GUERRILLA: THE TAKING OF PATTY HEARST is an unprecedented account of the Symbionese Liberation Army, arguably the most notorious and flamboyant domestic terrorist group in American history.
Dedicated to the rights of black prisoners and the working class, the SLA set forth in 1973 to incite the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, brilliantly manipulating the mass media to advance their message. Their audacious kidnapping of teenage newspaper heiress Patty Hearst inspired what might be described as the first true media "frenzy," one that only exploded further when Patty transformed into "Tania" and joined the ranks of the SLA . Every detail of their descent into the surreal outer limits of political extremism was played out in public, a spectacle foreshadowing some of the worst excesses of modern TV journalism. Thirty years later, the SLA's extraordinary two-year crime spree resonates as a parable of political ideology run amok, the role of the media in America, and the romantic fantasies of modern political terrorism.
For GUERRILLA, filmmaker Robert Stone literally went underground, where he spent four years creating a film that delivers both eye-popping archival footage of SLA founder Russ Little, whose incarceration inspired the Hearst kidnapping. The footage is indeed rare and breathtaking, but Little has never given an on-camera interview, making GUERRILLA an important historical document, as well as gripping entertainment. Stone's film does not sympathize with or glorify the SLA . Instead, GUERRILLA gives us a thorough, clear-eyed account of the first terrorist group to hold not just one heiress, but the entire nation hostage, and its subsequent, disastrous self-destruction.
Q AND A WITH ROBERT STONE, DIRECTOR OF GUERRILLA: THE TAKING OF PATTY HEARST
When did you first become aware of the Symbionese Liberation Army ( SLA )?
I was fourteen and fifteen when the kidnapping of Patty Hearst happened. It made a huge impression on me. Everybody was talking about it, even on the east coast where I was living. I remember my parents had a subscription to Newsweek and it seemed that Patty Hearst was on the cover every week. It was the first time we'd experienced a news story unfolding like an ongoing soap opera. It was one bizarre thing after the other. I wasn't caught up in the politics of it. It seemed like a weird pop-culture story - the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) and their slogans. I remember watching the shoot-out in Los Angeles on live television, everybody did. We'd never seen anything like that before, it was incredible. I remember after Patty got arrested, there was an incredibly funny spoof on the show Saturday Night Live. Anyway for me and my friends, that's how we regarded it. We weren't caught up in the cause or anything. It was seen as this bizarre pop culture Californian weirdness: we had this jaded attitude to the 1960s thing, because we were the younger generation.
At what point did you decide to make a documentary about this subject?
I walked into a used books store in New York in 1994, and I picked up a book called Voices of Guns, which was written in the late 1970s, and was about the SLA and who they were. It's an amazing book and I was amazed that I had never known that side of the story. It had always been about Patty - that was all we knew. I immediately thought that this will make a great movie. It was interesting to me on so many levels. Most of my films have been about this area where fantasy meets reality, and there's so much of that in this story. The whole relationship between the media and terrorism I found fascinating. I wasn't able to get any money to make the movie, because I didn't want it to be the Patty Hearst story, I wanted it to be this other thing. Hearst's celebrity has obscured people's attitudes to what the story is. I was eventually able to get the money in the year 2000, because they had gotten back in the news again because of the recent arrests. And then of course September 11 happened in the middle of making the movie. Suddenly everyone was talking about terrorism, and the mass-media /terrorism thing was on everybody's minds. It became a much bigger thing than it started off.
How hard was it to get Russ Little and Mike Bortin to speak on camera for the film?
It was a matter of building trust with the group. The key thing was I got to know Bill Harris. We spent a day together talking, and I showed him some of my other films. I was very upfront that I didn't agree with what they did, or anything like that. I didn't want to make a film that was rewriting their history. I didn't want to make any deals with them. If I had come with any other attitude, they would have said no. I explained that I didn't use narration in my films, and that if they weren't in the film, somebody else would be talking about them. Bill couldn't be in the film because of his legal situation, anything I shot of him might have ended up in court. He said that Russ Little could talk because he'd been re tried and acquitted of crimes he committed in the SLA . That shocked me because I didn't know where Russ was. He'd changed his name and disappeared. Bill was still in touch with him and they were very good friends. Russ agreed to talk to me no strings attached. I flew out to Hawaii and met him at a secret location. I didn't have his address or phone number, because he wanted to preserve his privacy. It was very fresh for him. He may have spoken to his immediate family, but otherwise it was a complete unburdening to him. We spent the whole day and it all came out really raw. Mike was easier to track down. Again it was establishing trust, and showing him that I wasn't some tabloid TV guy coming along to do some exploitative film. They hadn't been approached by anybody who was trying to make a serious film.
What do you think pushed these college kids into armed insurrection?
What pushed them over the edge was that after 6 years of demonstrating against the Vietnam War, Nixon get re-elected in 1972 by a landslide. He was the man who had promised back in 1968 to end the war. As Mike Bortin says in the film, a lot of the people who got involved in the demonstrations were at the top colleges. It was the best and the brightest, these were upper middle class kids. The whole ridiculous thing about going in to Iraq and saying we're going to turn them all into middle-class capitalists, and then there won't be any more terrorism. All the 9/11 hijackers were college-educated upper middle class kids. You look at all these groups all around the world, whether it's the Baader Meinhof or the Red Brigades or the Weather Underground, they're all college-educated kids. Maybe if you're a poor kid from a working-class family, you're more interested in putting food on your table than having the time to read Marx and Mao.
The SLA story seems a defining moment in the way the mass media cover terrorist stories
Yes I think it was a turning point in the way the broadcast news media covers things, and it formed a template for these focused soap opera episodes we have. We've had OJ, the Scott Pietersen murder case, the Michael Jackson trial, which are covered in these serial dramas. We cover the war for three weeks and then we move on to something else, that's how we understand news events. This started with the Patty Hearst story. The broadcast news media in this case transformed themselves from being a public service into an extension of the entertainment industry. Part of this is new technologies - live video is coming in for the first time, so you have an ability to transmit an unscheduled live event to the nation and that was put into effect with the shoot-out with the SLA members in the house in LA. Now we watch wars on live TV. I remember we'd never seen this before, apart from perhaps the Oswald shooting.
And the terrorists in the film understand how the media can act as their mouthpieces
The SLA were very savvy. Their great skill was in manipulating the media. Part of it was guerrilla theatre and performance art. They were drama students, English majors and arts students. They had a flair for the dramatic, so a lot of the posturing, and the slogans and the ranks were to project this image that they were this great guerrilla army. That was an attractive thing, more interesting than a group just saying give peace a chance. This is part of our attraction to outlaws and terrorists, they are fascinating.
Look at five years ago when Al-Qaeda was a tiny little cult. Whatever they are now, we've made them into that, because they've riveted our attention. The parallels are amazing, except now it's on a grand scale. Like with the SLA, had Al-Qaeda been treated as a tiny cult of misguided college kids, rather than a genuine threat to the United States , none of this would have happened. If you look at 9/11 as a media event, they crashed into the World Trade Centre, they didn't blow up a nuclear power plant or any of the horrible things people imagined they would do next. If you understand what the motives of terrorists are, which linked with the mass media, and our fixation with these kind of dramas, we'd be much better at combating them. There is a parallel between the SLA and Al-Qaeda.
How hard was it to discover the archival footage for the film?
The stuff came from a lot of places. We were fortunate that in this period of time between 1969 and 1975, the news stations were shooting 16mm colour film, with synchronised sound. So if you could find original footage of this stuff, it's beautiful. A lot of the stuff got trashed though when TV stations switched to video in the late 70s and early 80s, they threw out a lot of their collections. Some of it was preserved. One archival coup made the whole film possible as a feature length documentary. There was a guy in San Francisco called Guy Morrison that worked as an archivist in one of the TV stations, and when they threw out their collection, he took it all and put it in a storage locker, where he kept it for 30 years. As much as a 1/3 of the archival footage in the film comes from his collection, and it was all out-takes which had never been broadcast before. It was in terrible condition - we took it to New York , transferred it to video, and that made it possible to flesh this whole story out as a feature-length documentary.
Do you go through periods of doubt during making this sort of work- do you worry for example about not having enough archival footage?
Every evening! It feels like you're going from euphoria to despair every other hour. That's part of the process. You never know when you're entering into these things what you're going to find. Sometimes you hit gold and you come up with a movie that everyone wants to see, sometimes you hit gold. You've got to keep at it and trust your intuition. That's what separates theatrical documentaries and the stuff made for television. The stuff for television is done on very short deadlines. You write a script and you fit the images for the script. The theatrical docs are done in a different way: you see what's out there, you explore the world and gather materials. It's a long-haul approach and a very expensive process, but in the end you have a piece of cinema, and come up with a lot of surprises. If you're sending a researcher out to find things, your script is often based on images you have in your mind, that you might have seen in another documentary. The stuff gets recycled.
What surprised you the most in researching the film?
The greatest surprise for me was how the news media and the Hearst family regurgitated back the rhetoric of the SLA and the image of themselves, and how that got back into a feedback loop. Their only knowledge of themselves was what they saw on TV. They bought their own hype. It became something far greater than what it was in reality. The central focus of the film is what we made of the SLA , of these half-a-dozen kids, of Patty Hearst, rather than what they were. It's really about us. It's our response to this act of terrorism which is more interesting than the act itself. If you limit it to what they did - you've got a dozen kids, who kidnapped a 19-year-old girl and held her hostage. Everything else is mushrooming out- there wasn't any grand, spectacular thing they did. Even the political aims of the SLA are so obscure and over the top. That very fact is interesting. Why of all the groups from that period are they one to achieve that recognition.
This is why terrorism is a politically useless tactic, it serves no purpose other than to get attention. All these groups descend into megalomania. What is terror? It's in your head, it's the emotion of being afraid. It's fear. It's a response not necessarily to an attack, but to a fear of an attack. That's what terrorism generates. This relationship to the mass media is critical to the world we are living in right now.
What was your sense in talking to Russ Little of his perspective on these events?
When you spend time in jail it gives you a lot of time to think, in a way if you're going out to work every day. You have the time to think how did I end up here. In his situation, he was in jail while much of it was going on. He was watching this idealistic group, this guerilla army he'd modeled on a South American revolutionary organisation. He saw his friends go off into this fantasy land, and then, in his words, become like performing monkeys for the media. He was becoming more disenchanted with what happened. He was still very much caught up in the idea that he was a guerrilla fighter and a revolutionary, which is why he went to jail. He didn't co-operate with his defence lawyers, he didn't attend his trial, he wouldn't talk. Despite where his friends were going, he wanted to retain his idealism. He feels like he didn't sell out his ideals and he didn't go down the rabbit hole like they did, and that still comes across.
Was it always your intention to finish the film with Patty Hearst being interviewed on a chat show?
No, I can't remember when I decided to end with that. It was just a great piece of video. I guess I felt like I need to address the question of why I didn't interview her. I needed to toss that to the audience. That ending says it all in so many ways. The fact that she is introduced on the chat show as a former terrorist is about us. Some people have said I am contrasting she's on a chat show and the terrorists are in jail. It's far more than that. It sums up the whole film. It's about what we made of this group, and descending into complete farce. The question the woman asks, 'What was your childhood like?, it's like does that tell you anything. It's not about her. Everyone who came to the SLA had their own personal baggage, a lot of it was about problems with their parents. It got played out in this spectacle of Hearst representing the older generation. All of that is encapsulated in that one little Gaby Roslin piece. What else could Patty say? And that's the question she's been asked since day one.
The whole thing is terrorism as a form of mass entertainment. It is still. It's dark and spooky, like people going to see horror movies. There is an element of that. I used those Hollywood film clips from Robin Hood in the movie to stress that whole notion of the outlaw. We are attracted to outlaws, we're interested in people who transgress outside our daily routines - the people who say 'Screw You' interest us. There's a side of us who wants to rebel, and the ultimate transgressor is the terrorist. And we want the bad guy to be caught at the end, and order to be restored. How we understand reality is through dramatic narrative, and the broadcast news media in this case created a dramatic narrative out of this story. This is how news is communicated. The Patty Hearst story had so many great twists and turns and so it captures our attention. People have compared it to what if Paris Hilton got kidnapped today.
When the film premiered at Sundance, it had a different title- Neverland: The Rise and Fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Why did you change it to Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst?
I liked the original title, it captured the spirit of what the whole thing was. We had to change the title because of the movie Finding Neverland. We got a letter from Miramax films, so it was forced upon us. There was also the Michael Jackson story at the ranch, which people might have confused.
How do you explain the resurgence in American documentaries for theatrical release in recent years?
I think Michael Moore has opened the door to a lot of people who wouldn't normally watch a documentary at the cinema. The technology for making documentaries has made them a lot less expensive to produce - it now costs 10 dollars to shoot 10 mins of film, which allows a lot more people to come into the business. That will produce better documentaries. There is a new generation of film-makers, who are trying to make documentaries that are genuinely cinematic. They draw on Hollywood narratives, music videos and commercials, and they don't come from it as journalists but as artists.
Also people like movies with an attitude. People are hungry for filmmakers to take a stand on a story, and to present it with complexity. You don't get that on TV.
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