I guess the obvious place to start would be with the genesis of the "Panther" movie.
MVP: Well, the genesis of the movie was my novel. As a matter of fact, I just got a review in the biggest review of all, Publisher's Weekly, which calls the novel "engrossing".
I'd like to read that. I didn't realize when I went to the film that it was adapted from the novel.
MVP: Yes, well, what happened was about nine years ago, I was coming from Philadelphia to New York with my partner on the train. I turned to my partner, who's also my son, and I said, "What do you think of the manuscript I showed you of the novel I'm working on?" And he said he thought it was engrossing, it was powerful, and he learned so many things about this group that he really didn't know a lot about. He thought it was all good stuff. Then he went on to say that it would make a great movie.
Actually , I was a little bit annoyed at the time, because I wasn't even sure that I could find a publisher who would print something that explosive as a novel, let alone make it into a movie!
I'd been working on the novel for about fifteen years. And when I started off, people considered it science fiction, not even fiction. It was considered so far-out. Here's this guy talking about the FBI, and people hadn't gotten around to saying that the FBI ever did anything illegal. This was before the 1976 Senate committee that said, on the floor of Congress, that the FBI had committed lawless and illegal acts against the Panther party. So then people backed up a little and said, okay, maybe you've got a slight point. Then, you had the Freedom of Information Act, and it came out about this Cointelpro and other activities. You could even get the memos.
The way you used the Cointelpro memos in the film was very effective. Were those the actual memos?
MVP: They paraphrased the contents, but they were pretty close to it.
It really is shocking.
Well, I used to be a crime reporter in Paris, for one of the French newspapers. So I have a nose for bullshit. It seemed to me one of the most obvious things when I started the book - well, it really started in two strands. One was, if the Panthers were this stumblebum group of thugs, as they were portrayed in the media at that time, how were they able to survive for all those years and flourish, to go from a small core group to over a hundred chapters around the country, if that were true? If from day one, they were at odds with the authorities, how were they able to flourish and grow under that? So that was one thing. The answer to that, quite obviously, was that they weren't what they were portrayed to be.
Number two was, there was a serendipity for the authorities. There was a direct correlation between the rise in the availability of drugs in the ghetto, and the rise of militancy. Was that just pure luck for the authorities, or was there a more sinister explanation? I believe, and as things came out my conscience told me, that there was a more sinister explanation. Now, how to take these two strands and try to breed them together to tell a coherent story? That's how I then came up with the fictitious character of Judge. And it was the weaving of that (the two strands of intrigue) that ended up as the novel, Panther.
Do you think if you'd left out the drug angle that the criticism you're getting would have been less severe? The critics who dislike the film seem to zero in on that.
MVP: No, I think they would've just zeroed in somewhere else. That also happens to be true in shooting the shoot-out. But what happens there is we have what they call corroborated evidence, which usually means, here, white-sanctioned evidence. If it hasn't been in The Wall Street Journal or TIME Magazine, then it didn't happen.
In that shoot-out at the end, in the warehouse, did anything like that ever really happen?
MVP: Yes, it did. On a number of occasions. It happened once right here on 86th and Columbus!
What did the shoot-out take place over?
MVP: It involved a heroin factory at the time.
So the Panthers really actively fought against drugs?
MVP: Yes.
And they really tried to police the ghetto communities?
MVP: They also raised awareness of Sickle Cell Anemia, school programs, all those things that aren't considered so radical now, which have been co-opted by the larger culture without giving the credit where it started. Also, when they were carrying guns originally they were legal in California.
Right. As I recall, the Panthers were the first ones to apply the colonial model to the urban ghettos.
MVP: They weren't the first ones. Many others talked and wrote about that. The Panthers were just well read, well versed people. But they were some of the first to bring it to those times. You have to understand the times: you had the SDS, the Panthers, the Peace and Freedom Party, all those things.... [Eldridge] Cleaver ran an article recently, May 9th, in an interview in the Globe, in which he said, "Look, detail by detail they jumbled the order, but the essence of what was going on was true."
The movie reminded me of the way some Panthers, like Fred Hampton, died in bloody shootouts with the police.
MVP: The murder which happened afterwards, and is only alluded to in the movie. In Fred Hampton's case, there were ninety-nine bullet holes in the house, and only one of them pointed outward. You can go on and on and on, but I don't want to go on about that. There was a lot of that that happened. You've got to read the book, because I have what I call witnesses; people who were there, giving their take on what happened at the time.
Is Eldridge Cleaver still alive?
MVP: Yes, Eldridge is alive. Bobby Seal is alive.
Have they said anything about the film?
MVP: They say it's not the way it happened. Bobby says it's not the way it happened. But then, speaking of the minutiae. Sometimes people who were there get frozen in the details, but I wanted to deal with the forest rather than the trees. "No, he had on a green suit!" "No, it was a pink suit!" I wanted to avoid all that stuff, you understand. And speaking of the forest, I didn't want to be shoved aside with people saying, "Well, this is an individual case." That's why I did it broadly like this. Starting from those two strands I wanted to discuss them and still have an engrossing movie. These were larger-than-life characters, this was a major turning point in America. And that's why I did it that way....
From there, my son had said "Dad, I'll do it with you." But that was nine years ago, and he couldn't even get arrested. He was just starting out in the business. But as time went along, and his star went up, he and I and another producer named Preston Holmes, the three of us got together and pooled our muscle. The first Hollywood group that we went to wanted us to tell it from a mainstream perspective - that's how they put it, a la Biko or Mississippi Burning. You know what I mean?
They wanted a white central character.
MVP: They wanted a white Panther. And when I didn't like that suggestion, they wanted a Guru, some Berkeley student who teaches these poor illiterate kids to read and write and then they turn into Panthers. So ,finally, we ended up getting the money from overseas, and that's how we raised it.
How difficult was it to finance this picture?
MVP: It took five years.
And you had to raise the money overseas. Did it come from people in the movie business?
MVP: Yes. From a movie company called Working Title, who've done most recently, Four Weddings and a Funeral.
What was the budget for "Panther", approximately?
Under ten million, which is less than a third of what you normally do. A normal movie's average cost is $27 million at the least.
