Popular Culture Review Vol. 15, No. 2 | Page 17

The Black Panther Party, Hollywood^ and Popular Memory 13 films.” Melvin Van Peebles was unable to equal the success of Sweetback, and his film career was virtually over by the 1980s. However, he bequeathed to his son a legacy of filmmaking and interest in the political agenda of the BPP. Seeking to make his film more commercially appealing, the younger Van Peebles blends historical fact and fiction in the cinematic portrayal of the Panthers. Van Peebles focuses his film upon the roles of Huey Newton (Marcus Chong) and Bobby Seale (Courtney B. Vance) in establishing the BPP in Oakland, California, during the late 1960s amid the police brutality of that period.^^ The film tends to ignore the role played by the Panthers outside of California, and the contributions of such female leadership as Kathleen Cleaver and Elaine Brown are overlooked. Nevertheless, the film does attempt to include the police murder/shooting of Little Bobby Hutton (Wesley Jonathan), the rise of Elridge Cleaver (Anthony Grriffith) in the party leadership, and the role of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Richard Dysant) in systematically discrediting and eliminating the BPP through the government’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO). But to provide some perspective on the formation of the Panthers, Van Peebles introduces a fictional character who is the narrator of the story. Judge (Kadeem Hardison) is a Vietnam veteran and Berkeley student who eventually decides to join the BPP because of their efforts with educational and antipoverty programs in addition to ridding the community of police brutality and the drug trade. Newton then commissions Judge to serve as a double agent when police detective Bremmer (Joe Don Baker) leans on the veteran to serve as an informant. During his undercover work for the Panthers, Judge learns of a conspiracy by the federal government and organized crime to neutralize the unrest and activism of the black community, symbolized by the BPP, by unleashing an epidemic of crack cocaine in the ghettoes of the inner city. In an action sequence. Judge is able to destroy a warehouse of drugs, but he is unable to prevent the liquidation of Panther leaders and a drug epidemic, which, despite the assurances of organized crime bosses, moves out of the ghetto and into the white middle class suburbs.^^ Such a controversial thesis unleashed a torrent of media commentary on the film. The right wing Center for the Study of Popular Culture, headed by former Panther ally and leftist David Horowitz, took out an advertisement in Variety, denouncing the film as a “two hour lie” and—^playing upon Newton’s death in a 1989 drug deal gone bad—describing the BPP as “cocaine-addicted gangsters who turned out their own women as prostitutes and committed hundreds of felonies. Reflecting the internal conflicts, abetted by government campaigns of intimidation and misinformation, which played an important role in the eventual demise of the BPP, Bobby Seale criticized Panther, proclaiming, “It’s got shit backwards, it’s a ciying shame.” On the other hand, David Hilliard, a boyhood fiiend of Newton and BPP leader who was later expelled from the party by Cleaver, emphasized the progressive potential of the Van Peebles film.