William Kunstler Disturbing the Universe
The life and times of radical lawyer William Kunstler is the stuff of legal legend.
The liberal icon was also a father, and two of his daughters recently created a documentary about his life’s work.
WWTW reached out to Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler about the making of “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” just released on DVD, as well as shooting a warts and all feature about their father.
WWTW: Can you discuss the balance struck in the film between your father’s professional triumphs and your personal anecdotes shedding light on him as a person? Was that difficult to achieve?
SK: Definitely the biggest challenge we faced as filmmakers was figuring out how to strike this balance. Early on, Emily and I knew that we couldn’t make a traditional biopic. But it was hard for us to figure out how to incorporate our points of view and how much of our personal stories it was important to share. We owe a great debt to our producers (Jesse Moss, Susie Korda and Vanessa Hope) who helped us look at the film from the outside and helped us find and weave together the personal with the historical and political.
WWTW: What did you learn about your father while researching the film that you weren’t aware of prior to the shoot?
EK: We definitely learned new things about our dad. We had the opportunity to meet Paul and Orial Redd, founders of the NAACP chapter in Westchester, N.Y., whose fight to live in an all-white housing complex was among our dad’s first civil rights cases. Dad never told us about this case, and we had assumed all of his civil rights cases took place in the south. We were amazed to find that the Redds still lived in the same apartment they won the right to live in back in 1961. And saddened to learn that after all this time, they were the only black family there.
But I think the most important things we learned were about ourselves. Since our father died when we were still teenagers, the film afforded us the opportunity to get to know him as adults. And although we complained about it during his lifetime, the fact that our father lived so much of his life in the public eye really provided Sarah and me with a unique opportunity to hear from our father directly. We collected a wealth of archival material and could literally just rewind the taped to find many of the answers we were looking for.
WWTW: Any intriguing reactions to the film during its theatrical release, perhaps by younger audience members who weren’t alive when your dad was fighting for civil rights?
EK: I remember one particular screening for 300 sophomores at a public high school in Seattle. The film started and it was dead silence, which initially had me worried, but than I realized that they weren’t texting or gossiping with their neighbors so I took this as a good sign. I sat in the hall though most of the screening and at one point, midway
through the film, a young student exited the theater with her arms flailing above her head screaming, “This film is blowing my mind!” and rushing to the bathroom to bathroom and back so she wouldn’t miss anything. This was our first screening before a high-school audience and although Sarah and I hoped the film would resonate for them, we were worried because it deals with events that transpired long before any of these students were alive. But the reactions by that student and others showed me that that we were reaching this audience and more importantly, that this was the most important audience to reach.
WWTW: Your father once said, “I’m not a lawyer for hire. I only defend those I love …” but later in life he defended some people many would say were indefensible’ – how did making the film help you process his defense of unsavory clients over the final decade of his life?
(more below)
SK: I don’t think our father felt the same affection for El Sayyid Nosair, the man accused of killing Rabbi Meir Kahane, that he felt for Abbie Hoffman, one of his clients during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, but as we looked back at his life we began to see more of a common thread. Towards the end of his life dad came to see the defense of the unpopular at the forefront of civil rights law at that point in time. He felt that it was the most unpopular defendants who were most likely to be vilified in the media, where there would be a rush to judgment, and subsequently whose rights were most likely to be violated in the courtroom. Dad saw his unpopular clients as canaries in the coalmines of the legal system – where their rights were violated all of our rights could soon be violated.
WWTW: Reviewers were surprised how the film magnifies your father’s penchant for media attention and his in-court theatrics – were you trying to be even-handed to assuage potential criticism, or was that an artistic choice as a filmmaker to be as objective as feasible?
EK: I don’t think the film is at all objective. It is from our perspective as our father’s daughters. When we started out, we were preoccupied with telling a balanced story. We wanted to give equal time and space to our dad’s enemies and detractors. But most of them wouldn’t talk to us. Being our father’s daughters gave us amazing access in certain
respects. But it also closed certain doors to us. But in the process of making this film we realized that the critical voices we were looking for were our own. It was Sarah and my journey – we were the ones looking for answers. So we focused on what was for us a very real investigation into our father and how we felt about him and forgot about the
rest. But even though the film does not look at dad with rose-colored glasses, it is a loving and redemptive story.
WWTW: What would your father think about the year 2010 with a man of color in the White House? What battles do you think he’d be fighting today?
SK: We think about this a lot. When President Obama was elected, it was definitely a moment we know he would have loved to live to see. But after the election, Emily and I were to hear people talking about how the election of a black president meant that we had “moved beyond race.” Dad would have been horrified. In a nation that still bears the scars
of slavery, civil war, Jim Crow, lynchings, riots, and the assassinations of countless black leaders and activists, racism is alive and well. It doesn’t go away when one person of color is elected to higher office, even when that office is the highest in the land. And if we stop talking about it, we ensure that it will never die.
EK: Dad used to play this game with Sarah and I when he read the New York Times Week in Review. He used to go through the articles and point out how many times the Bill of Rights had been violated in the past week. He taught us that freedom is a constant struggle, and that it is our responsibility to stay on the front lines of that struggle. If he
were around today I am sure he would be taking cases that would keep him in that fight – whether it be representing Guantanamo detainees or challenging the Patriot Act. And he would be fighting for some of his longtime clients who are still in prison, Leonard Peltier and Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown).
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
In other words, we’ll always be a racist country to people like her, because they’ll never accept that we aren’t one no matter what happens.
Kunstler was a red diaper commie baby and remained one his whole life.
Beneath contempt.