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.