Dramatic Voices of Dissent: Celebrities Film Zinn's 'The People Speak'

Why would Josh Brolin -- with all the current Oscar buzz for his work in No Country for Old Men -- schlep to Boston to film an independent television project named The People Speak for union-scale wages? He explains with passion, "I have given myself over to supporting [this project] in any way that I can in the spirit of reaching those who are in need of an inspiration ... to speak up for themselves." It is this continuum among the historical dissident writings, the activist performers and an audience hungry to unearth the history of their own class, gender and race, that promises to produce an exceptional television series.

The four-hour series is based on the words of the original primary sources for Howard Zinn's unique perennial A Peoples History of the United States, now approaching sales of 2 million copies. These testimonies have been collected by Zinn and his frequent collaborator Anthony Arnove in a new volume called Voices of a Peoples History of the United States. Chris Moore, Zinn and Arnove are executive producing and directing.

Recently they shot the first four sessions of readings and performances in Boston's Cutler Majestic Theatre, organizing them around four themes: class, women, race and war. Boston is Zinn's home turf, so every seat was swiftly filled with people who know his work.

Zinn's introductions and each session's readings offered tantalizing insights into the oft-hidden radical sides of historical figures. Helen Keller, generally represented in soft-focus homilies for overcoming her disabilities, was actually a fiery socialist and suffragist who once, Zinn recalled, picketed outside a theater production about herself. In the "women" session, Christina Kirk read with obvious contemporary resonance from Keller's famous 1916 speech Strike Against War. Here is one excerpt:

We are not preparing to defend our country. Even if we were as helpless as Congressman Gardner says we are, we have no enemies foolhardy enough to attempt to invade the United States. ... [Congress] is planning to protect the capital of American speculators and investors. ... Incidentally this preparation will benefit the manufacturers of munitions and war machines.

Mark Twain's novels are taught in schools, but his anti-imperialist essays were only collected in 1992. "I am opposed," he wrote in 1900, "to have the eagle put its talons on any other land." He exposed the slaughter of Philippine natives during the American invasion in 1899. His Comments on the Moro Massacre, read by Brolin during the "war" session, recall how 600 Filipino children, women and men were trapped in a crater, surrounded on all sides and murdered by "the Christian soldiers of the United States" shooting down into it.

For the many celebrities involved, this is a too-rare chance to work on something that reflects their political values. In shooting this production, Howard Zinn explains, the means are as rewarding as the ends:

Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Kerry Washington and Viggo Mortensen all flew the redeye just to spend a day or two with us ... The affection, the teamwork and the camaraderie -- it becomes less a cast than a social movement, like people on a picket line together. That's the spirit we felt backstage and throughout the process.

The four sessions garnered a momentum that culminated in a prolonged, celebratory standing ovation at the end of the last shoot, audience and cast alike savoring the rare experience of being in a theater full of like-minded progressives.

Some of the readings are terrifying. Following a disturbing excerpt from Christopher Columbus' diary at the opening of the "war" session, Viggo Mortensen read a chilling piece from Bartolome de las Casas' Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies, written in 1542. De las Casas explains how 49 years after the arrival of the Spanish "ravening wild beasts" to Hispaniola, a place that "is a beehive of people," the estimated population of 3 million was reduced to "barely 200 persons."