take no I you know it's it's a fascinating thing that he does and we struggle with on the show all the time it's like I think Sorkin is a great propagandist I'm not a hundred percent certain he's aware of the fact that he's a propagandist he walks in that's called ideology there you go yeah I mean see he walks into this story acknowledging I'm sure you've

all heard you know when he first got the job he had to call his father and ask him what the trial of Chicago 7 was I don't know how you do that he's a couple years older than me I know everything about it you know I was an infant when the fucking thing happened but you know he puts together a movie that it's amazing talking to people who knew nothing about it they watch the film like that was pretty entertaining you know like yeah it can pass you know it's when you dig into what he's actually doing with the characters and who they are what they actually believe versus what he has them espousing in the film that you come to the real insidiousness of it and I don't think it's him going you know I know I'm going to turn Abby Hoffman into a neo-liberal

I just think he goes wouldn't it be cool if Abby Hoffman said he likes the system and and he has clearly contempt for for the radical left but he also wants to be respected and revered by them and um yeah I I just it's such a benign anodyne looking film and just as it went on and on I just was I turned it Dave Anthony by the end it was just me at it uh Matt what did you think I was basically with Will there uh it was it was like most of his films entertaining his movies are way better than his shows because the runtime requires him to uh it doesn't you don't wear out your welcome with the characters as as thoroughly as you do with his TV people because there you can only handle that much pomposity and it'll concentrate at dose so it's as watchable as most

of his movies are laden with the ideologies of course uh uh but kind of like a greatest hits like a concentrated sorkin uh nugget all of his all of his like worldview consolidated into one expression uh Dave yeah I mean I agree with that it's it's crystallized simplicity I think that he just completely lacks curiosity as a human being to understand what anybody else in the world thinks so he takes every character every person he's run across and he squeezes them through his idiot filter and out just comes just bland nonsense I just like if you have any understanding of the history of the Chicago seven I don't know how you can like that film because you're just watching something that isn't and it's fucking crazy to watch and just from a screenwriter's perspective there's

so many interesting moments that happen in the Chicago seven trial that he doesn't use and even small things that would that would color the characters are just left behind and they're not even stuff that I think would fuck with his his viewpoint of the world like when a witness comes off the witness stand and Abby Hoffman hands him a ten dollar bill well that's not that's that wouldn't undermine what he wants to say it would make the script more interesting and what's happening in the courtroom interesting and the character's more interesting and he just leaves all that behind so this is one of those movies that I think if I had watched it without any understanding of the history I would have enjoyed it but since I know the actual story and I'm super

into this shit that happened and how fucking crazy it was I'm just watching it mystified as to what the fuck he is doing Amber yeah I was going to actually say something similar to it Dave said is that the problem is I realized that I mean one there's the obvious obstacle that Sorkin doesn't like characters he sees them as obstacles to the plot but the other one is that yeah the actual trial is a comedy and Sorkin can't write comedy I I remember just like getting like you know 10 minutes in and I was like this should have won it should have been a miniseries because it's just you can't consolidate those events into a movie I really think it was a bad choice and two it should have been a comedy I mean what I would say instead of watching this

terrible movie is to just get the new transcript which is fucking hilarious he didn't include any of the cool funny stuff in there like you know Ginsburg was like reciting poetry they had like Judy Collins on there and like Carlo Guthrie yeah yeah they they called all of these oh god I think it was Freud's at one point said he wanted to call to the witness stand Karl Marx or Groucho Marx and Groucho Marx said that he supported them but that his last name might make the jury biased against the defendants like it's the the actual it was real life comedy and so Sorkin was um uniquely unprepared uh to tell the story yeah imagine reading all that and thinking ah fuck it I'm gonna give 15 minutes to Ramsey Clark yes that's that's the current theme and uh Ramsey Clark's

a boxer yeah the real the real factor of entertainment here is uh the guy behind the desk although I will say among many of the excellent performances Michael Keaton King uh and finally Felix your overall takes uh fans of the show and my overall struggles will know that I have gained 30 pounds during quarantine uh as a result of this weight gain I have uh gone on a brutal regimen of working out again it's back to my 2015 shape uh as a result of this I've been going to bed earlier and I actually fell asleep after watching about 15 minutes the 15 minutes I saw were true to form uh you know technically a good movie as is you know you know many of the takeout meals that I've enjoyed during this quarantine are technically

enjoyable the chemicals stimulate your brain in a more or less agreeable way yet they cause you to gain 30 pounds so that becomes a problem um uh instead I thought I would offer something else if this is a trial varied circuit I present myself as an expert witness not in the events of the trial I don't really care about this everyone knows what I think about the 60s it's a lost decade uh nothing really there wasn't really any great cultural accomplishments from there uh well I know there were only cultural accomplishments there were no political accomplishments they weren't good either the cultural accomplishments uh I think it's a lost decade I think you can sort of disregard anyone who's born in that decade or perhaps even

lived there and participated in a lot of the stuff uh you know this was a time where you could make the equivalent of $300,000 working as a lifeguard at a pool and you would use it to buy the loudest van possible so you and your friends could drive to a concert that lasted for a week uh where you like uh you know met a 14 year old old pair and that was okay back then because there was no morality yet because Nixon hadn't uh achieved victory yet um I I am instead an expert on the the types of uh people who are on trial because as many know I grew up in a neighborhood in Hyde Park where many of these retired radicals settled and uh shoved their annoying kids out into the world and their annoying kids later went on to fill the Obama White House and uh greatly

harmed this country with their agenda of SSRIs and condoms uh so if there are any cultural background questions about the types of people who were on trial and ended up selling out and then starting like a uh mindfulness start-up or something as many of these people did who went on to be my neighbors I will do my best to answer those questions as an expert witness as far as the movie uh again I saw I think about 10 percent of it uh I was not able to reconvene uh or call a quorum to my own viewing of it yeah can I just say that I went into this with uh I mean I also hate the 60s and the cultural turn was the worst thing to happen for class politics in America and in American history but I just want to go through and uh

read a text I sent to Josh Abbey Hoffman Ega maniacal aspiring celebrity man-child Jerry Rubin narcissistic counterculture hack who soon denounced activism and phase over a personal introspection and therapy culture becoming a stopbroker real estate investor multi-level marketing scammer before eventually cashing out in early as an early apple investor Renny Davis triumphalist dork who later got into eastern mysticism became a venture capitalist Dave Dellinger old money who got really into Henry David Thoreau at Yale and then Oxford Seminary Seminary where he trained to be a literally holier-than-thou pacifist before slumming it with hobos and then adventurism in Spain Lee Weiner won a ground show marks to appear at the

trial and explain satire then went on to work at the ADL and held process on behalf of quote Russian Jews suffering under the evil communist regime Tom Hayden Port Huron author and SDS Bohr was married to Jane Fonda for 17 years became a California assembly member and got cozy with the Clintons endorsing Hillary over bore Bernie in the primaries John Freunds however a chill chemistry dude opposed to war and pollution and just he actually got removed from his position because he was secretly working with other environmentalists chemists and saying yeah those things are poison and they considered a conflict of interest the weird chemistry dude that no one talked about most reliable thing what you basically response no you can say your response you basically described

what's going to happen to choppo by the way yeah yes yes yes i have been studying chemistry that is correct all right so let's get me i know please yeah i've been i've been the uh the witness mentioned me so i feel that first of all we are terrible with money so that will not happen to us we're gonna we're gonna i'm gonna bobby i'm gonna bobby seal josh right now but yeah go ahead i mostly wither i always think about it's the thing keeps everybody honest the awareness that you will eventually be dishonest um joe strummer's great line he who fucks nuns will later join the church yeah and uh i i celebrate some of these people for what they did in the moment not who they became but i wrote back i can't go with you and abby he ended his

days as an effective environmental activist while hiding from the cops on a phony bus yeah the the environment is doing great he did a great job he was just fighting for one area of the environment yeah all right i gotta i gotta grease up abby was one of the only ones that didn't sell out or become fraudulent but his theory that like uh politics is actually um a press campaign has been very bad for the left it's also been vindicated by the right who are now doing i mean the president is a right-wing abby hoffman to to but i would say the press would be less hostile to a right-wing agenda than any left agenda that would try to go up to exactly and again if the if the press had any real power um well hillary clinton would be president the focus on press and

pr rather than you know working class institutions or what they call the cultural turn because abby hoffman was really into marcusa brandice boy uh like um that is that was a wrong turn and he wasn't the only one that made it certainly here's my question should should should he have been aware of that at the time is the question you know it had to happen but the idea of thinking of him as like a some sort of romantic hero what he did is he discovered something that was new and and but the novelty of something doesn't necessarily mean uh that that's the way forward i mean it's it was just a very to a man with a hammer he should have been lennie bruce well well yeah and i i would say that it's it's part of the the tools that need to be used i think that if there is

going to be uh a takedown of the system it has to happen on all fronts and one of those fronts is what abby abby hoffman was talking about like you're going to have to confront the media for what it is and it's just a fucking clown show okay well let's let's let's let's let's dive into the film itself i mean in case you haven't figured it out yet uh what the trial of chicago seven was this was the uh basically a trial that resulted following the the riot that took place during the 1968 chicago democratic national convention in which sort of the sds and the yippies and like various sort of left and countercultural groups went to chicago to protest the nomination of pro vietnam war candidate hubert homefrey and like the thing about this

movie that you have to keep in mind at least as as far as like sorkin's presentation of it is the whole thing is just sort of this uh it's it's a presentation of like historical fantasia that is just all about like winking at you the audience to be about like this is actually about the present moment and it's about erin sorkin's like like personal beliefs about the present moment as filtered through the lens of like real historical events this was like the chicago seven originally chicago eight will get into the reasons why for that happened they were they were charged by nixon's justice department and his attorney general john mitchell for this like obscure law that involved crossing state lines for the purpose of inciting violence and they were put on this

like big you know this was like the like an oj trial equivalent for like the 1970s in america this was like this huge spectacular mega trial with like legal and actual celebrities involved in it and it lasted for innocent just like the other and it lasted something like 186 days so this was like like this this big mega trial that uh that you know like it brings together like all these elements of you know protest police brutality uh the state freedom of speech into this one like sort of mega mega judicial event and you know he fills it out i mean he fills out his cast with a number of really great actors and performances who like you know bring this tapestry of historical events but through this this veil of sorkin's a sort of semi-aware self image and an ideology of

how he presents himself and i think it is the real the real meaning of this movie is in between in sorkin's idea of the split between tom hayden and abby hoffman and i think it is very clear that sorkin identifies himself and his point of view with hayden rather than abby hoffman and we even remember back from the newsroom jeff newsroom harangues he has this whole dialogue with sam waterston about how like oh like you know what's the movement got hijacked by abby hoffman and jerry rubin you know no one took progressive politics seriously for the next you know till today and like that's the problem speech that same speech is in the movie yeah he doubles that yeah um yeah so i um in remembering this by the way this is a great book to have on the back of your toilet because you

can just flip to a section and and read to it um i'm a girl so i don't read on the toilet but i understand the genre um so this is production right so this is just the trial of the chicago's official transcript and i bought uh the new edition which has a forward by none other than erin sorkin love him i'm just gonna read a few parts it's not very long for once he's brief on a sunday morning in 2006 i was asked to come to steven spielberg's house already cool just name drop by the way politics i know steven spielberg that's the first sense second sentence spielberg is an exceedingly affable man who does his best to make those around him feel comfortable and worth his time it doesn't work on me i believe him to be a genius and the greatest filmmaker who's ever

lived mcdonald's is my favorite hamburger it's the greatest meal that has ever been prepared so uh he's asked him to make a trial a movie about the trial of chicago seven he told he said i told him i thought that was a great idea and there hadn't been a that there hadn't been a film about the chicago seven which is not true and that i'd love to write it i didn't tell him that the first thing i need to do was find out who the chicago seven were and what the hell he was talking about jesus christ why would you put this in print i know yeah why would you yeah yeah no i'll tell you why you want to know why there's only one reason to do it because you pulled it the fuck off and no one can take that away from yeah you made

a film so fucking brilliant it's only more amazing that you didn't know who they were yeah yeah i don't i don't even need to know things that's how good a writer i am that is how so he sort of talks about the bloody clash with the police the right occurred a few hundred ways for hubert humphrey he's being nominated and then he says by the way there's just like factual errors in his forward which is only a few paragraphs then he says hubert would go on to lose a very close election to richard nixon hubert got creamed crushed now the popular vote humphrey did uh was very close yeah yeah i was damn near one but yeah the electoral vote was 301 to 191 that's a pretty big detail because it proves that there's no reflection of the popular will in these institutions

should just say that like oh it was really close yeah like the popular vote the one that doesn't count like i mean the electoral college has made that not even look close so he turned to the draft and this was a long time ago and it just sort of sat on a shelf for a while and he said well now we need to bring it back because the movie wouldn't be about rides of 1968 or the trial of 1969 it would be about right now now it was 2018 in time for another election this one would be a referendum on an incumbent president who often rhapsodized at campaign rallies about the old days when they take it processors out here on the stretcher and he'd like to punch them right in the mouth beat the crap out of him so his whole thing is that like this is this moment is exactly

like uh like 1968 which is just not accurate not not at all it's just not accurate yeah um that those were also mad it was all that was all about the draft it was all about the war i mean there were other things going on but it was all about the war yeah it's about american empire anyway just the weirdest thing that even he would be like that he would be writing this word there are members of the chicago seven that are like still alive that could have written the forward by way yeah i i follow when he davis on uh facebook and he wrote some interesting stuff about the film which we can get into later if you want um he's a character played by uh virgil texas in here and everything i just love that i just love the fact that the the the the big

hollywood director is like we need our preeminent liberal mind in hollywood to get on this script and they bring him in he's like fuck i don't know what that is like that just sums up liberals in a nutshell and he did spielberg spielberg doing nothing about them it was just not his world at all how did he not know that he's the greatest filmmaker who has ever lived spielberg spielberg let me guess what he was doing at the time uh he was learning uh sacrifice rituals from molach he was he was like a busboy at bohemian grove it was when they were inducting it was like the first third of good fellas but for getting into the new world order well as uh as they point out like that the film does open like the very first thing you see is uh like news

footage of linden johnson uh escalating the the number of american troops he's going to send to vietnam and raising the number of like the draft quota so we very much begins with this this thread of the draft and then it gives you this kind of snappy sort of news footage historical montage of martin lucy it literally opens up with the baby boomer montage insert boomer montage here it just goes from it's also almost the same montage there's a terrific film i was gonna say if your listeners want to actually learn something about the trial of chicago seven uh there's a terrific movie called chicago ten um from a director named brett morgan a few years ago where it's footage from the era and then animated recreations of scenes oh yeah i saw that that was pretty good

yeah this work and uses so much of the structure of that doc for his film it's astonishing and it's actually the chicago ten refers to a chicago ten out of ten which is a uh four hundred four six to four out of ten really any other major urban center so yeah it because of this yeah the boomer montage of like you know the draft and martin lucy king coming out against the war then him getting assassinated in menfests then robert f kennedy giving his sort of like a plea for a piece following the king assassination and then the ambassador hotel boom like he's assassinated this all comes at a pretty clip pretty fast clip it's got some funky music and then we're introduced to the the various the various actors who are all sort of coalescing around the democratic

convention to come to protest it you've got uh tom hayden and the in virginal texas with sds you've got jerry rubin and abby hoffman i should say i shouldn't mention your tom hayden is played by that guy eddie redman um don't know why i gotta see him in every movie when will we as a country admit that we don't actually like eddie redmay every every two years we find a brit with a weird face and pretend that we like him it's horrible i gotta stop it they're sending their best i gotta say though i did not find him all that objectionable in this movie but just it's just eddie redman he's he's everywhere now then you've got the yippies abby hoffman of course played by sasha barron cohen you know one of our one of our generation's greatest tricksters and

pranksters and then you've got uh jeremy strong from succession as jerry rubin very i gotta say jeremy strong they are sending their best from the uk i like jerry jeremy strong very much although his portrayal of jerry rubin in this movie is he's sort of like a an oafish sort of stoner who's just a little bit he's he's he's basically the comic relief and like hoffman is sort of the he's funny but he's the smarter more serious one and and jerry rubin is sort of like the the the character of like the hippie who's like you know got a lead man yeah yeah he's not here man yeah it is like completely fabricated but i gotta say they have a fun they have a fun chemistry yeah yeah no no sasha cohen and jeremy strong are very good together like i said like i like

a lot of the performance in this movie you've got john carroll lynch the zodiac himself paying fat pacifist dave delinger you know king i was so happy when i saw him and then you've got uh yaya abdul matine playing bobby seal and uh the black panthers and they're all just like we all got to go to chicago uh then the movie jumps ahead until like you know nixon's been elected and then like you know the new the new regime is in town and we get to see nixon's justice department and you've got um uh john domen playing uh john michael john domen is actor renown for playing mega assholes like uh what's his name um ralls from the wire he's just sort of like a that guy is like the the standard go-to casting for sort of like institutionalized mega prick you know some guy

who's just sitting behind a desk who's just like these motherfuckers i can't wait to ram the dick of the state into these fucking berries yeah he took the job of remember the guy who played the dean incentive a woman that used to be that guy and then he aged out of it i'm gonna get this guy in my biopic he will play the head of the trojan corporation my major antagonist you know what he has he has um bloomberg uh energy we're just very good at being like i'm gonna say something specifically to make you uncomfortable because i'm a fucking shit he's really good at it so we got we got we got john michael brings in like this sort of the the young hotshot prosecutor from like the illinois state attorney general's office is like you're the guy here he's 33 years old and he's like you're gonna

you're gonna prosecute like this like this is our this is our fucking our showcase trial for like restoring law and order and manners and values and decency on like an american culture that had gone through the 60s and uh the prosecutor richard schultz is played by joseph gordon levitt and and sorkin's portrayal of this guy is right off my god this might be the worst thing in the whole film yeah it may be like so noxious it's it's so vile reading the transcript because you're like that guy was a bastard yeah i mean first of all journalists at the at the time described him as oppressive rage he was constant anger and rage yeah and and he's met like wild accusations that never made it into every character is totally wrong in this yeah my way also factually um uh

renny davis wrote about that he said um he's talking about tom faran the other guy uh who was gonna wanted to run for the governor of illinois and um he said apparently uh the cross examination in one of the cross examinations he ran the trial basically ended his career in politics he was an absolute prick um in the movie his character it's that's the one played by the other guy you remember and he writes in the movie his fictional character movie barely existed i have no idea why since he was the lead prosecutor and most colorful by far the movie makes you believe richard schultz was the government star i have no idea why well i'm like just just on its face the guy's 33 years old and being handpicked to prosecute like the marquis trial of the nicks

administration yeah i'm gonna bet chances are he's not a very fucking nice good guy dedicated to like yeah no no he got that job because he's the best damn it yeah yeah and i just think the even though michael is this disgusting uh political hack he can't deny talent when he sees it and here's the thing here's the here's the thing with sarkin's portrayal of of schultz who's like who's who's you know i mean he makes john michael to be like a complete prick and like a vindictive psycho who's really only prosecuting this case because ramsey clark linden johnson's attorney general waited to like an hour before he swore was sworn in to resign as attorney general and he like he has a huge chip on his shoulder about that about like the the breach of decorum

and disrespect to me and he's like i'm i'm gonna ram i'm gonna take that i'm gonna take these like sort of uh these golden boys these college kids these subversives and i'm just gonna ram it down their throat to fuck with them and also the outgoing ag who declined to prosecute them and here's the thing with the richard schultz character is like he's willing to make nixon's justice department look like the absolute fucking monsters that they were but the guy who's like been given the authority to prosecute this case has to be held out as sort of like yeah he's on the other side but is basically like a decent good person who just wants to uphold the law because in sorkin's world there can never just be like two sides if you're dealing with american institutions

there can never just be like it's a trial so obviously like there has to be two sides but like the prosecutor in this case he has to hold out he has to create like a little paddock for him to exist as like okay like i'm playing my part here and like maybe i don't agree with their politics but like i i still stand for the law and i'm basically a good decent person and the one thing we can agree on and this is a spoiler it's this is the climax of the movie we all want to hug and kiss the troops okay that's right i want to i want to get to that i want to build up to that moment i want to build up to that moment the schultz thing is also sorkin found a moment in the real story that he wanted to go back and reconstruct who schultz was to make it make

sense to him and that's when ruben and hoffman bump into each other bump into schultz in the park and that actually happened and and schultz actually did say i might have been on your side back in college because in sorkin's mind that can't happen if people hate each other if they're having a conversation and one guy says i used to be you in his mind he can't comprehend how a guy saying i used to be fucking idiots like you fucking pieces of shit and i've come around and i know how things are now his mind can't handle that those guys in the park bumped into each other and they fucking hated each other and they walked away hating each other and nothing happened other than that but in his mind he reconstructed the whole thing the whole entire character to fit

into that moment wild and so like i think i think the movie is is smart enough to just jump immediately into the trial and tell the story of like what happened during the convention largely in sort of flashbacks that come out through testimony i think it's like it's a pretty good way to frame it and like keep the action going along so there's not some big build up to what like most of the movie is going to be which is in a courtroom so i mean and then we get uh the the lawyers for the defense is uh bill consular played by mark rylance another and a steven spielberg favorite as of as a recent note um but a very good actor and he's sort of the uh the crusading you know first amendment advocate who's going to be defending the chicago seven and then right off the bat

there's this this whole issue about bobby seal because bobby seal had his own attorney who was going to represent him in this trial who had explosive gallbladder surgery like the day before or like prior to the trial and the judge did not issue a like a stay he did not delay the trial he went forward without it without one of the main defendants being able to have counsel and then he wouldn't let him represent himself so it was this whole fucking like already off the bat like and the judge i gotta say judge hoffman not abby hoffman played by frank langella is maybe the best character in the movie i love frank langella and apparently this movie soft sells what a prick this guy was too which is saying a lot because he comes across like a complete asshole

in the movie and basically senile like he he doesn't know anyone's name he doesn't know what's going on he's like this ordinary sundowning asshole well i i just the thing about the judges is he also after seals uh attorney got had gallbladder issues he then had four pretrial attorneys who worked on the case and were now gone arrested one arrested in california and brought back in chains another flew in it was arrested at the airport because he was demanding that they be seals attorney and none of them had been hired to be seals attorney so he he was a fucking monster from day one on levels that are are just extraordinary and the appellate court reversed that decision within two weeks and had all the attorneys out of jail yeah so

there's there's too much shit in this maybe to have made a movie i really think that that's part of it like you don't even get like what a bastard you don't get i mean like you get when you know they gag bobby seal but like some of the stuff too that is just i think really essential like charles gary is a major plot like he defended like he was a major civil rights attorney and a lot of these civil rights attorneys had their own kind of like that was a whole other kind of movement um or these like landmark civil rights cases and he would have been like worth mentioning because he he was the he was the black panthers lawyer um but like this is a really interesting person he defended the people's temple like he defended chose down like all of these

people are so interesting and they're so flattened because you just can't fit all of this shit in a movie yeah and you can't you can't justify this doing it as a film because i really think you have to you have to you have to know each character and you have to build up to each character before you get to the trial and there's no yeah so you just seven characters we know that from the beginning so i mean like whether it's the whether it's the issue that bobby seal was being put on trial without legal representation and like there's this weird thing where uh frank langella as judge hoffman keeps telling a counselor like why don't you just represent him you're sitting next to him and he's like because i'm not his attorney he hasn't hired me and he's just like like i said

in this sundowning like angry old man way is just keeps being frustrated why why why won't like the other attorneys just take on bobby seal and they're like well because he hasn't hired us this is well and we can't represent can't represent him and also because they the panthers already had a very dedicated specialist lawyer so bobby seal didn't didn't want him and i think the judge i think judge hoffman really wanted to be able to associate the entirety of the left with um like the militia wing of of certain black panther chapters like he needed to tack them together he needed to put them all in one group yeah there's a moment in the movie where bobby seal says like i was in chicago for four hours i've never met any of these people i wasn't ever in the same room with them and like

i'm only here because the prosecution wants the image of like this scary black man to like in the minds of america and by the way yeah one more thing here one more thing here about sort of mood and ambiance like it's true that panthers showed up into the courtroom the panthers didn't always look like they were dressed for a photo op pictures angela davis wore like brightly colored mini skirts to her truck they weren't all dressed they weren't dressed like fucking beatnik militia members 24 7 they wore normal clothes it wasn't constant berets and black shades and doors but he stacked i think the numbers of black panthers that were actually in the in the um what do they call it the theater the audience the gallery it was hard to get in actually people

waited all night to get in it wasn't an easy yeah it was like a new apple yeah also to your point they they didn't uh fred hampton was there but he never talked to bobby seal they use sign language use sign language to communicate anyway that just everything is so mischaracterized over and over again well there's a there's a fun there's a fun moment with the black panthers i love because it's so sorkin uh we do this they got our show every week the misogyny rundown sorkin loves nothing he loves more than if you need to explain something to the audience he has a character explain it to a woman who would naturally already know this stuff and there's a scene with bobby seal explaining the basics of the black panthers to a female black panther at black panther

headquarters that is just fucking jaw dropping it's a walk and talk it's a black panther it is a black and panther walk and talk where he he and i hate this term but sorkin sorkin owns it i really hate this fucking term but when you watch sorkin you have to he mansplains to her it's fucking so like you know as the film and the trial progresses like the defendants their attorneys they just they keep racking up these contempt charges as they keep running you know smashing their head into the obvious show trial that's being run that they're being forced to participate in i mean they strike a number of sympathetic jurors i mean i think that's a i think that's a bad framing because i don't think they were smashing their head into it they were they were celebrating its

stupidity like they were everything they did was to point out how it was a political trial and how fucking stupid the trial was and they they were all like we're going to jail anyway so let's make this the farce that it is that's something that's big really i would say that that's true but i think one of the reasons they felt so safe is because at least uh hoffman was pretty secure that i think he's like no this will get turned over and appeal so yeah they all thought that look if we if we can get out like fuck it let's just make this uh the circus that it is and that's the other weird thing is that like they're so much cooler and funnier and more likeable in the transcripts than they are in this movie abby hoffman is not a self-important like dickhead like he was on the stand in the

movie he's like funny and charming and really charismatic and you know uh not all of them even testified uh delinger wasn't just like this gentle giant he was cool he was badass yeah hustler by the way was not like a settled down fellas he was fucking wild he was a wild man all of this stuff was all of the bad people are not portrayed bad guys are not portrayed as bad as they actually were and all of the defendants and their lawyers are not as portrayed as like cool and likable as they actually were in that moment i read an entire chapter in a book that was just about laughter in the courtroom because there was so much fucking funny shit going on funny abby hoffman was fucking funny and you know what it's same thing too with tom hayden

tom hayden wasn't the square they made him out to be everyone was a thousand times more complicated and and and in and in like i said like the the hinge of this movie in sarkin's mind is this split between tom hayden and abby hoffman which he reads into like all sort of interleft progressive democratic debates of the current moment and he clearly thinks hayden was the correct one because hayden was like had a got a haircut he wore a suit and tie he respected the institution of the court and the police and the american military and he didn't want everything to just be like a circus to show the absurdity of the trial itself like in in sort through through sarkin's words hayden is portrayed as a guy who was like hey we're on trial for our lives here this is serious and we need to

act like it even though like every everything around them in the legal proceedings is being shown to be an absolute farce uh there is i i did like this this one moment where they start getting into like what actually happened during the uh uh during the riots that happened in in chicago and there's this whole thing where uh these these these cops catch tom hayden letting the errors out of an undercover cop car and the reason he did that is because like renny davis's in-laws would get mad at him if they knew undercover cops are trailing him and he was like all right you you he's like his girlfriend's parents not even in law oh yeah his girlfriend's parents would get mad at him so then he wanted to arrest him he gets arrested and that kicks off this whole like confrontation with the

police in the first like major incident of violence sorry the real renny davis wants everyone to know that never fucking happened this situation with his girlfriend is bullshit yeah they really make him look to be like hey the revolution can wait guys i got to get home in time for dinner it's seven o'clock yeah yeah they they made the squares look actually like way more square and they made the counterculture figures look like insane idiots like yeah like like renny davis like and like we'll get to this like the real the real climax of this movie that made me want to blow my brains out oh my god this is like the chekov's gun of the movie is that renny davis like as soon as the trial starts keeps a journal where he records the name of every american soldier who's been killed in vietnam

since the trial started and like you know like this is like you know that gun is going to go off in the third act and sorkin uses it in the most just a propellant way imaginable but like the real renny davis like traveled to north vietnam prior to this trial like he was a he was a pretty serious guy and crucially during the trial was recording the names not just of the americans who were killed in vietnam but every vietnamese person as well and that is a huge element that where sorkin just cannot abide or like he cannot metabolize that into his worldview because like there are so many moments during the during this movie where it just like it comes to a screeching halt and sorkin just wants to remind you this is what this all is really about i.e. the americans who are suffering

because of the vietnam war another thing about renny davis is he's the one who got really into eastern mysticism and one of the ones who became a venture capitalist but that's not so much uh an indictment of like left politics were inherently doomed to go that way uh or there was an inherent reaction he his dad was a chief of staff for the council of economic advisors to harry truman like wow he was just going back home like that's yeah i don't i don't think that uh i think the thing about uh the vietnamese names and the vietcong names on that list is i don't think that he believes that a likable character can list about vietnamese vietnamese like he he literally in his mind doesn't see how those two things are possible and he thinks that if you write a character that

way that they're they're villains and he can't comprehend that someone just against war and life in general is a good person that's not that's that's that's sorkin's imperial politics the crime isn't the empire the the misuse of resources isn't the forever war or in this case the specific massive war it's that you have this great beautiful institution that all of america is perfect and especially the military and the worst thing you can do is misuse it and not take the lives of the military not not have them die with some plan if it's with a plan if it's for the expansion of our institutions and our global influence it's fine but incompetence and uh someone who you know came to conduct the war not coming up through meritocracy that's the greatest crime not just the concept of

war he's not against that at all and he loves the troops like nobody's business because there's that remember he throws in that line can you imagine the real william cuntler date donger was a was a conscious objector in world war two went to jail for it and it comes up with a bit of dialogue and cuntler goes even i want to punch you in the face for that it's like that's fucking insane that's just sorkin talking we have a clip we play in the show all the time from this interview where Aaron sorkin genuinely believes that until donald trump became president when the american troops came into other countries people went thank god here come the america that is that this is what i've said about sorkin is that you can't analogize analogize him with other screenwriters or directors

or anything from this era erin sorkin is like a pro imperial victorian playwright like he is one of the most pro imperial worldviews out of uh almost anyone in hollywood is fucking filled with these people but sorkin may be the most explicit in it well he's so effective at it and this gets to josh's point because i don't think he's even aware of it and if you were more conscious of like his propagandizing it wouldn't be such good propaganda and that's what's sort of like his genius and i want to talk about actually another really funny and i would say probably one of the most evil elements of this movie next to the portrayal of richard schultz is the introduction of this fbi honeypot undercover god who's just this babe who like buys a drink for jerry rubin in a bar and

uses a pickup line that a sorkin woman has also mouth on the west wing it's about why is a terrible joke it's a terrible joke about how we know why is one egg enough in france because one egg is enough or whatever and then jerry rubin is like wow lady you're blowing my mind with this crazy man someone remembers high school french or even took it for that matter can i give you can you give me a groovy hand job this is how most relationships this is how most relationships started in the 60s so a man was brutally incapacitated by his diet of lsd and stems and then uh any any any woman would tell a nine year old's joke and he would just calm in his pants she's always reading like uh like uh bazooka joe wrappers to him and he's just getting a

giant boner whoa i've never felt like i've felt with you with anyone it's like you make me laugh let's have four kids named zander i hope they work in the obama white house one day they're going to attend university chicago lab schools in hide park where we're gonna live so i want to argue for sorkin he has evolved because if he had written this character if this was an episode of the west wing she'd be an unrepentant monster she yes or you know all this stuff but in this one she is presented kind of the same way joe's up where the levitt is because at the end it's like you realize she really does she's got a heart of gold she's doing her job she's kind of rooting for these guys but she's got to do what she's got to do so like that makes me realize i can't wait

for the next sorkin movie which is the jonathan pollard trial well okay so it's like she she's this babe who uh goes undercover and like insinuates herself into the leadership of uh like these protests and then testifies against them at their trial and is made out to be like a sympathetic character and then even after like he knows that you know he's been you know honey potted by this fucking undercover fed jerry rubens like says to richard solz when they meet in the park he's like how could you do that to me man we had a thing we had a connection and she should ask about me man and not like hey i hope she fucking dies in the line of duty they really they really made him a punchline and like yeah like you know whatever jerry ruben became a bastard but he was a smart person

like he was yeah i mean i will say one of the major issues like abby hoffman later in life developed he had basically like really crippling manic depression and that but there was no like sort of uh record of it in his early life so it's possible that his idiopathic late onset but that's pretty rare on czar it was maybe well he got hit in the head no he ran into night sticks over and over again even after he was unconscious so maybe a cte but also like it's true you'll never find a bigger advocate for acid than me but when they first got it they didn't know you could take too much um it's not an everyday drug i mean it's not it's not it's like cocaine or heroin or marijuana honestly the first time i took it i didn't know you could take too much either

but i know here here's an important point though portrayal of of of them being on drugs is like not even negative in the correct way it's chichen chong but i also want to say about about jeremy strong's did you guys read that thing that came out a couple weeks ago about this film where jeremy strong talks or iran sorkin talks about jeremy strong's method and i was expecting this amazing performance out of him especially after reading this he goes jeremy begged me to spray him with real tear gas i need to know if it really hurts turns out it does they deserve each other they deserve each other however still very funny guy but as the as to the fbi honeypot lady um she she is a babe and like she totally seduces jerry rubin and she's like right there with them during the

police riot when it happens but here's like one of the few actually important lessons for the contemporary politics if you are a leftist or socialist man of any kind and an attractive woman is showing any interest in you whatsoever she is 1000 percent an undercover agent so do not trust it do not respond to their do not go on a date with her do not tell her anything if a woman is showing you any attention she is a fed 1000 percent write it in blood yeah as if all of these guys weren't like eyeball deep and pussy i know right i mean hoffman got a hoffman that's one thing reading about hoffman and that guy got laid more than anybody but often often looked like dog shit i'm into i'm into it but you know i like a unibrow and a harry back so isn't the worst thing

about the fbi agent is how she's always in the shit right in the protest and keeps saying let's not do that people will get hurt yeah yeah she's the one asian provocateur who wants everyone to simmer down yeah she keeps forgetting what she's supposed to do at her job so what is she doing well because they want because erin sorkin he wants to tailor the story of this particular abuse of power as narrowly as possible he wants it to be about the specific actions of bad political figures john mitchell acting out of personal peak not because of a coordinated government-wide persecution of the left in this country that it went from like operation fucking from like co-intel pro and fucking operation chaos and shit i mean we know what they were doing but no it

wasn't that it was just these bad people who were voted in are doing are using our wonderful institutions for ill intent but the people within those institutions they actually are servants of the people broadly and don't and just just do their jobs which means that they can never be corrupted fully which means that the system itself is never to be questioned yeah erin sorkin uh things that i was just doing my job is actually the best defense for not yeah i i would the fbi character i love her like i obviously didn't make you feel like she is your ideal woman though she really is yeah uh yeah but she's a waspy blonde who's like also a federal i saw a clip of this and i've already um i figured out ways to impress her uh similar to how other men like me impress jody

foster just kidding but uh no she um that idea for a character that is the most comedically ripe thing erin sorkin has ever come up with a deep state amelia bedelia who like who like doesn't know what an agent provocateur does and like there should be a sequel to just her where she's she's taking part in gladio and the years have led but she's just like she's publishing like centrist uh centrist opinion pieces in italian newspapers about how the communists and and everyone need to come together to tamp her down the budget deficit and she thinks she's doing gladio everyone has to clean up her mess but she's the best at she's the best at like uh i don't know uh whatever she does in the movie fucking some guy

uh felix felix i i wish i i mean if you had gotten to this point in the movie there there isn't there is one segment that i did found very humorous and i thought was right up your alley it's the sequence where they show all of the undercover informants who were like infiltrated these protests and were like sort of ingratiating themselves and like they're all these guys like this montage of them in their hippie costume and then on the stand and it's so funny because they are all like pollock chicago cops and they're like this guy approaches you and he's like hey man i can get you grass and ludes and they're like cool what's your name and he's like uh uh star child presbylusky bousker that would be the chicago bb that oh man i would like just a guy with like

a haircut like a tin of spam coming up being like hey hey i got a really grew i got a really groovy babe down there do you want it you want to come to my jam session i played a tuba matt matt did you pick up on the uh the one uh north country midwestern accent that they jammed in there the court reporter she had she only had a few lines but there was this moment where she's like babby seal jen france france france i i sweetheart i don't know how you say that so i mean as the trial goes on like here's another thing that that circan underplays and that is the treatment of bobby seal and his famous gagging by judge hoffman oh yeah in reality that went on for three days of the of the court proceedings he was fully public torture and gagged in courtroom for three days and in the

movie he's gagged and then immediately like he has declared a mistrial and separated from the chicago seven but like there's just one moment but like there was three full days of like you know courtroom sketch artist drawing him fucking shackled and gagged as he has denied any representation in this trial whatsoever so like at that point like you know they like he he is sort of neatly severed um after judge hoffman is just like in all my years i've never been declared to be discriminated against an african-american and then consular is just like consider me the first and then uh like his co-counsel felix who was played by uh chuck roads his friend ira on billions he shows up there and he's just like i second that your honor we have two i have a motion and a

motion to sponsor that the judge is a racist so that happens and then also like prior to wait wait wait hang on no no this is this is this is where my head popped off the shoulders because they do something and this goes to everything about sorkin why he's stupid and not intentional do you remember in the film bobby seal is bereft he's devastated because they've just found out that his good friend fred hampton has been assassinated yeah that happened three months after bobby seal was chained in the courtroom yeah he conflates the events and in in sorkin's mind what he's doing is he's giving the scene more emotional power so you're like you're already completely on bobby seal's side and then when you know when he's he's devastated by the loss of

his friend and then this evil judge changed him up and you're like oh what a bastard but what it ends up coming across as is that bobby seal's behavior is somehow more extreme than it's been up till now because he's so devastated by the death of his friend and he ends up undercutting bobby seal he ends up undercutting the argument that the judge is just a prick and it just it just it's so fucking awful because it's like i think it's uh august that he gets chained up or no it's october that he gets chained up and bob fred hampton's killed in december and he just uses this to lie about everything that fucking happens on that death well he has to make his objections uh you know uh sympathetic and that's only he's only allowed to be mad if

it's because he's grieving right yeah exactly yeah exactly it's like anything he can't be disangry at the system he can't be disangry at the court it's gotta be because he's exactly i'm like by fucking with the chronology he like he gives you what he thinks is like a very cinematic moment where bobby seal stands up and he's like fred hampton was assassinated last night you asked the coroner about like the first shot being fired into his shoulder he couldn't even lift it a gun and then they're like an order order a gag you but like if anything like he's what he's doing there is undercutting the actual like how evil and grotesque just you know for lack of word the banality of this proceeding is where like how easily and over like relatively nothing that

this guy could be literally gagged in a court of law he's also undercutting the assassination of fred hampton who was drugged by probably the woman he was sleeping with or his friend one or the other we don't know but he was fucking drugged and then and then killed by chicago police using the information from the fbi it's a government assassination he undercuts two things at once because he's a fucking shit writer and you know what even if you were like if you didn't know how to tell that story don't show it like if you if you're like i'm not gonna infer exactly what happened to fred hampton you know what don't show it how about don't include it at all because it didn't happen until after bobby seal was out of the trial yeah you could very easily

made that film without fred hampton being in it too right yeah but he wanted to get all the all the sort of like 60s all stars in there you know but he didn't but he didn't yeah he could have had john bayer all right so yeah okay there's john bayer's gradually marks uh okay so country joe fish it was great because he just kept saying yes my name is country that's right so uh okay there's another big thing where the ramsey clark issue comes back with a vengeance and then like the like counselor is like big like aha moment is when he realizes that like oh my god the outgoing attorney general maybe has some relevant testimony as to this case then he hello hello muhler right this is muhler right yeah yeah exactly yeah like and you know like and the fact that sorkin makes

like uh like the lion of like the lbj administration like a big savior in this movie is just yeah like you're right that is like kind of a muhler thing because let's be honest i mean lbj started the fucking vietnam war i don't like well yeah his attorney general was so much fucking better than john mitchell and then he shows up in the guise of of course god michael keaton you know who's he's you know he's doing the keaton thing you know it's always a pleasure uh he they go to interview him and like the nixon justice department guys are there and it's leading to this moment where he's just like yeah i wanted them in the room so that i can tell you i'm testifying in your case and they're like but sir it's illegal and then he's like then arrest me or get the fuck out of my house you know

it's like a very good like you know big stirring moment and then they like they let ramsey clark testify voir dire without the jury and then basically strike it from the record but what he testifies to is that his justice department looked into this and declined to prosecute any of them because they found that the chicago police started the riot which is an important in a very important detail when people talk about the chicago riots this was not a this was a police riot all of the violence was instigated by the chicago police department and there is one scene where like they they show like the shit really going down it's brief but i think to his credit sorkin does show just how brutal and nasty these police officers were like you know at hitting women with batons

just like really savage violence hold on but but wait he he he has to use rape in the middle of a protest to make a point about how crazy things are i mean that i'm the shit he did with the protest was just equally insane really weird yeah yeah and also that's a tell he doesn't put it into like is it some frat boys try to do an attempted rape of this like a hippie woman who's waving an american flag and again like many of things in this movie i don't know how historically accurate that yeah a public rape in the middle of a riot which scene i don't know i'm talking about most rapists most rapists like to rape when there's a hundred people running around them crowd yeah there's performer personalities but he needs to raise the stakes because in sorkin's mind what the cops

what the cops are doing isn't that bad you're right so if you feel the rape in now yeah the the situation on the hill where they where the cops surround the statue of the the horse soldier whatever the guy is you know what happened the opposite it's things like this i don't understand what the fuck he's doing the kids ran up and took the hill and then the cops came and said get off the statue and then there was a whole standoff and they ended up going up and beating people and pulling them down and just by switching that little thing he changes the power dynamic of what's happening and there's no reason you're right i mean i just like i was just thinking like uh hunter s thompson was famously at the chicago conventions and saw it all go down and his written

accounts of it he says that he saw in the course of one night five or six beatings of people by the chicago police department that made anything he witnessed the hell's angels do while writing that book pale in comparison he said he saw like the most savage acts of violence that he's ever witnessed and he said that what the chicago police department did just beating people on the ground with their boots with batons with whatever was at their hands made the hell's angels look like basically the boy scouts like he said like he had never seen the hell's angels beat anyone as badly as the chicago police did that night and i think that and i think that's greatly missing from the movie and i also think how this is a a way he also like the the fact that the system is on trial

for the protesters is completely lost the first defendant for the for the defense was a guy who worked in a candy candy factory and he he happened to photograph the cops beating people while they were laying on the ground and so he was the first witness and he got fired from the next day from his job and then the defense was like okay we clearly can't have actual witnesses on and then they just went bat shit with it but it's stuff like that that's missing that like the brutality of cops beating someone and then a guy doing the right thing and getting fired like that's just all gone from this story in sorkin's world and uh there's there's another there's another moment i found funny where it was like of the night of the actual convention like the night time riot

not the hill one where they get a recording of tom hayden at the band shell basically instigating a riot and i thought what was so funny about that is like up to up to that point hayden is like mr respectability and like mr hey like you know let's hey the cops have to do their job too and then he sees his friend renny davis get beat up and just grabs a mic and is like blood we want blood he wants his end and then like it's very important though because as sorkin views hayden as the stand-in for him that moment becomes all about the responsibility of a writer and omitting certain key pronouns and it's like hayden's problem was that he didn't he didn't write it carefully enough because hayden's defense there he's like he had some line about like if blood is gonna spill

then it should spill all over the city is that he said the line was supposed to be then our blood should spill all over the city but he comes across like fucking conan the barbarian like bang for the fucking death of these cops and sorkin sorkin's mind he was just like you can't drop a single syllable of my dialogue much less the word yeah it would be like missing a note in a symphony no and like and like that moment there being such a key moment in the movie is like sorkin being like you know what really matters there is the real the real power in our society it's writers and it's writers have to be very careful yes to be very careful with their words he got that i believe he hung out with hayden i think he's the only person he ever talked to and hayden

told him hayden told him this and hayden told him that and there's this interview with sorkin where he talks about the great thing when you're writing something like this is to have a secret that like nobody else and he knew the one thing he had while he was working on this that other people have not talked about this he knew tom hayden had neglected to say our not about that was going to be the seat yeah i was wondering why all the characters when they hear that it's everything it's everything oh my god well and it provided it was like they were living on a different universe if he had said our blood as if the crowd would have gone oh okay and it provided for the sake of um of uh abbey hoffman uh telling uh tom hayden that i've always respected you which is all

erin sorkin once it's all he wants so all he wants so like it's always this this climax it's always this climax of the movie that because they have uh you know an audio recording of tom hayden basically instigating a riot he can't testify on their behalf he was going to be their golden boy because he was the most like respectable sort of commonsense member of the of the group and but he wasn't in the trial he wasn't god fuck he what he just wasn't he was fucking he was getting yelled at for laying on the table and shit like what the fuck yeah okay wait a second he wasn't he wasn't like the square button up he was a serious revolutionary and also there wasn't like this constant animosity between him and abbey hoffman like they disagreed on tactics and the way

to approach the top the trial but it wasn't this like it wasn't daddy issues it wasn't sorkin's daddy issue i gotta i gotta go back a little in time there's there's one moment in this movie i wonder if you guys like it's when hayden and consular go to ramsey clark's house to interview him and when they go inside ramsey clark's uh african-american lady who is his like uh sort of like housekeeper um says to tom hayden um i read in the newspaper that you were the only one who stood for the judge after what he did to bobby which the movie shows him like they all decided they pass a note in the court to say don't stand for jh and when he leaves the court tom hayden sort of reflexively stands and like looks like he's the asshole and i swear to god

i was so expecting in that moment of dialogue where hayden goes sorry it was just a reflex i was so expecting sorkin to make the housekeeper say you were right to do that yeah yeah it's good to have respect for the law it also wasn't just an episode it was also just what wasn't just him it was also thorns but go ahead no we just did an episode of the west wing where uh Bartlett talking to lily tomlin's character and she had written something about how somebody should poison uh the president and and he's like this is why i'm hiring you she goes what he says yes because you call me the president you know the the the only thing i mean who else am i trying to poison the the only thing that make can make sorkin uh come is watching the videotape of clinton

saying it depends on what the definition of is is so but he loves respect yeah well and he loves words they make hayden out to be way more like as we said way more of a square than he really was and like way less radical than he than he was because i mean like it gets this thing we're like okay hoffman is going to have to be the guy to testify rather than hayden and like sort of like the pre climax of the movie is when hoffman says to hayden why what is it about me that you don't like and he's like i'm tired of me i'm tired of answering that question you know i wish i didn't have to answer it and he's like there's no cameras here it's just me and you one time what is it about me that you don't like and then tom hayden's like okay put you know put have a sip of coffee and strap

in bucko because i'm going to spit some epic fucking truth at you and what he says is you know it's the newsroom west wing line of like for the next 50 years when anyone thinks about progressive politics they're going to think about you smoking dope and like you know having sex and just being like a spoiled petulant baby and they're not going to think about you know justice or equality when they go to the fucking polling place when they go to vote and like you know you're going to hamstring us and like that that is that is sorkin's like whole like that's him like just putting his fucking like entire weight down on the audience just being like hey i'm talking to you here talking to you dum-dums watching netflix right now all you millennials out there this is for you uh so another

thing is that hoffman is pretty vocal about saying that speeches are archaic in a thing of the past like that's really his his idea of how this all works now and he's that's why sorkin hates that's why he's doing the providence art so he is he is telling with his existence and his philosophy he's telling sorkin as sorkin reads whatever he reads about him to fuck off every single time he reads about hoppin hoppin is saying fuck you erin sorkin this is a grudge movie it's another grudge movie by sorkin which is all he does his entire his entire body of work is based on grudges and settling grudges and and someday he'll someday he will do a script and there will be podcasters in there being dicks to him i fucking guarantee it and how wrongly i guarantee i can't

wait i can't wait yeah but that's really what it is he doesn't believe in the speech and sorkin only believes in the speech that's all he believes in and also cool funny guy that people liked and made sorkin look like the fucking talentless square that he was in college or whatever yeah and it's funny because uh there's a scene with bobby seal where he's like you know um in in jail talking to hated and counselor and he's like you and you and you know we're different you and hoppin got into this because you hate your dad because he called you a fag or whatever it's all daddy issues for you for me it's life or death and like that's sorkin saying like oh it's daddy issues for me too but i'm acknowledging that for uh black people don't have a parental psychology they're they're better

they're better than i don't have parents they're better than i am well he is woke now and he has he has right you know because he's done to kill a mockingbird and he's now so it's all daddy issues though i thought you know i don't expect people to like focus on their identity when they write i think that's like oftentimes especially in our current moment pretty fucking cheap but the glaring absence of the intra-jewish animosity that was a feature of that trial and i knew it going in i'm like they are not going to show abby hoffen screaming that judge hoffen was a nazi saying that he would have helped hitler he called him a shonda yeah shonda for the goyim oh yes even worse a shonda for the goyim which is like uh uh it like the the exact translation is like a

Jew for the for the Gentiles but like meaning that like you uh justify their anti-semitism it's the nastiest fucking meanest most it like it it's a really intimate animosity he's not like aloof he left out all the funny shit yeah he left out all the cool shit he left out all the really intense stuff words like you would have helped hitler that is an insane thing to say and a judge one of his um uh contempt charges was literally listed as cursing the judge in yiddish but amber i think i think to davis point about like writing down the names of vietnamese people who've been killed by our military in this war he like he he doesn't like abby hoffen and looks at this movie as sort of like a repudiation of hoffen and i.e. people like him people who are rude and

funny and popular but you know not serious um but at the same time if he'd included the things where hoffen was accusing the judge of like basically being you know a cop like he would have like helped hitler during the holocaust then like that would have made abby hoffen beyond the pale and he can't have that he can't really have people like he would be too uncomfortable with that like you know writing him as a character in a way that would put him beyond the pale of erin sorkin's respectability or like you know his vision of morality and like he would that would have made abby hoffen like too unlikable in his mind to include that detail in the script and it would have made their interaction too intimate for sorkin to be able to write i also think that he

doesn't know what to do with uh the fact that the the the seven are putting the system on trial and exposing the system for how fucking crazy and stupid it is and so he doesn't know what to do with if a character calls the judge hitler well that just frazzles his mind because nothing happened the judge just went well you're in contempt and then they were like okay hitler like it just kept going on and so in his mind he doesn't know what to do with that because no that's our system that's our courtroom he can't he just his brain frazzles well okay well and this gets like the climax of the movie where hoffen himself takes the stand and is cross-examined by sheltz and like this is this like this is where sorkin is like gets like flex his pure sorkinism like the soaring majestic

inspirational dialogue some of it is from the actual transcript but it's his deviations from it that reveal the hollow misery at the core of this movie because the whole thing is talking about like you're saying like the actual trial was about them putting the system on trial and making this trial itself an absurdity to show how absurd it was that they're being prosecuted and how unethically the prosecution was acting so when it really comes down to it what does abby hoffen say on the stand to defend himself this is the worst he says he says our in our the institutions of american democracy are wonderful things they're just currently populated by some very terrible people after showing you for the previous two hours that our american institutions are awful

miserable evil things that can like crush you like a fucking bug if they no matter no matter what fucking legal precedent or evidence or any of that shit it would seem to suggest that our legal system is pretty much shit but then no he's got to bring it back the last moment and then like sheltz says to him how would you peacefully overthrow your government and hoffen says we do it every four years uh oh yeah voting is a peaceful revolution convention because they were going to dominate a guy who is in favor of continuing the vietnam war to run against another guy who was in favor of continuing the vietnam war i don't get your point it didn't even matter because there's an electoral college so like it's all around anyway yeah he but that good does that go

to his how incurious he is about these actual people or is he just impervious to allowing thoughts from other ideologies into his fucking skull no this is this is that fucking liberal that we all know that you all deal with constantly who begins every fucking argument with you like look man i'm as progressive as you are yeah so i've been like and that sums out and then it gets to like the ur climax like the moment in which my brain completely checked out of this movie is at sentencing judge hoffman gives tom hayden the opportunity to make a statement before he issues sentencing he says now be brief be respectful and be remorseful and i will show you know take that in consideration during sentencing wait you miss something by the way can i just say you missed

a huge movement in this film delinger oh punching a guy oh right yeah delinger for people who don't know delinger is a socialist he is a pretty badass pacifist he he he went to jail in world war two for not fighting in the war he is a fucking to the bone pacifist and in the courtroom he gets so mad that he punches a bailiff yeah it's even better than getting your rocks off with a girl we're riding a motorcycle it's the craziest so they made him into such a polyana he was not a polyana he was just like i'm not going to war i'm going to jail instead of going to war he was cool and tough although i will say i think uh world war two was justified just going out that's fair that's fair you started a whole thing online but whatever people are going to flip out uh but

but he he just undermined everything his his essential is essential core of pacifism by being like they pushed him too far and he just cold cock one of the bailiffs like it would be like erin sarkin making a movie about malcolm axon and then showing him sitting there eating pork you know it's good that's really good you got to try these ribs man falling off the bone just but at the end of the day he doesn't care because he just wants that moment on screen like that's his idea of how unjustified this trial was as opposed to having these guy guys called the judge hitler and and just they had food all over the fucking table all the time they were they were eating seeds and shit like it was just fucking chaos so getting to like the very very end of the

movie is tom hayden is given a chance to like make a statement before sentencing and what does he do he brings out that journal that renny davis is writing of just only the american war dead and he's like uh uh private david colman 19 like and he just starts reading all 5000 names of the americans who have been killed in the war and then what do his co-defendants do they stand in reverent solemn rec like basically hand over heart recognition as as the judge paid right thank you all is like order order i demand that you stop respecting our honored fallen war dead stop being patriotic i'm holding you in contempt and then the fbi lady stands richard shalt stands and his co-counsel is just like hey buddy what are you doing asshole and he's just like i'm respecting the fallen

and it just it just for him it's just like the whole vietnam war anti-war movement the whole sixties counterculture it just comes to a head and like the ultimate righteousness of their cause is borne out by their willingness to fucking reverently pay respect to our american boys who died in vietnam when in actuality they they draped an american flag over the defense table and a viet kong flag over the defense table and then they started reading the names of both vietnamese and americans who were dead and then the bailiffs and abby hoffman had a tug of war over the vietnamese flag and then they finally got it away and they left the american flag and abby hoffman after the trial was like you see those assholes disrespected the american flag by leaving it there like the

whole thing just had a different level to it and it was immediately stopped the judge immediately put a stop to it there was no go no one gave a shit about it was just you know and then it tells you where where everyone went on to do and you know blah blah blah and then like you know it's just it's like it's the dead poet society moment at the end where everyone's standing on the table going oh captain by captain you know and you know yeah he said five you know you're not going to read these five thousand names and it's like if they include the vietnamese names it'd be considerably more than five thousand let's put it that way um and then i just like say like the very end when the credits roll i had the the captions on and i think like the perfect perfect moment for me in

this movie was right as the credits roll and like a song begins to play the captions just said showed me the the line hear my voice by celeste and i just love the name i just love the perfect end to the movie is some schmaltzy cornball song by an artist called celeste that's titled hear my voice and that pretty much sums up the entire point of view of this movie it's just you know how is there not a single song from that era in the fucking movie netflix doesn't have enough money they can't fucking pay the rights for any of you know fucking going up to see the spirit of the sky or anything all these hippies are sitting around they're listening to some horrible like like folk band yeah do just one look from you know 1959 i think it was i think it was actually the avid

brothers uh yeah where's fortunate son man yeah yeah i could bring out the classic i don't know i think they probably wanted to like save money on it can i just say about the credits though at the end it made me fucking insane because as a as a child sort of my my first political heroes really were i this is this is you know i i came out for this era but these guys were around Muhammad Ali and abby hoff yeah and to sum up abby hoffman at the end of the movie with abby hoffman wrote a best-selling book of the numbers of copula of copies and circulation is unknown as the title was steal this book he killed himself in 1989 you leave out all the amazing shit that he did while he was fucking undercover or hiding out for the police i mean he's it's such it's such a

he is such disdain for yeah he was moving weight but you know tom hayden gets elected to this and plays in the system it does all these wonderful things they don't mention that he married jade fonda though they weren't like like elected to the california state democratic legislature nothing about the fact that he married jane fonda or endorse Hillary you know the judge was also working with the fbi and was given the fbi approval to bug the defense attorney's offices and just telling them that yes he would hold them in contempt tomorrow and like all of this shit was going on and how the fuck you leave that out of a movie like this of course he loves the fbi so he can't he can't put it in his script but the fbi are just fucking monsters and that's just like

in the scene where they strike the two jurors that like the night before at their sort of like clubhouse they talk about like jurors number six and eleven i can tell they're sympathetic to us the next day like that those two jurors houses got sent letters by the black panthers threatening them that was like clearly just written by the fbi and the movie i was i kept expecting a movie to make it explicit that like the reason they knew that was because they had bugged their fucking office yeah and it never ever is explicit about that they're just like oh lucky guess it's mentioned in passing in a piece of dialogue where it's like you bug our offices and it's like wait what wait you didn't show that at all it's bad i mean i i'm sorry you like this will

do and matt you're both uh disappointing you can enjoy you can enjoy mcdonald's you'll get a stomach ache afterwards dave dave i just love movies okay i'm gonna watch it and nine times out of ten i'm gonna like it i'm just i like the movies i love the magic of movies i like seeing actors yeah you know so i can i can overlook how evil it is uh i don't know if you would be interested in uh ending on a reading sure of court transcripts but i really do recommend everyone get this uh just get the court transcripts because it's a laugh riot and it's it's it's so disappointing that this is what got made out of this trial which was in fact yes it was a major political trial but it was a comedy um so these are a few excerpts uh

mr hoffman this is this is abbey uh the court is the judge uh mr hoffman your idea is justice is the only obscenity in the room you stunk for then shon the for to go him huh obviously it was a provocation that's why this has gone on here today because you threatened him with cutting off his freedom of speech in the he gave him a walkie the court mr marshall will you ask defendant hoffman to mr hoffman this ain't the standard club the marshall mr hoffman uh mr hoffman i'll tell him to stick it up his bowling ball how's your war stock doing julie let's see here mr hoffman you put that linger in jail because you have lost faith in the jury system i hear you people haven't lost a case before a jury in 24 tries only the crebby osan

people got away by the way crebby osan was a marketed cancer drug that they later found out was just mineral oil and the pharmaceutical company did not get convicted by hoffman uh we're going to go away too that's why you're throwing us in the jealous way uh mr hoffman the judge in nazi journey or ordered sterilization why don't you do that judge hoffman the court mr marshall will you have mr hoffman or remain quiet please order him to remain quiet mr hoffman order us order us you got to cut our tongues out to order us julie you railroaded seal so he wouldn't get a trial a jury trial either four years for contempt without a jury trial the marshall mr hoffman will you shut up mr hoffman no i won't shut up i ate an automaton like you i don't want

to be a tyrant i don't care for the tyrannical system best friend blacks ever had huh how many blacks are in drake towers how many in the standard club how many own stock in brunswick corporation the court mr marshall please have that man refrain from using these epithets which were left out mr rubin it's just descriptive i just describing what i see the marshall for the sixth time shut up mr hoffman epithet the whole thing is like that from beginning to end obviously like they cut out like uh you know very dull proceedings part but it's just them screaming you're a nazi i mean sorkin would go to the the the kribian and see a beautiful sunset and paint a picture of it and it would just be gray i mean that's all he fucking does he just grays everything out be his feet

there we go that was uh the trial of the chicago seven another another another sterling entry in our erin sorkin uh master's work sir before you sentence us yes before you sense is david and i would like to um read aloud the name of all the producers on the film oh my god highly recommend epithet go it's go to the movie's imdb page and look i can't believe how many producers there are on this movie i've i've never seen this but i i would imagine this is because it was in it was they were trying to make it for like 15 years a decade at least yeah so it's got to be why i'm around a lot i've just never seen anything like this before though it's really just amazing yeah it's like the hadron collider paper so there we go once again uh josh olson and dav anthony thanks

so much for joining us their podcast about erin sorkin is the west wing thing and the west wing has just had a west wing reunion and you guys are of course doing a west wing reunion special when is that dropping it's it's up it's up now hell yeah go go to vimeo go to vimeo and look for the west wing thing reunion thing and also announces that we're starting up who's on that uh i just well pretty much everybody i'm looking at right now we've got a ton of other guests we've got music from our great music i diesel boots and uh will will made a little short film that could give you a seizure but it's uh it's great also uh the the patreon isn't so that um josh and dav could buy second castles it's so that they can pay the tech people that produce this and it's a really good

show and uh it's a great gateway drug for libs who might be uh questioning yeah we do we find that we we get uh i think it was just dav and me screaming at each other about politics no one would listen but we get all these people who are lured in because because we're hate watching a beloved tv show and if you if you if you want if you want a wedge to separate uh a lib in your life from the the sorkan mindset just point out the way he treats women in any of his tv shows yeah that would be a we do a segment that would be a good place to start tell them to tell them to listen to the west wing thing uh wing pill them yes so once again guys thanks dav and josh thanks so much for coming on uh the rest of you gang uh talk to you soon bye bye

you