Aaron Sorkin's new film The Trials of the Chicago 7 takes great pains to accurately portray the famous 1968 trial, but Allen Ginsberg's wild testimony was cut from the movie entirely. The Trial of the Chicago 7 details the prosecution of eight anti-Vietnam war protesters charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Allen Ginsberg famously testified at the trial - although he was not a defendant - and was one of many celebrity counterculture figures that were called as witnesses.
Allen Ginsberg appears briefly in The Trial of the Chicago 7, but his famous testimony doesn't appear in the movie at all. Ginsberg was a writer and a poet with a long history of political activism. Ginsberg was called as a witness for the prosecution due to his role as a prominent anti-Vietnam war activist and his participation in planning and promoting the protest. Aaron Sorkin made many changes to the real story of the Chicago 7 to compress the months-long trial into a film and likely chose not to include Ginsberg's testimony to narrow the movie's focus on the defendants. While leaving the testimony out might have been the right narrative choice, it would have been a great addition to the film.
Allen Ginsberg's trial testimony featured him repeatedly chanting Hare Krishna at the judge, in one instance while answering a question about his participation in a press conference that announced the protest. Ginsberg's chanting resulted in disruptive laughter from the spectators, who were then scolded by defense attorney William Kunstler. Judge Hoffman responded to the chants by saying, "the language of the United States District Court is English," (via prosecutors Richard Schultz and Thomas Foran.
Those weren't Ginsberg's only antics while testifying. He also repeatedly chanted "ooommmm," most famously to calm down Judge Hoffman and William Kunstler when an argument broke out. Part of Ginsberg's testimony focused on his travels to India, where he studied Eastern religion and tried to prove that chants have been known to calm large assemblies of people, to justify his chanting during the protest in an attempt to calm protesters before their violent altercation with the police. Instead, his memorable testimony mostly succeeded in making the spectators burst into laughter.
But Allen Ginsberg's testimony isn't memorable only because he was chanting on the stand. The prosecutor's line of questioning was designed to discredit Ginsberg on the basis of his sexuality, which they did by forcing him to read poems that he had written containing graphic sexual imagery. Thomas Foran also attempted to imply that Ginsberg had a sexual relationship with two of the defendants, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, which has never proven to be true.
Aaron Sorkin didn't include Allen Ginsberg's wild testimony in the film, likely to strengthen the narrative and narrow the focus on the actual defendants in the case. Ginsberg's testimony isn't the only one that was left out of the film - other celebrity testimonies from Jesse Jackson, Phil Ochs, and Judy Collins were cut as well. Nonetheless, it's a shame that the wildest testimony from the trial - which included Allen Ginsberg chanting and reading graphic poetry - was left out of The Trial of the Chicago 7 entirely.
