Aaron Sorkin (c) Armando Gallo-HFPA 2017
Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed The Trial of the Chicago 7, with Sacha Baron Cohen playing Abbie Hoffman, Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin, Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seal. On Netflix September 16, watch trailer.
Sorkin did not know about this trial when Steven Spielberg proposed to him in 2006 to write the script, he was 8-years-old in 1969, so he asked his father about the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations at the Democratic Convention of August 1968.
I ask Sorkin what he hopes this film will teach his 19-year-old daughter. “My young daughter joined the Women’s March the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated, she has been out on the street these past few weeks marching with Black Lives Matter protesters, so she is teaching me about protest. Protest is a very honorable form of patriotism, it’s not anti-American, every important change in this country has always happened because of protest. My daughter and her friends are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong © Niko Tavernise-Netflix 2020
I ask Jeremy Strong about Jerry Rubin: “From Jerry’s books you get a sense of his anarchic, creative, defiant spirit. He was a merry prankster with a real volcanic outrage underneath, he used guerilla theater, humor and theatrical tactics. He cared greatly about people’s struggles for liberation all over the world, and, ultimately, he believed in what he called an interracial humanhood, which is such a wonderful noble concept.”