Eye on a turbulent time

Robert STONE hesitates to call himself a historian, although he does the historian’s job, excavating facts from the remnants of modern memory. Yes, he majored in history at the University of Wisconsin, but his father, chair of the history department at Princeton University, was the real historian. Stone is our contemporary equivalent, a documentary filmmaker, and he has a particular fascination for the recent past.

In “The Satellite Sky” (1989), he examined America’s reaction to the Russian launch of Sputnik; in “Farewell Good Brothers” (1992), he looked at our ‘50s obsession with flying saucers.

Now he has turned to a piece of history that occurred in his lifetime. Born in 1958, he lived via the media, through a series of shocking events unfolding on the other side of the country -- the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army in Berkeley in February 1974, their shootout with Los Angeles police a few months later, the arrests the following year.

As amazing as these events were, at the time they were just “another incredible thing” happening in the world. Now he has revisited the era through adult eyes in “Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst.” Despite its title, the feature-length documentary is more about the SLA and the public context that allowed a minuscule band of radicals to command worldwide attention, he says.

Driven by deep idealism and outrage against the Vietnam War, the SLA members were largely well-meaning and well-educated youths from well-to-do backgrounds. Tim Findley, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who covered the era, said in a telephone interview that he did not believe they would have gone to such extremes had they not been coached by Donald DeFreeze, an escaped convict who joined their number. He welcomes the documentary because “this situation is not as well understood as it needs to be,” he says.

“Guerrilla” includes interviews with Findley as well as with two former SLA members, Russ Little and Mike Bortin. The interview with Little, a founding member, is a coup. Little was arrested and served time for the murder of black Oakland schools superintendent Marcus Foster but was later exonerated. When released, he disappeared into another identity.

Stone tracked him down through an SLA member who served time for the Hearst kidnapping but didn’t want to be interviewed himself because of the upcoming trial for the murder of Myrna Opsahl during an SLA bank robbery in 1975.

Stone met Little just once, but that was enough. “He felt that the time was right to speak out,” Stone says. “It was a great interview because he just unburdened himself. He was able to take me back, what he was thinking at the time. You can see it in his eyes.”

As a student at the University of Florida in the late 1960s, Little witnessed the escalation of the Vietnam War. In 1972 he moved to Berkeley, closer to the radical politics he saw as the only solution to an unjust system. Over footage of student antiwar demonstrations and the Nixon inauguration, his voice says, “It got to the point I felt the country is out of control.... it’s being run by total right-wingers with no respect for the Constitution.”

It was time, he thought, to establish an “army” to fight for what he believed was right, and in Berkeley he managed to find enough like-minded souls to join him. In reality, despite the SLA’s forays into violent action such as murder, kidnapping and bank robbery, most of their war was fought through the media, with words and images.

“I used to think it was the Patty Hearst story,” says Stone on a recent visit to Los Angeles. Ten years ago he picked up a couple of books about the SLA that gave him a whole new perspective. “The story of the SLA and how they came to be formed, what they wanted to do and their living out this fantasy, how the media fed the fantasy and they fed the media, I thought that was fascinating.”

He decided to do a documentary on the subject. Early attempts at fundraising proved unfruitful. Some thought the event passe, some thought it not passe enough -- that is, it was not distant enough to be considered history. Yet others believed it would be great -- as long as he could get Hearst to speak on camera.

But that was not the film Stone wanted to do. He wanted to tell a larger story and did not believe Hearst had much to say about that, even though she had been, during the media frenzy of the time, the star of the drama -- first as the kidnapped heiress, then as the rifle-toting revolutionary “Tania.” Stone decided to proceed on his own, relishing the prospect of having complete editorial control. (He has since gotten funding from the BBC and PBS’ “The American Experience.”)

He began by trying to locate all the documentation and archival footage he could get. “I tried to find material to make a film that was cinematic, not just talking heads,” Stone says.

One major challenge was that in the early ‘80s the news departments at television stations switched to videotape, dumping all their film outtakes. Fortunately, Stone tracked down a lead in the Bay Area, Guy Morrison. Morrison had once worked at a local news station, and as it was about to toss its archives, he salvaged them and put them in storage. When Stone arrived at the storage site, he found “thousands of rusty old cans and an old rewind kit.... It was all falling apart, it was unmarked and uncataloged.”

But he knew he had found the treasure lode, a wealth of unique and riveting footage -- newspaper publisher Randolph Hearst and his family caught on camera shortly after the kidnapping, the public negotiations with the SLA for Patty’s return, the disastrous food distribution program that followed. “I knew then I could make a feature film I’d want to see,” he says.

The filmmaker also hoped to obtain the complete footage of the infamous Hibernia Bank robbery in which Hearst participated two weeks after announcing she had joined the SLA. Only the FBI had the whole take, and the agency refused to release it because of the pending Kathleen Soliah trial. Having been on the lam for nearly a quarter of century, Soliah had finally been discovered in Minnesota in 1999 and arrested. In early 2002, between the end of her trial and the reopening of the Myrna Opsahl case, Stone was given access to the footage. He uses it to show the event unfolding in real time, from two angles, allowing us to judge whether Hearst did it of her own accord or whether she was under threat from other SLA members.

Here as elsewhere, Stone prefers to let others do the talking. There is no universal narrator used to establish an “objective” voice. Instead, the voices are from interviews he has conducted and from archival recordings he has located, including those made by Hearst. Over time, her voice goes from that of a drawling “Mom, Dad, I’m OK” to a strident soldier of the revolution intoning, “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” In its use of Maoist phrasing and revolutionary poses -- such as the infamous one of Tania in her guerrilla outfit in front of the group’s icon, the seven-headed snake -- the SLA captured the imagination of a nation.

While Stone thinks it is not likely anything like this would happen again, he believes the lesson of these events is that “violence doesn’t work. It can never be a solution.”