History & Film | Politics & Protest: Medium Cool (1969) & Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)
WRITTEN BY K.M. SANDRICK
The Democratic National Convention set in Chicago August 19-22 this year could not help but recall the turmoil in the city on August 26-29, 1968.
- A sitting president drops his bid for a second term. In a letter on July 21, Joe Biden acknowledged that it was “in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.” On March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson told the nation: “I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
- A divisive war intensifies overseas. More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked and killed 1139 Israelis and took 251 hostages. During the Tet Offensive in early 1968, massive numbers of military and civilians were killed or wounded: between 32,000 and 45,000 People’s Army of Vietnam/Viet Cong, 10,000 South Vietnamese, and 8000 US troops.
- Shots are fired at a presidential candidate. On July 13 a gunman shot and killed one and wounded two other spectators and injured Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, after winning the California primary.
- Protestors demonstrate. The Coalition to March on DNC and US Palestinian Community Network expected thousands of protestors in Chicago over the 2024 four-day convention. The National Mobilization Committee to End War in Vietnam (MOBE), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Youth International Party (Yippies) drew between 9000 and 10,000 demonstrators in 1968. 1,2
Many have forgotten about Chicago and the summer of 1968. Many have no idea who the Chicago 7 were and what happened to them the following year.
An Internet search of 1968 reportage returns: indelible images of journalists being forcibly ejected from the convention floor, live television coverage of the 17-minute melee known as the Battle for Michigan Avenue, police pushing protestors through plate-glass windows and beating them as they lay on broken glass on August 28, and the prosecution of protest leaders called the Trial of the Chicago 7, beginning in March 1969, lasting nearly five months, calling more than 50 witnesses, and handcuffing and gagging a Black man while he sat at the defense table during testimony.
The two films do more than observe; they provide context and perspective, blending history, cinematography, and drama to capture that point in time and reflect on today. Medium Cool (1969), re-released in 35 mm in 2024, incorporates footage of police-protestor interactions over the course of the 1968 convention. Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) relies on courtroom testimony to reveal the leaders of protest movements who were prosecuted in federal court for actions they took in Chicago: Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Lee Weiner, as well as Black Panther Bobby Seale.
Protest
Medium Cool took its name and inspiration from Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian communications scholar who coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in 1964. McLuhan called television a “cool medium” that involves people in what they see but doesn’t require viewers to engage, turning viewers into spectators who move from news segments to paid commercials and back again.3
The film follows news cameraman John Cassellis, played by Robert Forster, as he’s swept up by events at DNC 1968: staged war-game preparations by Illinois Army National Guard, actual face-offs between police and protestors, emergency care of wounded individuals, and even scenes of votes tallied by DNC delegates.
Although scripted, the film is intentionally disjointed as it slips between documentary and drama, using only natural sound, few artificial lights, and no sets, placing fictional characters in actual situations and real people in fictional ones.4
In 1968 Haskell Wexler was a well-known cinematographer. He’d received the Academy Award for cinematography for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1966 and had produced documentaries on Freedom Riders (The Bus) in 1965 and Chicago (The Living City) in 1953.5
When he came to Chicago in the summer of 1968 as the writer, director, and cinematographer of Medium Cool, he didn’t know what he would find. In 2015 at age 91, he explained in an interview upon the Criterion Collection’s release of a restored 4K digital transfer of the film: “I knew there would be demonstrations and that the police would suppress them. But I didn’t build the story or the script around that. It just sort of unfolded before me.”6
During six weeks of filming, Wexler capitalized on media access. He and his actors were considered to be part of a news crew and so were able to move in and out of the action. Before arriving in Chicago, Wexler had received permission to shoot National Guard troops in Fort Ripley, Minnesota, as they engaged in pre-convention “practice riots,” wearing jewelry with peace signs and “Flower Power” shirts, carrying “Draft Beer not Students” signs, marching arm-in-arm and singing We Shall Overcome. He also had credentials to film Democratic Party delegates on the convention floor.
The result was considered to be a radical, experimental film, one known as guerilla-style, vérité filmmaking for handheld camera sequences, and one that had a frighteningly real consequence—a canister of tear gas bounced off Wexler’s camera and exploded, sending the man to the ground and permanently diminishing his eyesight.7
Prosecution
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin first heard about the Chicago 7 and their trial for conspiracy to cross state lines to incite riots in 2007 when Steven Spielberg asked him to write the screenplay for a film he would direct. Because of budget cuts and a strike by the Writers Guild that year, Spielberg dropped out of the project. More than ten years later, Sorkin took the helm as both writer and director.8
The project was a natural fit for Sorkin, involving courtroom dramatics a la A Few Good Men, real stories of real people in complicated times like his biopics of Steve Jobs and The Social Network’s Mark Zuckerberg, thorny social and political themes and the way people learn about them, think The West Wing and The Newsroom.
The Trial of the Chicago 7 centers on courtroom theatrics, the intended peaceful demonstrations that turned violent, and the personalities, differences, and rivalries between two principal defendants: the intellectual and restrained Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), and the flamboyant, in-your-face Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen).
The film has been criticized for playing fast and loose with fact and the portrayals of those involved. David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), did not punch a courtroom guard. Prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt), was not sympathetic to the defendants. Chicago Leader of the Black Panther Party Fred Hampton did not sit behind fellow Panther Bobby Seale and offer advice during the trial.
Parts of the script conflate timelines. In the film, Seale is told that Hampton was shot to death by Chicago police while he was seated at the defense table. In reality, Hampton was shot in December 1969, months after Seale’s case had been severed and he was sentenced to jail on 16 counts of contempt of court.
Yet Sorkin’s vision earned praise from an antiwar protestor who was on the streets of Chicago in 1968 and followed the trial of the Chicago 7 as it was happening. Robert Levering welcomed the film’s humanization of the antiwar movement and shift away from Hollywood Vietnam-era features that highlighted war scenes, or depicted antiwar activists as hostile to returning vets or self-serving draft dodgers.9
Today & Yesterday
Medium Cool fit right in with so-called 60s rebel films like Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy that delved into counterculture, taking stories off the back lot and out of the film studio and into actual settings. But it was roundly criticized for lacking cohesion, failing to make plot connections, or including discrepancies, such as Cassellis mysteriously appearing to cover proceedings at the DNC after he had been fired from his TV news job.
Fragmentation was actually the point. In keeping with the cool medium of television, the film captures images as they occur without providing background, point of view, or explanation. As Wexler himself noted, the cameraman influences “reality” by choosing which image to take, and the video presents a highly selective view of what’s happening—the action directly in front of the camera lens.10
The film’s message is spot-on today. “Medium Cool offers us a thoughtful examination of our position as spectators of and performers for an ever-present media. The film is more relevant now than ever, in our YouTube, cell-phone-camera age where nothing goes undocumented,” wrote Brett McCracken in 2015.11
And it turns an inquiring eye on viewers. At the end, a TV cameraman turns his camera away from the scene of an auto accident toward the screen as if to challenge the audience: what do you think? What are you doing while the protestors of 1968 chant, “the whole world is watching”?
The Trial of the Chicago 7 takes a different approach. It is highly polished, carefully scripted, driven by dialogue—so much so that the historical liberties it takes worry some critics who believe viewers may take this version of events as gospel fact, when it alters time, testimony, and the personalities of characters. 12
Yet its dramatization carries messages with contemporary relevance. The tension and threat of violence are present today just as they were in 1968. As Aaron Sorkin told an interviewer for WBEZ TV Chicago in 2015: The film “is chillingly relevant when, suddenly, Donald Trump at rallies, you know, when a protestor in back would shout something and he’d be getting dragged out, and Trump would start reminiscing about the good old days when we’d carry that guy out of here on a stretcher and I’d like to punch him right in the face and beat the crap out of him—when protest was being demonized….”13
And the film gives the final context—the why. At the end, when Eddie Redmayne stands to make a statement to the court on behalf of all defendants, he starts to read the names of nearly 5000 GIs who recently died in Vietnam. Though the incident did not happen when and how it’s depicted, the scene illustrates the reason protestors had gathered—to stop the war in Vietnam, save lives, and change government policy while the whole world was watching.
References:
1.Mark Rivera and Chuck Goudie, Chicago DNC 2024, WLS-TV, various dates.
2. History.com editors: 1968 Democratic Convention, May 3, 2024.
3. McLuhan Organization: The Medium Is the Message, August 17, 2023; McLuhan, Marshall: Understanding Media, McGraw Hill, 1964; CreativeSpace Publishing, 2016.
4. Brett McCracken: Haskell Wexler Medium Cool and the Unscripted Drama of 1968.
5. IMBD: Haskell Wexler (1922-2015).
6. TimeOut: Haskell Wexler on the Criterion Collection Release of Medium Cool Interview, 2015.
7. McCracken.
8. Andrew R. Chow: The Trial of the Chicago 7 Is a Riveting Movie, But the True Story Is Even More Dramatic, TIME, October 16, 2020.
9. Robert Levering: Why the Trial of the Chicago 7 deserves praise from an antiwar protestor who was there. Waging Nonviolence, October 30, 2020.
10. Chicago Sun-Times: Chicago laced through the life of renowned cinematographer Haskell Wexler, July 7, 2024.
11. McCracken.
12. Jeremy Kagan: How ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ gets history wrong. Forward, October 26, 2020.
13. Terry Gross, Sam Sanders: In “Chicago 7” Aaron Sorkin Sees Chilling Parallels between 1968 and today, WBEZ Chicago, November 21, 2020.
About the contributor: K. M. Sandrick is a reviewer for HNR and was one of the first-round judges in the HNS 2024 First Chapters Contest. She is author of the historical novel The Pear Tree, recipient of Chanticleer International Book Awards’ 2018 Goethe Award for Late Historical Fiction.
Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 110 (November 2024)
