After three decades, the notorious figures of the 1960s from Malcolm X to Charles Manson have been thoroughly picked over by writers and filmmakers. But that precedent hasn’t helped an Oakland-based film company working on the story of black prison revolutionary George Jackson. Although the film’s subject has been in the grave for more than thirty years, its producers have run into a wall of opposition from state and Bay Area officials who would rather the man’s legacy not be “glorified” on the silver screen.
Black August — both the title of the film and name of the production company — has particularly fueled controversy in Marin County, where George Jackson went out in a bloodbath at San Quentin Prison, and his kid brother Jonathan died in similarly violent fashion at the Marin County Civic Center.
It requires a little history to understand why the state correctional establishment and Marin County officials — who usually welcome filmmakers with open arms — have bent over backwards to thwart Black August.
Even to his admirers, George Jackson was no angel. As a teen, he was repeatedly arrested for petty crimes. In 1960, at age nineteen, he was sent up on a one-year-to-life sentence for robbing a gas station of $71.
Over the next decade, Jackson was shuffled between Soledad, Folsom, and San Quentin prisons, where he was politicized by the writings of Mao and Marx, and the rise of the Black Panthers. He came to see the prisons as a tool for silencing political and social dissidents, and began to organize inmates around his theory that the growing prison population was a potential army of soldiers ripe for a “poor man’s war” against a repressive government.
Jackson documented his philosophy in a series of letters published in 1970 as Soledad Brother. The book, which included an introduction by French dramatist Jean Genet, caught the attention of the radical left, white and black. With his poetic, revolutionary language and class-based ideology, Jackson was seen by many as an heir to Malcolm X.
But his life took a decidedly violent turn. Convinced his political activities and ties to the Panthers would forever prevent his parole, he took part in the revenge murder of Soledad prison guard John Mills, who was thrown to his death from a prison tier. Jackson later privately confessed the crime to his editor, David Dryer.
On August 21, 1971, days before his trial in the guard’s killing, the 29-year-old Jackson launched an uprising at San Quentin with a 9mm pistol he’d acquired. Gun in hand, he released an entire floor of prisoners from the maximum-security wing, crying, “This is it, gentlemen, the Dragon has come!” In the ensuing melee, three guards were slaughtered, as were two prisoners suspected of being snitches, before the instigator was taken out by a guard’s bullet. It was the bloodiest day in San Quentin’s 151-year history.
Jackson’s death made him an instant martyr among prisoners, and contributed to a September 1971 Attica Prison uprising in which more than forty employees and inmates were killed. The rebellions were a nasty shock for Americans. George Jackson, more than any other man, had forced the country to consider the troubling proposition that the rage previously contained behind tall concrete walls could reach beyond and bite lives on the outside.
The makers of Black August figured that stuff was all in the past. The film — financed by Isaiah “JR” Rider, a former NBA star from Oakland whose career has been stalled by his own run-ins with authorities — stars Gary Dourdan of CBS’ CSI: Crime Scene Investigation as George Jackson, and San Francisco actor Darren Bridgett as David Dryer. It focuses on Jackson’s final fourteen months and includes his involvement with Angela Davis and the Black Panther Party, as well as his relationship with editor Dryer, who is dogged by FBI agents as he tries to get Jackson’s letters into print.
Black August producer Andy Hill says the company started out in July confident they’d be allowed to film in at least some of Jackson’s old haunts, since prison policy and state law dictate that film companies can’t be denied permits based on content. A spokeswoman for the state corrections department even highlighted the accessibility of California prisons, noting that, of approximately sixty requests a year from documentary and feature filmmakers, “more than 85 percent get permission to film where they want.”
But Black August was promptly denied access to Folsom, Soledad, and San Quentin, which variously cited security and staffing concerns.
Lance Hoffman, the film’s location manager, says prison officials’ resistance to the project was immediately apparent in their refusal to negotiate terms for a permit — a tactic the twenty-year film-industry veteran calls typical. “They said, ‘There is no point in meeting, we’re just not going to cooperate,'” he recalls.
San Quentin guard John Gladson, who has worked at the prison for two decades alongside employees who were present at the uprising, says nerves are still raw, even after so much time. He believes the circumstances surrounding Jackson’s death invalidate any claim Jackson had of representing the oppressed. “If it was a political action, prison guards weren’t the one to take action against,” Gladson says. “It was working-class people who got killed.”
San Quentin’s public information officer, Vernell Crittendon, says the filmmakers were denied access because of the story’s inflammatory nature. “This is not a historical event for us,” he says. “We still have employees who were here on that day, we have children of staff who were there who are now employees, and we still have prisoners who were there.”
The spokesman points out — and a prison visit confirms — that it would be impossible to film in the locations requested by Black August without the knowledge of prisoners. Fake gunplay in those areas, he says, would likely raise tensions between racially divided prison gangs.
But security fears aren’t much of a factor in the area just outside the prison’s east gate, located more than one hundred yards from the main facility and out of view of prisoners. Black August was denied a permit to reenact what Crittendon calls a “racially motivated” protest at that location, although Hoffman says he easily received permission to film “an identical scene in the exact same spot” for True Crime, a 1999 film directed by Clint Eastwood. “[San Quentin officials] rolled out the red carpet for us,” he says. “Of course, that wasn’t a movie about George Jackson.”
Last month, Black August filmed several “Quentin” scenes, including the uprisings, at medium-security Nevada State Prison in Carson City, where Robin Holabird of the Nevada Film Office says prison officials regarded the story with a “that was then, this is now attitude.”
California corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton defends San Quentin’s decision, citing logistics. “Hundreds of volunteers and visitors pass through the gates every day,” she says. Black August, she notes, asked to film with up to sixty extras, requiring a fleet of support vehicles. That, Thornton says, would have been an unreasonable burden. “It would disrupt visiting by families and volunteers for an entire day,” she notes. “As for filming on a day when they don’t have visitors, well, there’s no such day.” Her office is still negotiating with San Quentin officials for a permit that would let Black August film outside its gate.
If crew members thought they had a tough sell with the prisons, things only got worse when they applied last month to film at the Marin County Civic Center, the scene of a bloody kidnapping by Jonathan Jackson.
That incident, too, stands out in the minds of public officials. In August 1970, the seventeen-year-old entered a Civic Center courtroom, hoping to take hostages to swap for his older brother’s freedom. He slipped guns to a San Quentin prisoner on trial and two other prisoners who were present. The four took hostage Judge Harold Haley, Deputy DA Gary Thomas, and three jurors. Minutes later Jackson, Haley, and two of the prisoners lay dead and Thomas was permanently paralyzed following a shootout with police as the group tried to escape in a van.
Despite negative feelings around Civic Center — which was a key location for 1997 science fiction movie Gattaca — the office of County Administrator Mark Riesenfeld gave Black August notice that a permit was forthcoming. Such permits, he told the Marin Independent Journal, were granted regardless of subject matter, within reason.
So when members of the film crew arrived to pick up their paperwork during the second week of October, Hoffman was surprised to learn that the rules had changed, seemingly overnight, to forbid the use of any type of gun, even a fake one, in or around the building. “What were we supposed to do, run around going bang-bang?” Hoffman fumed at the time. “Where was the public notice? Who was in on that decision? Where’s the record of that meeting?
“They are,” he griped, “making up the rules as they go.”
Hoffman believes Marin officials made the last-minute change under pressure from county Sheriff Robert Doyle, who was a bailiff in a nearby courtroom on that day in 1970, and has said publicly that he objects to the film based on the community’s feelings about the incident. In an October 23 memorandum urging Riesenfeld to deny the permit, Doyle wrote: “We know through reports from the Department of Homeland Security that some government sites have been listed as potential targets by terrorists [sic] organizations. Whether such a plan exists for the Civic Center is unknown but to popularize an armed takeover and reveal the attackers’ specific actions can only be detrimental to our attempts to maintain a safe environment.”
In an interview, Doyle defends his statement. He repeatedly characterizes the film as a “glorification” of the incident at the Marin Center, and insists his security concerns were legitimate. “There is always the fear of copycat crimes,” the sheriff says. “How do people know they are fake guns when they see it in a film?”
Hoffman scoffs at this. “If there are security issues, where are the metal detectors?” he counters. “You could walk in [the Civic Center] with a bazooka and no one would stop you.”
Black August quickly hired an attorney to represent it against Marin County. On October 29, under threat of a federal lawsuit, Riesenfeld reversed himself again and issued the permit, saying, “Upon further discussion with counsel, we have decided not to pursue that change.” He would not elaborate.
Hill believes the reaction by county officials was based on a misunderstanding about the film’s message. “It’s essentially a humanistic story, a male story, with the ’70s as a backdrop,” the producer says. “The movie portrays him as a flawed individual. He killed a guard. No one is hiding that. It was a tragedy. But it was also a tragedy that African-American prisoners were killed. It’s a balanced story.”
But Tcinque J. Sampson, the film’s executive producer and screenwriter, doesn’t claim neutrality on the subject. He spent 22 years locked up in the state penal system, which included a stint at San Quentin in the cell adjacent to the one Jackson once occupied. He proudly claims membership in the Black Guerrilla Family, the prisoner resistance organization Jackson founded in Soledad.
The movie, according to Sampson, will explore some of the unanswered questions about the deaths of both Jacksons, including the source of George’s pistol in San Quentin and the unexplained presence of a small army of corrections officers, armed with rifles, who joined police in riddling Jonathan’s escape van with bullets. “We allege that there were some untoward circumstances, and the audience will see that on the screen,” he says.
Sampson also is convinced Sheriff Doyle’s feelings aren’t necessarily shared by the public. “I sympathize with [Doyle], the fact that he was a bailiff there that day,” Sampson says. “However, it appears that the families of the jurors present, the family of the Honorable Gary Thomas, and the Marin community as a whole seem to be making less of an outcry than the sheriff himself.”
Indeed, when Black August showed up on Halloween for its three-day shoot under the graceful arch of the Marin Civic Center, they encountered only a single protester, a 67-year-old retired San Francisco police sergeant from San Rafael, who was hauled off by police after he refused to leave the set.
The crew also received a dose of reality with the arrival on location of Jonathan Jackson Jr. — Jonathan’s son and George’s nephew. The 32-year-old, conceived just weeks before his father’s death, attended UC Berkeley as an undergrad and is now a Ph.D student at Cornell University. The “surreal” quality of watching a re-creation of his father’s death, Jackson says, doesn’t lessen his personal satisfaction in seeing the film made. “There is an incorrect perception that the Jackson family has been killed off,” he says with a sly smile.
During his years at Berkeley, Jackson says he kept his family history mostly to himself. Now, he believes, the time is right to revisit it. “It’s a valuable moment in history,” he says. “But I don’t decide what’s valuable about it. You sit down and talk about it, you make a movie about it, and that’s how you learn the value of it.”
“The Bay Area needs to heal itself on this issue,” he continues. “We’ve come a long way in thirty years, so let’s deal with it.”
