MOVIES : Up Against the Wall : There's something to galvanize (or antagonize) just about everyone in director Mario Van Peebles' fictionalized history of the Black Panthers--especially the ex-Panthers themselves.

By Kristine McKenna

April 30, 1995 12 AM PT

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OAKLAND — Brace yourselves. With the release this week of “Panther,” director Mario Van Peebles’ fictionalized history of the Black Panther Party, every ‘60s radical with breath left in his body threatens to crawl out of the woodwork to take issue with the film.

Because one thing nobody’s ever been able to agree on, then or now, is the truth of what went down with the Black Panther Party.

Was party co-founder Huey Newton, the figure around whom all Panther stories pivot, a genius and revolutionary martyr or merely a street thug with the gift of gab? (People who knew him remember him as a charismatic blend of both.) And were the Panthers heroes or villains?

Van Peebles knew he was opening a can of worms when he decided to make “Panther,” and he is the first to acknowledge that his film, which was scripted by his father, pioneering black filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, “isn’t the full story--and is just a beginning in the telling of the Panthers’ history.”

The final, violent flowering of the civil rights movement that began in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, when Rosa Parks insisted on sitting in the “whites only” section of a city bus, the Panthers rejected the nonviolent philosophy espoused by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.--which was central to the strategies of the leading civil rights organizations of the day, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference--in favor of the more aggressively revolutionary tactics of Mao Tse-tung.

Initially formed to protest the police brutality then rampant in Oakland, the Panthers and their history shatter into a hundred conflicting stories from there. Which story to tell? The community-outreach programs the Panthers initiated in their early days? The warring factions within the Panthers and in the black liberation movement as a whole? The illegal methods the U.S. government resorted to in attempting to destroy the Panthers? Newton’s descent into drug addiction--a descent that finally hit bottom in 1989 when he was killed on the streets of Oakland in a drug-related shooting?

Mario Van Peebles, whose 1991 film “New Jack City” was a box-office hit, focuses on what might be described as the Panthers’ golden period, beginning with their formation in 1966 and ending in 1969. Much has been written about the dark side of the Panthers, who officially disbanded in 1981, and there have been numerous allegations of gangland-style executions, drugs and extreme violence against women within the organization.

A book published last year, Hugh Pearson’s “The Shadow of the Panther,” presents a damning body of information, and even the pro-Panther histories written by former party members--Elaine Brown’s “A Taste of Power,” David Hilliard’s “This Side of Glory”--acknowledge that much transpired within the Panthers that they regret today.

Taking the long view, however, the Panthers seem to have fallen prey to the same things that brought down the entire ‘60s counterculture: youthful hubris, ego-driven internal dissension and drugs.

And, of course, the U.S. government didn’t exactly handle any of these people with kid gloves. COINTELPRO, the illegal counterintelligence program used by the government to crush the Panthers (and only vaguely alluded to in the film), involved the planting of informants within the Panthers, illegal wiretapping and the framing and imprisoning of key party leaders, and was implicated in the deaths of several party members--most notably, that of Fred Hampton, head of the Panthers’ Chicago chapter. (COINTELPRO was discontinued in 1971 when an office burglary resulted in some of its records being leaked to the press. Its complete files were made available to the public in 1974.)

When “Panther” producer Preston Holmes walks to the front of the crowd gathered at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater and declares, “This is the most important screening of this film we’ll have,” he’s not just blowing Hollywood hot air. The screening is for surviving Panthers and their families, and if these people don’t like the film, then it has failed in an important way.

The screening gets off to a late start because it’s doubling as a reunion of sorts, and the lobby is jammed with old friends who haven’t seen each other in years. Most in attendance are well-dressed, middle-aged people who bear no resemblance whatsoever to the popular conception of a black revolutionary; however, the politics of the audience begin to show when the screening gets rolling and enthusiastic cheers go up during scenes where the Panthers openly challenge the Oakland Police Department.

Described by screenwriter Melvin Van Peebles as “an impressionistic, rather than a scientific, accounting of the Panthers’ early days,” the film opens with the formation of the Panthers, then depicts key events of their first three years. Among them: the Panthers’ storming of the Capitol in Sacramento with guns drawn; providing security to Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, in her first public appearance after her husband’s assassination; the confrontation between Huey Newton and the Oakland Police that resulted in the death of Officer John Frey and the wounding and jailing of Newton.

As to how he prepared his script, Van Peebles says: “In many cases, I was there. I also talked to many Panthers, several of whom have been friends of mine for years, looked at old issues of the Panther newspaper and Ramparts magazine and went through the government documentation of COINTELPRO.

“I didn’t refer to any of the books on the Panthers that came out in the last few years, because they were published after I wrote the script,” adds Van Peebles, who says he was moved to write his screenplay because it always struck him as more than coincidental that the rise of militancy in the black community seemed to be directly followed by a mysterious--possibly government-masterminded--influx of drugs.

Post-screening, the audience moves to the lobby where they share their reactions to the film.

Artie Seale McMillan, ex-wife of party co-founder Bobby Seale, dismisses it as “a gross misrepresentation of the Panthers.”

“The only Panther who was consulted for the film was Tarika Lewis, so it’s not surprising that many dates and incidents are wrong,” says McMillan, who adds that her ex-husband is under contract as a consultant to Warner Bros., which has a film about the Panthers in production. (A spokesman for Warner Bros. confirms that the studio does have a project in development based on David Hilliard’s 1994 autobiography and Bobby Seale’s 1991 book “Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party & Huey P. Newton.”)

Hilliard, a high party official in the late ‘60s who is also a consultant on the Warner film, lauds “Panther” as “a very positive portrayal of our organization.”

Tarika Lewis, who joined the party when she was 17 and was one of the first female Panthers, served as technical adviser on the film, but says: “It’s off in terms of chronology and also fails to make clear that most of the building of the party was done by Bobby Seale while Huey Newton was in jail.

“However, this is a docudrama, not a documentary, and given that, I don’t think it’s a misrepresentation. It talks about the Panthers’ ideals and their 10-point program and shows the police brutality we struggled against.”

Says Tolbert Small, a doctor who became involved with the civil rights movement while working for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi and provided medical care to the Panthers after moving to Oakland: “You don’t expect accuracy in a Hollywood movie--which is what this is--and the reality of the Panthers was much more violent than the film shows. The reason the Panthers came to exist was because the Civil War had been over for 100 years but black people still weren’t free, and there was a profound rage at the ongoing oppression; the Panthers were the visible form that rage took.”

Oleander Harrison agrees with Small, noting that “the film doesn’t show enough violence--the reality was much more violent--and the police were a lot more scared of the Panthers in the early days than they show in the movie.

“They toned that down, though, because people wouldn’t believe it if they showed how it really was,” says Harrison, who joined the party in 1966 when he was 16 and left three years later.

“I left the party because it started to split within itself and I disagreed with the political direction it was taking. The other reason I left was because the organization was beginning to achieve its goals, so I felt my job was finished,” adds Harrison, who is now an engineer. “The things we fought for are taken for granted today, but prior to the ‘60s it was hard for black people to get an education, they were denied access to many things, and the police could brutalize us any time they wanted.”

Huey Newton’s brother, Melvin Newton--who joined the party in 1968, left in 1970 and was primarily involved in running Huey’s defense committee--concurs that “whereas films, particularly violent films, are often seen as an exaggeration of reality, this film understates what that time was really like.

“The party was so outrageously different in its day that it’s hard for people now to understand how radical it was,” he says. “Essentially, though, nothing in the film strikes me as grossly inaccurate.”

One of the most controversial choices Mario Van Peebles made in the $9.5-million film was the decision to present Huey Newton (played by Marcus Chong) as a heroic figure. With a well-documented history of violent behavior and a serious drug habit, Newton has been dismissed by many historians as nothing more than a highly intelligent gangster. Van Peebles stands by the film’s characterization, saying: “It isn’t misleading to present Newton as a hero, because our film ends in 1969, which was before the party--largely under Huey’s influence--split into warring factions and became Fellini-esque. In the early days of the party, Huey was a heroic figure.

“Beyond that, this isn’t Huey’s story, nor is it about whether the Panthers were good guys or bad guys,” Van Peebles says of the film, which also stars Kadeem Hardison and Courtney B. Vance. “Essentially, this is a film about a government conspiracy to neutralize the people.”

Harrison’s problem with “Panther’s” interpretation of Newton is of a different sort:

“Huey was a very intelligent guy, as was Eldridge Cleaver, and that’s something the film fails to convey. They could articulate their ideas amazingly well, and the actors portraying them simply don’t have the magnetism the real people had.”

Adds Small: “Huey was different people at different stages of his life and, like any tragic figure, he had his fatal flaws. Lack of courage, however, wasn’t one of them--he was a very courageous person, and I think the film shows that.”

Melvin Newton applauds the film’s handling of his brother and asserts that “Huey was a heroic figure, albeit one with terrible flaws. It’s ironic that in the end he became a victim of the drugs he’d fought against earlier in his life.” (Newton is collaborating with Washington-based writer Don Davis on a biography of his late brother.)

Though Huey Newton isn’t shown using drugs in “Panther,” drugs are a major subtext in the film, which suggests in no uncertain terms that the current drug epidemic can be laid at the feet of a federal government that willfully incapacitated the black population by allowing its communities to be flooded with drugs. This is one point every ex-Panther in attendance agrees is accurate.

Says Elaine Brown, who became party chair in 1974 when Huey Newton was in exile in Cuba and now splits her time between residences in France and Oakland: “Anybody with an understanding of social dynamics knows that black people didn’t develop a drug trade involving airplanes and massive transport operations that only land in New York and on the West Coast.”

As to whether governmental persecution of the Panthers is a thing of the past, Emory Douglas, who joined the party as a graphic designer in 1967 and was a member until 1980, says: “Not necessarily--I don’t put anything past the government and, to this day, whenever the Panthers come up in the media, attacks on the party always seem to follow.

“People didn’t believe our claims of what the government was doing in the ‘60s, but now that the documents on COINTELPRO are public record, they know we were telling the truth,” says Douglas, who now works as a graphic artist for the Sun Reporter newspaper in San Francisco and is also a consultant on the Warner Bros. film. “And, of course, there are Panthers today who are still in jail.”

(Attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. recently announced the formation of a blue-ribbon citizens commission to pressure the district attorney’s office into giving a new hearing to Geronimo Pratt, an L.A.-based Panther leader who has been in jail since 1972, when he was convicted of a murder many believe he didn’t commit.)

Checking in with Mario Van Peebles a few days after last month’s screening to see how he thought it went, the director laughs and says: “Nobody tells you you have an ugly baby at the christening, so it’s hard to tell. This movement had all kinds of factions with different points of view, and when so many different egos are involved it’s very tricky to please everybody. So, everybody might not like this film--nonetheless, I think everybody is still very interested in the Panthers.”

“The party remains a subject of intense discussion today because there hasn’t been an agenda for black liberation since the demise of the Panthers,” says Brown, speaking by phone from Washington, where she’s attending meetings of the Huey P. Newton Foundation, an organization she recently formed with Hilliard and Newton’s widow, Fredericka Newton. (The foundation plans to sponsor a series of youth conferences, as well as the building of a complex of schools, housing and cooperative businesses in East Oakland to be owned and operated by black youth.)

“Black people are an oppressed community who largely live in Third World conditions--that was true in the ‘60s and it’s still true today--and the Panthers were a natural outgrowth of that fact. There was nothing startling about the formation of the party, and this country is ripe for the rise of another organization like it,” adds Brown, who spent the ‘80s raising her daughter, attending law school and writing her autobiography.

“If your ear is to the ground and you’re listening to the rumblings in the black community, you have to realize that people are at a very dangerous edge. There are armed people all over America, and many of them are young black youth who know nothing about the civil rights movement and would just as soon kill somebody as not. If these people are left unorganized, they’ll eventually resort to wild rioting, and given what’s going on in Washington right now, I predict that moment is coming.”