 Robert Stone, director of Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst |
On April 3, Patty announced that she had joined the SLA, and changed her name to "Tania." Her photograph with a sawed-off shotgun became famous throughout the world. Patty remained with the SLA until September of 1975, when she was arrested in San Francisco.
Much of this story took place live on television, Mr. Hearst's boyish patrician face quivering as he responded to the SLA's escalating demands. The Patty Hearst kidnapping became the template for the media frenzies that now regularly unfold on our TV screens, from O.J. Simpson to Laci Peterson.
The film Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst retells this story, which, in hindsight, seems a mysterious, bloody fairy tale. Weaving together footage from the seventies—including a series of still photographs of Patty Hearst robbing a bank, spliced together to resemble video—director Robert Stone has created a taut, focused, and shocking document. Russ Little, one of the original members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, was interviewed on camera for the first time.
I spoke to Robert Stone on his birthday, the day after the election.
"This is a story I remember from high school," explained Stone. As a 15-year-old trying to understand the legacy of the sixties, Stone found the Hearst kidnapping "like watching the entire period go into some sort of train wreck. It was fascinating." In the early nineties, Stone read Patty Hearst's best-selling memoir, Every Secret Thing, which led him to other books about the kidnapping. He was surprised that no documentary had told this gripping story. Stone chose to avoid using Patty Hearst as the central character. (Paul Schrader had already made a Hollywood movie, Patty Hearst, based on her book.) But Stone couldn't raise money for the film without Patty Hearst's involvement, in our present culture of celebrity. "It was very, very difficult to convince people that she would not be a good witness for this project," Stone said.
 Patty Hearst holds up her letter of clemency on February 2, 1979. Hearst served two years of her seven-year sentence. |
Stone began Guerrilla in 2000, and ended up going heavily into debt, financing much of the movie himself. Suddenly, after September 11, the issue of terrorism became grimly relevant. (Much of the success in filmmaking comes from guessing what people will be interested in two years later.)
Guerrilla premiered at Sundance, and appeared at many film festivals, including Berlin, Montreal, and Edinburgh. Magnolia Pictures will distribute the film domestically, as well as in Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand. PBS will show the film next May, and Guerrilla will appear on television throughout the world. On December 10, the film comes to Upstate Films, in Rhinebeck.
At the moment, documentaries are more pop-ular than ever. "Low-budget independent dramatic films are having a very hard time in the marketplace, because they're competing with Hollywood films—and documentaries are not competing with Hollywood," remarks Stone. "Documentaries are cheaper to make. They're easy to market. You get a lot of word-of-mouth, because they're about issues people are talking about. The fascination with reality television has probably added some general interest. And, obviously, Michael Moore's success has gotten a lot of people into the theaters.
"That said, there are still very, very few that make any money. If you make a documentary, your odds of getting a theatrical release are probably 10,000 to 1. And your odds of making money once you've gotten a theatrical release are probably 20 to 1. It's a tough racket."
Robert Stone has an unusual story himself. He was born in Oxford, England, in 1958 to an academic family. His father, Lawrence Stone, was an historian at Oxford University. His mother, Jeanne Fawtier Stone, collaborated with Lawrence in researching pre-modern England. The Stones helped pioneer the Annales school, which relies on diaries, divorce records, and other primary historical sources. Their best-known book was The Crisis of the Aristocracy.
 Patty Hearst / “Tania” in SLA mode |
Stone recently moved to Rhinebeck with his wife, Melissa Cohen, and two young sons.
I was fascinated that Guerrilla is so suspenseful, even though I already knew the ending. I asked Stone his secret. "First of all, you know the ending," he replied. "Anybody under 35 doesn't know the ending. But there is the classic suspension of disbelief in a story. It's like sitting around the campfire, telling a ghost story that you've heard a million times. Or a good joke. It's in the telling."
Stone explained that he structured the film like a thriller. The musical score, by Gary Lionelli, drives home the drama. The music is electric and contemporary, avoiding the tone of nostalgia in so many documentaries. Watching the film—even with its conspicuous polyester shirts—one forgets that 1974 is over. The Symbionese Liberation Army becomes surprisingly appealing, like a team of comic book superheroes. The six of them defiantly taunt the police, the FBI, and the media. Within the sympathetic Berkeley community, they hide invisibly.
"The one thing the SLA knew how to do was propaganda—they were brilliant," Stone observes. "I mean, the seven-headed snake—their logo. And Tania as their mascot. Even the name 'Symbionese Liberation Army' just sounds terrifying. And their slogan: 'Death to the Fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!' They were artists."
On another level, this tale is a Hearst family drama—between the bland father, the steely, Southern-born mother, and the suddenly revolutionary "Tania." "Every parent who ever had a kid who went off to college and became a radical—who came back and said, 'Fuck you, Dad, I'm a Marxist!'—could relate to this," Stone explains. "[Patty Hearst] became a symbol for the entire generation—and the whole generation gap. You can see, in its most extreme form, the split between the uptight parents and their radical daughter, played out on this almost farcical level."
 SLA self-portrait, April 1974 |
"Do you think the SLA could happen again?" I asked Stone.
"Well, here we are, talking the day after the election, and it appears that Bush has been reelected. There's a great scene in the film where Russ Little is saying, about Richard Nixon's reelection, 'I couldn't believe it, that this guy had gotten reelected, after everything that had gone down!' And that was the turning point; that sent them over the edge. Yes, it could happen. It is happening! Look what's going on in the Middle East! Terrorism is what happens when people feel powerless."