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Current Affairs

PREVIEW: The Trial of the Chicago 7

Current Affairs

Current Affairs

Comedy, Government, News, Culture, Politics

4.4645 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2020

⏱️ 4 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We accidentally recorded two Sorkin episodes in a row, sorry. This one's about his most recent picture, The Trial of the Chicago 7, and why the real-life event was funnier and better-scripted than the actual movie. This is a preview of an episode available in full to our $5 Patreon subscribers. To listen to the whole episode, as well as lots of other brilliant bonus episodes, please consider becoming one of our subscribers at www.patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Transcript

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0:00.0

I think I realized, like, I was thinking about why this film, like, doesn't quite work,

0:05.2

why is it, why it doesn't quite reach its potential.

0:08.1

And I realize it's because the trial of the Chicago 7, like the event,

0:13.3

already has writers.

0:15.6

Like, Abby Hoffman, he said funny lines, he performed funny things, he created drama, that was literally his thing.

0:24.3

So the trial is already an event that has been dramatized, it was being dramatized as it was being created as this like televisual event that Hoffman wanted to be something you could something you could literally watch on TV or in a

0:41.5

movie, right?

0:42.3

So there's already kind of two writers.

0:44.4

And I sometimes kind of felt like there were moments where, like, Hoffman would say something

0:50.8

that was based on what he had said in the actual thing, but the original

0:55.4

version was actually a little bit funnier. And I almost kind of felt like there was an ego thing

1:00.4

going on where Sorkin didn't actually want to use Hoffman's lines because he wanted to do it

1:06.4

better. Like he was kind of almost like wrestling with Hoffman and not wanting him to be the funny

1:12.0

writer. Yeah, I definitely felt that. I mean, if you go back through the trial transcript,

1:17.1

Hoffman is hilarious. He's just so funny. And we'll pull out some quotes, but he's so funny. And also

1:23.4

the other, the other thing that felt that was sort of like Sorkin putting his vision on the events,

1:29.5

just in a structural way, beyond this kind of competition with Hoffman, which I agree

1:33.9

overshadowed the very good lines that he could have just extracted straight from history,

1:38.3

is also what it seemed like he was trying to do with character building, where everyone had

1:42.5

their role.

1:43.7

Like Tom Hayden was like the straight

1:45.9

man that was always in conflict with Abby Hoffman, and Avi Hoffman is the ridiculous guy. And, like,

...

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