The very essence of “The Big Cigar” is frenetic. The Apple TV+ limited series, a slice-of-life biopic, follows the stranger-than-fiction story of Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, played by a stoic André Holland, and his escape from the FBI into exile in Cuba. The whole thing, from Oakland to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to Cozumel, is a mad scramble.
But Newton retains control of his narrative, carefully enclosing it with narration. In 1974, Newton and his then-girlfriend, Gwen Fontaine (Tiffany Boone), show up on the Beverly Hills doorstep of Hollywood producer Bert Schneider (Alessandro Nivola). Newton opens the program with a warning: “The story I am going to tell you is true. … But is “They come through the lens of Hollywood, so let's see how much of my story they're really willing to show.”
And at the end of the show, in front of a typewriter in a quiet house in Cuba, he closes that circle with cautious optimism. “Hollywood is where people go when they want to escape,” she reflects. “That's where I ran. And that is the revolutionary potential of Hollywood. It can shape minds. It can create worlds that do not exist and alter those that do exist.”
After all, this is “a story about a storyteller who understood the power of storytelling to tell his own story,” said Joshuah Bearman, executive producer of “The Big Cigar,” whose 2012 Playboy article is the basis for the series.
Gwen Fontaine (Tiffany Boone) and Huey P. Newton (André Holland) fled to Cuba in “The Big Cigar.”
(Apple TV+)
“The Big Cigar” takes place four years after Newton was released from prison, having served three years in facilities around California, including solitary confinement at the Alameda County Jail, known as the “soulbreaker.” and the “hole” in San Luis. Bishop, which Newton described as a “torture chamber.” His mind has become increasingly fractured (due to soul-crushing, constant surveillance by the FBI Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and a growing drug addiction) and the show paints a stark portrait of his dizzying descent into paranoia.
Malcolm said showrunner and executive producer Janine Sherman Barrois, who also co-wrote two episodes.
At that particular moment, Newton was nervous, his senses were heightened, and he was acutely aware of what it meant to work with Hollywood.
Bearman's article details how Schneider, along with his producing partner Stephen Blauner (PJ Byrne), concocted a film, also titled “The Big Cigar,” as a cover to get Newton (codename “the star”) to Cuba. The movie was fake, but the Hollywood connections were very real: Schneider produced the landmark film “Easy Rider,” helped engineer the band The Monkees, and his father was president of Columbia Pictures.
“I think the truth is that Huey wasn't that conflicted about Hollywood,” Bearman said. “He saw that power, the revolutionary power of the media and of cinema in particular.”
After Bearman's 2007 Wired article was adapted into the 2012 film “Argo,” Jim Hecht suggested he write something similar about Newton and Schneider's story. Newton died in 1989, so Bearman interviewed those who knew him: Fontaine, former Black Panther Party chairwoman Elaine Brown, his childhood friend David Hilliard (later Black Panther Party chief of staff), and other members of the Black Panther Party. game.
“If Huey were alive and working on the show, he probably would have also been exercising the kind of critical analysis that the voice does on the show,” Bearman said. “It's not like I just said, 'Oh, the movies.' I get it, they're great. They help us tell our story.' “It would have been a conversation and a compromise.”
“I think the truth is that Huey wasn't that conflicted about Hollywood,” Joshuah Bearman said.
(Apple TV+)
Newton knew and loved the 1966 film “The Battle of Algiers,” about rebels fighting the Algerian War against the French government in North Africa, which is referenced in the show. He had been talking about making a film about his own life with filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles. He was well aware of the power of the big screen and understood the intrinsic relationship between media and politics.
The Black Panther Party – with its children's breakfast program, its child development center and its People's Cooperative Housing Program – needed to know how to manage that relationship. “If you're trying to make a change for your community and you're trying to make a change in the world, you have to make it happen somehow,” Barrois said. “They were on the news. “They took the cameras to social programs, they showed police brutality.”
Thus, Newton, as Bearman said, had a deep understanding of image and perception. A scene from the show shows his discomfort with the famous black-and-white image of him sitting in a wicker chair, a bolt-action shotgun in one hand and a spear in the other. This was Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver's idea, not Newton's. The latter were concerned that it would become iconographic, a symbol that could overshadow or distort the movement.
“He sees the revolutionary potential of culture and art,” Hecht said. “And he sees that that is a key pillar of the revolution, yes. But… it's a weapon. It is not inherently good or bad. Movies and television are not a pure presence that you can point at and say, 'There it is!'… but something that, in the hands of humans, like A.I. [artificial intelligence] or anything else, can be shaped and used for evil or good.”
“He sees the revolutionary potential of culture and art,” said Jim Hecht, who developed “The Big Cigar,” about Huey P. Newton (André Holland).
(Apple TV+)
Hecht, executive producer, is credited with developing the show and writing the pilot and finale. It is a deeply personal story for him, one that began in college, where he became deeply interested in civil disobedience, social movements, and participatory democracy. And when he first heard the story, he too was in an active addiction, as Newton and Schneider were in the mid-1970s.
“There's a saying: The personal is political,” Hecht said. “What I wanted to achieve with this program is that if you want to revolutionize the world, or even just your life, you have to be willing to revolutionize yourself.”
That feeling also shines through at the end of the finale. “Black children and future comrades around the world will create their own definition of revolution,” Newton narrates. Just before the credits roll, a montage of photos and videos from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests appears on screen.
Black artists like her, Barrois said, will continue to be tough on Hollywood, demanding that the industry show the full story, and next time sooner than 50 years later.
As for that ending, “he leaves them, passes the torch to them and says, 'Tell your story, tell all the story that needs to be told,'” he said. “You are holding up a mirror to society right now. Because if you don't revolutionize, we won't have any kind of revolution.”
