Ray Pride

Documentaries are tough enough to finance, even when they're not about a group of young people who bombed the U.S. Capitol.

Sam Green and Bill Siegel's "The Weather Underground," a feature-length portrait of the ambitions and failures of the radical group, turns out to be more topical today than the pair had imagined, with the parameters of protest against a potential, unpopular war once again under discussion.

In October 1969, several hundred activists in football helmets, carrying baseball bats and lead pipes, wreaked forty-eight hours of mayhem on Michigan Avenue, hoping to start a revolution against the Vietnam War and racism. A core group went underground, and waged war against the U.S. government, notably breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and bombing a number of federal facilities. "The Weather Underground" charts both the ideas and outrage of the group in interviews with Underground members who have moved on to other careers, including Northwestern University Law School faculty member Bernardine Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers, author of "Fugitive Days," his memoir of time spent hiding underground. It also chronicles the tale of those who didn't make it over to the other side, including David Gilbert, serving a life sentence for his participation in a 1981 Brink's truck hold-up.

The complex, mostly chronological narrative took four years to complete. "There are two reasons it took so long," Green, the San Francisco-based director of the accomplished documentary, "The Rainbow Man/John 3:16" says. "Finding people, connecting with people, and gaining their trust, took a long time. The only way people would talk about it is that if we knew the history."

The filmmaking partners met in New York in 1990, when Siegel, the Chicago-based director of school programs for the Great Books Foundation, who contributed to documentaries such as "Hoop Dreams" and "Muhammad Ali: The Whole Story," was at grad school at Columbia. They worked as freelance researchers on the Ali doc.

Green and Siegel discovered a mutual affinity for where-are-they-now stories as well as a commitment to left-wing politics. Of the Weathermen story and their terrorist actions, Siegel says, "We knew it included strident political convictions, that we'd had our own adolescent fascination with the sex and violence aspects of the story. But we realized that the generation or two younger than us had little to no idea of Weatherman's story. We also didn't know whether we could get any of the former members to participate." Most did, as well as contrarians like NYU prof Todd Gitlin, who was a member of the radical youth group Students for Democratic Society until the mid-1960s, before the Weatherman split.

While researching at the Library of Congress in D.C., Green surveyed a Senate report and found a couple of pages with all the members' mug shots, which is flashed at the beginning of the film. "They haunted me," he says. "They look really tough, and the same time they look like middle-class white kids trying to look tough. When I was looking at them, I also realized I knew one of the people." When he called him up, his friend conceded, "`Yeah, you found out about my secret life."

Siegel's blunt about why the film had to be made. "Since 9/11, dissent has only been further beat back and narrowed. Altogether, I see the film exploring more questions than answers. Why do people turn to violence to bring about social change? Is violence in the service of a cause ever justified? What responsibility do `we the people' have to challenge governmental injustice? Those questions strike to the core of the current climate, and are also at the heart of our film."

"The thing that interests me is that it's a morally ambiguous story. It's interesting because most of life is morally ambiguous, in my opinion," Green says. The film's most striking moment comes at the end when group member Naomi Jaffe, married with children, reflects the inevitable sorrow of a life long-lived. Her beliefs hadn't changed so much as the times; if not for her family she'd do it all over again.

"These were people in their early twenties who most people said were crazy or terrorists, and in some ways they were," continues Green. "But at the same time, there were such horrific things that this country was doing. In the film, Bill Ayers says something like, everybody says that if they were in Germany in the 1930s, they'd kill Hitler. Or if it was in the 1800s and they were in the South, they would oppose slavery. That's so easy to say, because you're not in any of those positions, but these were people who really felt they were in that kind of position and they had to do more than just protest. They had to put everything on the line. In some ways, I think that's very admirable, that impulse."

Siegel asserts that "Weather Underground" is more relevant after September 11 and impending plans for a war against Iraq. "The need for the film, and a broad-based discussion of the issues it raises, is acute. There's also the fact that the story of the Weather Underground is not easily understood, much less articulated on film, or even in any other way. Yet because it is so complicated, painful, inspiring, or maddening depending on how it strikes you, I hope it can be a vehicle to get discussion going. We'd love to reach the generations of young people who don't have any idea that not so long ago, a group of young, sharp and committed U.S. citizens tried to overthrow this country."

"The Weather Underground" debuts at the Sundance Film Festival. It should hit theaters or PBS this fall.

(2003-01-15)

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