San Francisco

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Written by Stephen Vittoria
(Los Angeles)

San Francisco (and the entire Bay Area) holds a very special place in the life of “Long Distance Revolutionary.” And not just because we interviewed a number of extraordinary people in the Bay Area, that’s the practical reality, but really because the spirit of San Francisco runs through the film like a main circuit cable.

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The spirit for me begins with the beat poets: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Ferlinghetti – who was scheduled to be in the film but unfortunately fell and was physically unable to be interviewed. That’s a shame because Lawrence’s courage and commitment to free speech also runs through Mumia’s veins. In another place and another time, Mumia Abu-Jamal could have been sitting in upstairs at City Lights Books in North Beach “howling” with Ginsberg or eating a “naked lunch” with William S.

The beats evolved into the counterculture movement of the mid-sixties that was thriving in San Francisco and it was ground zero for a revolutionary movement that was taking on a world of corruption – social and political… and it was this rumble that a young Wesley Cook aka Mumia would hear in a racist hot bed of corruption known as “the City of Brotherly Love.” The late, great Hunter S. Thompson captured the spirit of San Francisco in the mid-sixties with grace in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas – a truly remarkable passage:

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“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning… And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

In the film, Rubin Hurricane Carter says that Mumia “is one of the lost souls of the revolution” – and I think that encapsulates Mumia best: like Hunter wrote above, Mumia has the right kind of eyes to see the spirit, see the love, see the change. After all, there cannot be change without the vision of change first… and Mumia has never stopped believing in and fighting for change. Indeed, as Carter declares – “a lost soul of the revolution.” While almost every soul of that historic revolution has sold out, compromised, thrown in the towel, or became a ratfink, Mumia (under harsh and inhuman conditions) has continued the battle for freedom, justice, and the un-American way.

And so have some of San Francisco’s (and Oakland’s, and Berkeley’s) favorite sons and daughters… and we were fortunate to capture their brilliance in “Long Distance Revolutionary.” At the Ella Baker Center, we interviewed Angela Davis. Also in Oakland, we interviewed science fiction master and Mumia biographer Terry Bisson. In Berkeley we sat down with Michael Parenti at his home and with poet Aya de Leon on Berkeley’s campus. In San Francisco we spent a great morning in Emory Douglas’s painting studio and then some time with publisher and writer Ted Nace as well as the Native American activist Lakota Harden. And finally, we traveled just north of Baghdad by the Bay and we filmed a remarkable interview with the inimitable Alice Walker.

Clearly, the spirit and the people of San Francisco mean a great deal to the essence and spark of this film, so it’s fitting that our world premiere takes place in the Bay Area at the 35th Annual Mill Valley Film Festival on October 6 at 12:00 noon at the Rafael Film Center (California Film Institute) in San Rafael. With the right kind of eyes (and some tickets), you can see the “inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil.”