Cinematic Fictions: The Student Protest Movement Comes to Hollywood
How Abbie Hoffman, Nora Ephron & Jimmy Stewart Brought Student Rebellion to the Big Screen
In early May of 1960, an event occurred that would transform campus politics across the United States. The HUAC (House Committee on Un-American Activities), which once counted future president Richard Nixon among its members, organized a public trial at San Francisco’s City Hall to question local political activists, teachers, and union leaders who they thought were communists. The HUAC had been allowed to subvert the constitution, trample on civil liberties, and terrorize Americans for years under the guise of investigating communists who were accused of undermining the country. But this time their kangaroo court was met by thousands of college-age protesters from the University of California, Berkeley, including a young Abbie Hoffman,
The students, inspired by black activists leading the burgeoning civil rights movement in the south, were there to protest HUAC’s activities which involved the questioning of an 18-year-old Berkeley student and gifted photographer named Douglas Wachter who was singled out for his involvement in various leftist organizations. Wachter was dragged before the HUAC for his progressive activism on campus and this caused a sympathetic backlash from his classmates that was documented in college newspapers at the time. Students carrying signs with slogans that read “We March for Freedom!” “Is This a Police State?” and “Stop the Witch Hunt!” circled San Francisco City Hall while inside protesters disrupted the trial with taunts, chants, and songs.
Things turned violent when police decided to use water hoses and billy clubs to quiet the crowd causing multiple injuries to protesters who were sent tumbling down the marble steps of city hall. Police were also injured in the commotion and made 64 arrests that were eventually overturned following accusations of police brutality. The event became known as Black Friday and was described in chilling detail by Abbie Hoffman in his autobiography.
“There was an elite force of riot police called the goon squad. Each member stood six foot or better, in solid black leather, crowned with a white crash helmet with a plexiglass visor. Each carried a club. There were water-hose teams. Some had a device called the ‘knee bender.’ You hooked it around a person’s wrist and turned it once. The person fell to his knees in pain. A second turn broke the bone. The force of the water hoses drove people smashing into plate-glass windows. Students were clubbed to the ground, thrown off balconies, and kicked in the face. A pregnant woman was thrown down the stairs. All around there was panic. Things like that happened in Japan when police waded into snake-dancing protestesters, but those were just television images. Now it was real and scary.
I was separated from those I came with. People ran into stores. The tall black-leather shapes pursued, swinging their sticks. Sirens wailed all around. Screams filled the air. I ran through the side streets towards the theater district.
Four blocks from the riot, everything was as it always was. The passengers debarked from the cable car and helped the ticket man make the turn-around and climb back up Powell Street. Old men waited for the triple-bill movies on Market Street to open. No one seemed aware that the country’s most turbulent decade had just begun.”
- from The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman
Local news agencies and court cameras had recorded the skirmish so the HUAC decided to compile the footage into a deceptively edited state-sponsored film titled Operation Abolition. This film was widely distributed across the country and portrayed the protesters as ill-informed dupes and Kremlin collaborators who were attempting to sow discontent among America’s youth. But the HUAC badly miscalculated how the public would respond to their intentionally dishonest government propaganda.
Abbie Hoffman began touring campuses with the film as an ACLU representative to dispel its deceptive interpretation of the events that transpired in 1960. And instead of deterring students from participating in political activities, Operation Abolition became a recruiting tool for the bourgeoning New Left.
The Bay Area’s reputation as a hotbed of student activism had been sown and student groups at the University of Berkeley were inundated with calls and letters from other colleges around the country asking for advice on how to launch protest movements of their own. The HUAC’s film had inadvertently revealed that students had power when they organized around progressive causes in mass and that’s exactly what they began to do.
Here Comes Hollywood . . .
20th Century Fox was the first studio in Hollywood to address the budding student movement. In an attempt to recoup their losses following the release of Cleopatra (1963), a big-budget spectacle that nearly bankrupted them, studio head Darryl F. Zanuck installed his 27-year-old son as president. Zanuck Jr. immediately went to work on making cheap youth-oriented films that might attract an adolescent audience.
The studio’s first production under new management was Take Her, She’s Mine (1963) based on a popular play by Henry and Phoebe Ephron. The Ephorons had used letters written by their daughter, future film director Nora Ephron, describing her experiences at the elite Wellesley College for the basis of their play. Nora’s frequent letters documented her political awakening as the editor of her college newspaper where she reported on campus protests and reviewed films, including the HUAC propaganda production Operation Abolition, which she and her coeditors found “ridiculous but not humorous.”
The film adaptation of Take Her, She’s Mine features the popular teen idol Sandra Dee as a new college student based on Nora Ephron and Hollywood stalwart James Stewart plays her protective father. It’s a lightweight breezy comedy directed by German-Jewish Émigré Henry Koster but still manages to address many of the concerns of the day. In a letter read aloud by Stewart, Dee’s character writes compassionately about attending a lecture by prominent American socialist and antiwar activist Norman Thomas. And in one scene, we’re taken to a free speech protest at a library that has banned Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. During the sit-in Dee and Stewart debate the issue of censorship but their discussion is interrupted when the local mayor and police arrive to put an end to the peaceful protest. Amid the chaos that follows Stewart defends his daughter and her classmates by telling the mayor: “I know what my rights are as well as the rights of all these kids!” before he joins the protest himself. Soon afterward he and the students are forcibly removed by the police and arrested.
Despite its frivolous nature, the film is notable for its early depiction of a politically conscious young woman attending a peaceful protest disrupted by an authoritative mayor and his aggressive police force. Take Her, She’s Mine takes a surprisingly progressive position against state-sponsored censorship while supporting free speech and criticizing police overreach.
The film was well-received by critics but suffered a major setback when the president of the United States was assassinated a week after its debut. Take Her, She’s Mine originally included critical references to John F. Kennedy that were considered ill-timed so it was pulled from theaters and eventually rereleased with multiple cuts. The original film appears to be lost and there seems to be little interest in seeing it restored. In the 2016 documentary, Everything Is Copy — Nora Ephron: Scripted & Unscripted, which was made by her son, Take Her, She’s Mine didn’t warrant a mention and Ephron’s college days were barely referenced at all. Apparently, everything is not copy in the Ephron family.
Following the mild success of Take Her, She’s Mine, 20th Century Fox released Dear Brigette (1965), another college-themed film also directed by Henry Kostner and starring James Stewart. In Dear Brigette Stewart plays a frustrated poetry professor fighting to preserve the arts on a campus being overrun by the science department with computers threatening to throw “a million men out of work.” When a protest erupts in support of the professor students can be seen carrying signs that read “Bring Back Poetry!” hinting at a bohemian backlash and growing opposition to the bureaucratic automation occurring at universities across the country.
These 20th Century Fox productions foreshadow the growing Free Speech Movement that found its footing at the University of Berkeley in December of 1964 where students were demanding the right to politically organize on campus (NOTE: Dear Brigette was already in production at the time and released on January 8, 1965). Along with the demands to organize and speak on issues of the day, the Free Speech Movement was also opposed to the university’s registration and grading system that insisted each student carry a computer punch card containing all their personal information. Concerns over a computerized bureaucracy determining the college curriculum and opposition to college science programs, which were often funded and managed by the Pentagon, would become prominent protest themes throughout the sixties.
“There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Excerpt from Mario Savo’s "Bodies Upon the Gears" speech, 1964
Along with their campus settings, Take Her, She’s Mine, and Dear Brigette feature brief excursions to Paris and romantic obsessions with attractive French actors (Philippe Forquet and Brigette Bardot) in an attempt to appeal to a more sophisticated audience. 20th Century Fox knew that the younger generation was abandoning Hollywood and more inclined to watch foreign films not intimidated by the politically conservative HUAC or bound by the Christian morality of the Motion Picture Production Code (Hayes Code).
The surprising face of revolution in both films is Jimmy Stewart, who took progressive positions in films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) where he battled corrupt politicians and unfettered capitalism. Stewart reluctantly encourages rebellion in these sixties productions by joining protests and showing the younger generation how to fight the powers that be on screen. But off-screen he was an ultra-conservative war hero, Reagan supporter, and vocal proponent of the Vietnam War, which cost him a son. At first glance, the role of a middle-aged rabble-rouser might seem like an awkward fit for Stewart but it’s a natural progression for the characters he played. Mr. Smith would not sit the sixties out and it’s easy to imagine him taking his fight to the public streets and college campuses. 20th Century Fox knew the actor was a beloved figure and his broad appeal lends these early attempts to grapple with student unrest some heart despite their glib approach to serious issues of the day.
[After reading the Declaration of Independence on the U.S. Senate floor]
“Now, you're not gonna have a country that can make these kind of rules work, if you haven't got men that have learned to tell human rights from a punch in the nose. It's a funny thing about men, you know. They all start life being boys. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some of these Senators were boys once. And that's why it seemed like a pretty good idea for me to get boys out of crowded cities and stuffy basements for a couple of months out of the year. . .And it seemed like a pretty good idea, getting boys from all over the country, boys of all nationalities and ways of living. Getting them together. Let them find out what makes different people tick the way they do. Because I wouldn't give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn't have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a - a little lookin' out for the other fella, too. . .”
Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Despite the appearance of Bardot, pop star Fabian, and the much-beloved Stewart, Dear Brigette failed to attract an audience. College crowds stayed away and the film couldn’t manage to break even at the box office. The times they were a-changin', and Hollywood would continue to face numerous challenges as it tried to address, co-opt, profit from, and respond to these changes over the next decade.
This is a companion piece written for the upcoming book Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990 scheduled for release in August from PM Press and currently available for pre-order.