SACHA COHEN TO PLAY HIPPY RADICAL AND AUTHOR ABBIE HOFFMAN IN SPIELBERG FILM
December 31st 2007 10:49
Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Ali G and Borat has been persuaded by Steven Spielberg to play American anarcho-hippy radical and author Abbie Hoffman in a forthcoming film titled, The Trial of the Chicago Seven.
The Sunday Times reports that Cohen will portray Abbie Hoffman, “a figure from the 1960s counterculture who used a series of pranks to campaign against the Vietnam war,” for an expected fee of about pounds stg3 million (A$6.8 million.)
Cohen, 36, won international acclaim with the 2006 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and has now retired his Borat character.
The Trial of the Chicago Seven follows protesters who disrupted the 1968 Democrat party convention with an anti-Vietnam-war ‘carnival’ that turned nasty. Demonstrators threw bricks, police responded with tear gas and the centre of Chicago was engulfed in flames. Curfews only escalated the violence.
After the clashes, independent investigators blamed eight police officers and eight protesters including Hoffman, who had already disrupted the New York Stock Exchange with showers of fake money.
The police were not charged but the protesters were accused of inciting a riot. One was jailed for contempt, leaving the seven to fight the charges.
The later writer Norman Mailer, who testified for the seven, said it was a noisy televised clash between the old order and the burgeoning counterculture.
Hoffman became a cult celebrity who, later diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, killed himself with pills in 1989.
Cohen is still fighting writs for slander and fraud from several people sent up in the Borat movie, including the villagers of Glod in Romania where the opening sections of the film were shot.
- From MediaBlab
The Sunday Times reports that Cohen will portray Abbie Hoffman, “a figure from the 1960s counterculture who used a series of pranks to campaign against the Vietnam war,” for an expected fee of about pounds stg3 million (A$6.8 million.)
Cohen, 36, won international acclaim with the 2006 film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and has now retired his Borat character.
After the clashes, independent investigators blamed eight police officers and eight protesters including Hoffman, who had already disrupted the New York Stock Exchange with showers of fake money.
The police were not charged but the protesters were accused of inciting a riot. One was jailed for contempt, leaving the seven to fight the charges.
The later writer Norman Mailer, who testified for the seven, said it was a noisy televised clash between the old order and the burgeoning counterculture.
Hoffman became a cult celebrity who, later diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, killed himself with pills in 1989.
Cohen is still fighting writs for slander and fraud from several people sent up in the Borat movie, including the villagers of Glod in Romania where the opening sections of the film were shot.
- From MediaBlab
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