Aaron Sorkin remembers the day, 14 years ago, when he was summoned to Steven Spielberg’s house and offered a job. “He told me he wanted to make a movie about the riots at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the trial that followed,” he says. “I left not knowing what the hell he was talking about.”
Sorkin was seven years old when Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, Rennie Davis, and other counterculture activists spearheaded a massive protest in Chicago’s Grant Park against the Vietnam War. What started as a peaceful demonstration turned into a televised bloodbath when baton-wielding, tear-gas-spraying Chicago police and National Guard troops turned their fury on the crowd. The wild, infamous six-month trial that followed in 1969—in which the organizers were accused by President Nixon’s Department of Justice of criminal conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot—was a three-ring circus presided over by the blatantly biased Judge Julius Hoffman. The unjustness of the spectacle helped radicalize millions of disaffected American kids.