Sacha Baron Cohen to play Abbie Hoffman in Spielberg's Trial of the Chicago 7
Woah -- Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G, Borat) will play Abbie Hoffman in an upcoming Spielberg adaptation of the Trial of the Chicago 7. I'm a huge Hoffman fan -- his (somewhat fictionalized) autobiography is one of my favorite books -- and Cohen's the kind of merry anarchist who strikes me as the perfect and unlikely casting choice.
Link (via Digg)Hoffman went on to become an irascible celebrity who, later diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, killed himself with pills in 1989.
Baron Cohen will not have to undergo a big transformation to play the part. Hoffman, who was Jewish, attended Berkeley University in California, while Baron Cohen, an urbane Orthodox Jew more than 6ft tall, cut his teeth entertaining friends at Christ’s College Cambridge with subversive wit and surreal pranks.
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Will Cohen be speaking to Tom Hanks for this movie?
I too am/was a fan of Abbie. I read "Steal This Book" back in the late 70's when Abbie was underground, and saw him speak at an even in around 1980 or so after he resurfaced.
Abbie had great insights into the nature of mass communications, and of how to inspire and activate individuals.
Sasha Baron Cohen is ORTHODOX????
GTFO I do not believe this. Conservative maybe, but not Orthodox. Maybe raised as, but heck, he shaves....
I'm just sayin....
OUCH!
As a contemporary of Abbie, I took him at his word. The week "Steal This Book" came out I went to a bookstore and sat between the rows, read the book and left. A wonderfully chaotic mind!
I can't feel so positive about this film. Perhaps this is a bit of old fogey-ism but it really was a unique time and I question the people mentioned being able to bring that to the screen. Cohen is a frenetic comic who for all I know has the dramatic chops of Steven Segal. Spielberg hasn't seen a cliche he wouldn't throw at the screen. The only thing missing for a perfect trifecta is to tell me it is being written by a committee of twenty somethings with a great understanding of the background.
Don't whitewash history. It's the Chicago 8.
Hoffman attended the University of California at Berkeley. "Berkeley University" does not exist.
I had not thought about Abbie Hoffman in some time, and seeing his photograph here made me think: there are two people from recent American history that are sorely needed in these trying times, Abbie Hoffman is one, and Frank Zappa is the other. They were brilliantly incisive in different ways, uniquely subversive, not afraid to shout out loud by calling the idiots "idiots", and both died far too young (in ways that could have been prevented).
Just think, we could've been voting for Zappa/Hoffman in 2008, instead of the various shades of nimrod we have running now. (I don't for a second think that they would WIN, but I also don't doubt that they would make a beautiful spectacle that would shine a painful light on all the front runners, of either party. The 24-hour cable TV news channels are just GEARED for that kind of spectacle).
Wikipedia describes Abbie Hoffman as "a self-identified Jewish Road Warrior". What would Mel Gibson make of that?
Abbie attended Brandeis as an undergrad (1955-1959)
and did graduate work at Cal-Berkeley for a few years thereafter. Regarding the '68 Convention antics: Abbie used to refer to the Chicago Seven as his basketball team. Word: his dybbuk (ghost) will stage a protest rally outside of every theater where the biopic is shown.
CarpentC:
The only reason I clicked into this comment thread was to see if any other Cal alum was going to correct Cory. :)
An even better question would be, who will play Bobby Seale in this movie (and yes, there were 8, not 7, in the original line-up of protesters who were put on trial at the '68 Democratic convention).
Seale was a Black Panther activist without parallel. He was bound and gagged in court by the judge when he refused to stop talking. Bound and gagged. Not cited for contempt. I would hope that other members of the film's line-up would merit just as much mention than Sasha Baron Cohen, especially since Abbie Hoffman did not play nearly as great a role in this affair as the other players.
But, then again, focusing on accuracy may not be Steven Spielberg's goal...just like all the other filmmakers who try to make a period film. And it is rare in an interracial cast that the black people are focused upon in equal measure or presented as leads.
Well, it's a better casting choice than D'Onofrio anyway. (The major problem with both of those actors is that Abbie was actually fairly short and they're both over 6 feet.)
The perfect guy to play Abbie would've been Jason Antoon, best known for playing Rufus in Minority Report.
wow, lib ignorant (worse than racist) commentary strikes again. brilliant how you think sacha is is perfect for the part mainly b/c he's also jewish. i guess any white guy here should be a shoe-in to play any other white guy.
all blacks are criminals, all asians look alike, blah blah. way to go boingboing.
@#13 Goldemi:
Wow, what an amazingly stoopid thing to say.
Just amazing.
Troll.
"Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture" - who would have thought that his title would become true one day?
I can't wait to see who plays Jerry Rubin. Oh and Ginsberg.
For the record, Seale was NOT a Chicago protestor -- he was a last-minute replacement brought in for another speaker. He wasn't an organizer of the demonstrations and was not involved in any meaningful way with the Chicago actions.
The Chicago DA apparently indicted Seale out of pure malice. No one -- including Seale -- could figure out why he'd been included with the likes of Hoffman and Rubin. Seale -- and the rest of the Chicago 8 (or 7) attributed it to racism and a vendetta against the Panthers. Sounds about right to me.
Seale's case was severed from the 7 very early in the trial, and the majority of the trial -- including the strange antics, such as the recital of the whole of "Alice's Restaurant" -- took place after Seale was gone.
I think maybe we should stage something for the premier of this movie - maybe a "Hoffman v. Hoffman" re-match or something.
Don't know if it'll influence the film at all, but Sacha Baron-Cohen's degree at Cambridge was in History (he did well, graduating with a first class degree), and he especially focussed on the American civil rights movement for his dissertation
@Goldemi – the quote about Cohen's Jewishness was from the Times Online, not from the BoingBoing editors. Don't be a troll.
@#3: Cohen isn't Orthodox (he's said he's not a strict Jew) but he spent time in kibbutz and studied historic Judaism in college.
@#4: He certainly looks the part, but he's got the chops; check him out in Sweeney Todd. He's not a one-trick actor, from what I've seen.
Given Steven Spielberg's interest in investigating Jewish heritage in some of his films (not all, by any means), given the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's interest in Jewish themes in his work, and given the Chicago 7 (yes, 7, without Bobby Seale), I wonder what this film about the Chicago 7 will say about Jewish identity?
Are these Jewish filmmakers and screenwriters interested in something about the story because the principal defendants were Jewish?
Is it significant that that some leftist politics were lead by Jews in the 60s and 70s and how does that dovetail with this film' story?
Cory @ comment 16:
Bobby Seale gave two speeches in Chicago in August '68. He was not an organizer and he was a late replacement for (I think) Eldridge Cleaver, but those were significant speeches. Significant enough, provocative enough, and actionable enough to make Seale irresistible to federal prosecutors.
He was in the indictment and trial because his words were the most inflammatory ones spoken during Chicago '68. So, at the trial, his speeches were introduced into evidence, then he was bound and gagged, and then he was severed from the trial. Neat, huh?
The government got the Seale words into the trial without, in the end, having to deal with the racial issues crated by prosecuting him. There were aspects of Seale's role in the trial that accidentally but actually worked to the advantage of the prosecution.
My dad arrested Abbie Hoffman during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Hoffman been running up and down the street with the word F*©k written on his forehead, hidden under a floppy hat, and he would jump in front of women on the street, lift the hat and yell 'yippie!' He really rattled a few people who reported him, so my father entered the diner where he was eating breakfast with Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg and a few of their friends. He approached their table, told him a report had been made about him, confirmed the writing on his forehead, and then asked him to come with him. All of the people at the table linked arms. 'Well, it looks like I'm chained here and can't go with you.' And at that, one of the women at the table grabbed a piece of bacon and said 'here pig, have some pig' and threw it in my dad's face.
My dad was a pretty big guy back in the day, and he said, 'ok, lets go' and they still didn't budge, so he grabbed and yanked them and they all went flying out of the booth. He led Abbie Hoffman out to the car. My father was actually in plain clothes at the time and the diner was packed with police in uniform eating breakfast. They knew my father, but they all just sat there and greeted him as he walked Hoffman out of the restaurant asking 'Need any help John?' My dad replied 'No, I have it under control.'
Once they got in the car and started driving off to the station, Hoffman suddenly became terrified that they weren't the real police, he was quite paranoid that my father and his partner were perhaps some other possible party that might want to shut him up. The story ended up in the autobiography.
Now my friends like to tease my father that having me as his son is his karmic payback for arresting Abbie Hoffman.
It would be funny, albeit unlikely, if they titled the film "Camcord This Movie".
Goldemi, your #13 is genuinely foolish.
Hoffman wrote a great deal about Jewish identity -- and made it the centerpiece of the trial, hurling Yiddish epithets at Judge Julius Hoffman (*Shanda fer di goyim* and so on). In his autobiography, Hoffman describes the trial as a clash between two Jewish identities: the assimilationist, pre-Boomer reform identity and the radical, boomer-revolutionary identity.
By the same token, Baron-Cohen's work avidly explores what Jewishness means (and he is particularly harsh on people like you, who see anti-Semitism lurking behind every corner). Take, for example, his broad "Running of the Jew" sequences in BORAT, which lampoon the cliche of former Soviet republics being simmering proto-pogroms, waiting to burst into full-on, Cossacks-at-Easter madness.
For the record, I'm Jewish: circumcised, Bar Mitzvahed, the whole megillah. I'm also an atheist, a Yiddish speaker, and the child of a Holocaust refugee.
Sacha Baron Cohen needs to not be in movies. His performance was by far the worst in Sweeney Todd.
Hmmm. . . if Spielberg making this film because he is so interested in Jewish history, maybe he'll make a film about Al Goldstein next.
I used to own a 1st edition of STB, but to my complete lack of surprise someone "borrowed" it and never returned it.
I think Abbie would have approved of Cohen's playing his role. A new movie to look forward to (my last was "Stardust").
#24 (Cory), I'm with you on this one. As a fellow matzoh-muncher, I gotta say that the Running Of The Jews and bed&breakfast sequences were the only parts of Borat that I found truly funny.
I would like to direct Abbie fans to Marty Jezer's biography of Abbie Hoffman, called "Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel", published by Rutgers University press. A very balanced and readable book by a fellow 60's activist.
I am very psyched at the idea of Sacha Baron Cohen playing Abbie. I've always thought Eric Bogosian should be the one, but he's probably getting a bit old for the role. Baron Cohen would seem to understand Abbie's appreciation of the absurd.
@#3 and @#19: I heard that Cohen was raised Orthodox.
Probablywronganyway, it certainly might be the case that he was raised Orthodox, but having been raised Orthdox doesn't mean that he is currently, no more than having been raised Catholic means that I am.
According to the Wikipedia article about him, he was raised in an Orthodox family. However, he has been quoted as saying "I wouldn't say that I am a religious Jew, but I'm still proud to be Jewish." Also according to Wikipedia, he keeps kosher and observes Shabbat, to the point of not answering the phone on Shabbat.
As for his being able to play Hoffman, I think that he's a great choice. His style of comedy has a lot of parallels with Hoffman's activities, including the one mentioned by one of the other posters here that got him arrested. In addition, his thesis while at Cambridge was on Jewish Involvement in the American Civil Rights movement. So I'd be surprised if we isn't at least passingly familiar with Hoffman.