`Steal This Movie!': Film tells Abbie Hoffman story

The late Abbie Hoffman was once so opposed to a major-studio attempt to film his life that he threatened to burn down the theaters that would show it. The studio backed down, leaving the door open to independent filmmakers.

"The screenplay for that film made him into a jokester without providing a context," said Robert Greenwald, the indy director who finally got the job done. "I don't think he was serious (about burning down the theaters), but that certainly dissuaded people."

Greenwald's version, called "Steal This Movie!," stars Vincent D'Onofrio as Hoffman and Janeane Garofalo as his wife, Anita. Scheduled to open here Friday, it's an attempt to capture both the 1960s activist's politics and his sense of fun.

"One of the things I've tried to capture is his spirit," said Greenwald, who recently visited Seattle for a benefit screening, just days after Bobby Seale presented the picture in Philadelphia near the Republican convention. "Abbie felt that politics doesn't have to be dry or dreary."

The movie's title, a twist on Hoffman's book, "Steal This Book," is an impish tribute. It was originally called "Abbie," but Anita Hoffman, among others, "gravitated to this title rather quickly."

Anita, who died of cancer two years ago, had initially opposed any movie about Hoffman's life. She gave her approval to Greenwald, who is an old friend of the family, partly because of his track record of socially aware television movies ("The Burning Bed," "Hiroshima," "In the Custody of Strangers," "Forgotten Prisoners"). They met by chance in the late 1970s at a pickup volleyball game in Venice, Calif.

"She was violently against the movie," he said. "But there was this personal relationship. She did trust me, she knew I'd do it as an independent film and not a studio movie. I know that all the movies I've made have not been perfect, but she respected the consistency of effort. I told her I can promise you the effort will be there."

She ended up visiting the set and contributing to the screenplay, which includes many incidents that Greenwald feels are unique to this portrait of the Hoffmans. Her only major objection was that D'Onofrio was too tall to play Hoffman.

"I can't direct him to be short," Greenwald told her. After consulting with a friend, she decided that 5-foot-7 Abbie would have loved to be played by a 6-foot-3 actor.

Troy Garity, the son of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, was cast as Hayden. Kevin Corrigan is Jerry Rubin.

The movie's funniest scene is a recreation of the "Chicago Seven" trial that followed their involvement in 1968 protests against the Vietnam War at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

"You could do a whole movie just on the trial," said Greenwald. "One of the hardest things was cutting that down." But he also feels that "certain stories, the passage of time allows you to tell better."

"Steal This Movie!" was just being completed last year when the WTO protests erupted in Seattle. Greenwald feels that this movement has given the picture a whole new audience.

"The right wing and the Republicans have done a very good job of making the '60s seem irrelevant, but here it is all over again," he said.

At the benefit screenings, which started in May, "there's been an extraordinary response from people in their late teens and early 20s."

Producing a period film on a low budget is always dicey, but Greenwald quickly found a solution to the problem.

"When people read the screenplay after Bob Ward finished it, they said this would make a great $30 million movie," he said. "It has such scope, moving from the early '60s to the '80s - which means you have to have complete change of clothes, cars and backgrounds.

"Fortunately, very early on, when I was studying the documentary footage, the more I studied it, the more I realized I could not do it as well even if I had millions of dollars. I thought, `Maybe there's a way to break some rules here, to integrate the documentary footage with the actors'."

Eventually, he worked out a method for matching new and old footage, turning a 1960s confrontation between soldiers and the real Hoffman into a face-off between D'Onofrio and those same 1960s soldiers. Meticulous rewrites, editing and photography accomplished the trick.

Although the screenplay is officially attributed to a playwright, Bruce Graham, Greenwald gives equal credit to the uncredited Ward.

"He did a tremendous amount of work, but unfortunately because of the Writers' Guild rules, he can't be acknowledged," said the director.

"It was the two of them together working with more than 50 interviews I'd done, plus the two books (Marty Jezer's `Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel' and Abbie and Anita Hoffman's `To America With Love: Letters From the Underground'), and hours and hours with Stew Albert, Gerry Lefcourt and Anita."

"Steal This Movie!" ends with brief notations on the fate of the Hoffmans, including an ambiguous line about Abbie Hoffman's 1989 death, which was officially determined to be a suicide. In the context of the movie, which shows the Hoffman family being relentlessly harrassed by the FBI, it brings up the possibility of foul play.

"I personally think it was a suicide," said Greenwald. "Probably, if you did a poll, the majority of those close to him think it was suicide. But there are those who feel that there was some kind of conspiracy."