Finally Got the News: The Making of a Radical Film

Finally Got the News: The Making of a Radical Film1 Dan Georgakas (bio) and Cole Nelson Editor's Introduction Though not directly affiliated with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Dan Georgakas served a crucial role in documenting the struggles of the League, most notably in the now classic coauthored study Detroit: I Do Mind Dying. It is by way of Georgakas's and coauthor Marvin Surkin's study that many contemporary activists have come to learn of the League's precedence in "urban revolution, " to borrow from the book's subtitle. Alongside the League's militant workplace organizing, wildcat strikes, and legal battles, Georgakas and Surkin pay special attention to the League's manifold practices of cultural production—from the League-affiliated newspaper Inner City Voice, edited by John Watson, and the various plant-specific newsletters, most notably DRUM, to the League's book club run by Mike Hamlin and the short-lived Black Star Productions out of which Finally Got the News (dir. Stewart Bird, Peter Gessner, and René Lichtman, 1970) was intended to be the first of many agit-prop films. For Georgakas, Finally Got the News was the pinnacle of the League's cultural achievements, contributing not only to the broadening of awareness brought upon the League both nationally and internationally, but also intervening in the politics of film form itself. Georgakas's original 1973 review of the film in Cineaste, reproduced in full below, stands testament to the importance he placed in this work of militant filmmaking. Notably, Georgakas's characterization of Finally Got the News situates the film as less a narrowly conceived black nationalist thesis and, instead, as a series of insights into the messy and occasionally contradictory efforts at developing a revolutionary class politics that begins from the perspective of Detroit's black working class. To this end, Georgakas supports the theoretical overtures End Page 100 of John Watson who, along with Mike Hamlin and Kenneth Cockrel, sought thoroughly to inform the League's political outlook with a Marxism-Leninism reconfigured for the context of local black struggle. Consonant with Georgakas's characterization of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion as, ultimately, a proletarian rebellion, rather than a primarily black uprising, Georgakas here underscores the fundamental working-class orientation that informs Finally Got the News over and against competing political interpretations of the League. 2 The lasting legacy of Finally Got the News has been secured in no small part from Georgakas's widespread advocacy for both the film and the organization it documents. Worth noting are Georgakas's travels to Italy with Watson in 1970 to promote the film, setting up screenings with Italian extra-parliamentary militants who sought common cause with the League. 3 We reproduce here Georgakas's review in part to mark the lifelong efforts of this revolutionary intellectual in highlighting the ongoing significance of the League and its struggles. On the other hand, we bring this review to the surface to commemorate the author and activist whose untimely death in November 2021 has laid to rest an indomitable spirit of great conviction. It is our hope that, through renewed engagement with Georgakas's writings, we might continue to learn of the importance of committed filmmaking as one of many means in advancing working-class and black revolution. —Cole Nelson ________ Finally Got the News has become a classic before its time. The organization it was designed to promote no longer exists, but its political and class perspectives are becoming increasingly relevant. What remains so distinctive and valuable about the film is its insistence on the primacy of the working class in making a revolution. The hour-long documentary gives a taste of what the masses can do. Scenes of the city of Detroit—people pouring in and out of the factory gates, the gigantic sign which records minute-by-minute car production figures standing over the expressway like a capitalist holy grail, the Diego Rivera murals in the Art Institute, the stench hanging over Ford Rouge—all fuse to give an impression of what the concept of working class revolt entails. We have learned that the Detroit Insurrection of 1967 was primarily carried out by workers. . .