Director Norman Jewison and Denzel Washington on
the set of
" The Hurricane"

Sgt. Theo Capter:  "We're looking for two negroes in a white car."

Rubin Carter:  Any two will do?

“Can you make out these two men?  Are these the two men who shot you?  Look carefully, sir. Are these the two men who did it?"

False depiction

"Sure, it's off the record."

(T)he nation has watched as impresarios of racial street theater, political opportunists and naive media moralists sidetrack American liberalism again and again by turning criminal cases into "show trials" of their ideological opponents.

-- Jim Sleeper,
Salon Magazine

"Because when you're fighting against racism you can say anything and still be right and courageous."

Jonah Goldberg

What Norm Jewison DOESN'T know
about the Hurricane Carter Case

Norm Jewison and the producers tried to defend their movie, The Hurricane, from charges that it was inaccurate.  But Jewison doesn't know the most basic facts about Hurricane Carter's arrest and conviction for triple murder, as his "director's comments" on the DVD of the movie clearly demonstrate:

• Jewison thinks that Carter was pulled over almost by accident on the night of the murders. Not correct.
  
  
• He thinks one of the victims said that Carter and Artis weren't the killers. Not true.
  
  
• He thinks that the Canadians claimed in their book, Lazarus and the Hurricane, that they were threatened by the police and their car was tampered with.  Wrong.
  
  
• He believes the Canadians proved that the prosecution forged evidence against Carter. Nonsense.
  
  
• He thinks the Canadians found a taxi driver who provided Carter
  with a strong alibi.  Not so.

Jewison on the scene where Carter and Artis are arrested:  

"I think that’s one of the most prophetic lines in the film.  ‘we’re looking for two negroes in a white car.' / 'Any two will do?’  This is so current to me because of the attitude of law enforcement people, not only in New Jersey in the sixties but even today, you pick up the newspaper and find all kinds of connecting stories where the police have jumped at the opportunity to accuse someone, attack someone, kill someone, because of their ethnicity."

Fact:  Carter and Artis were pulled over because their car, with its butterfly shaped taillights, matched the description given of the getaway car by two witnesses.  It was 2:30 in the morning in Paterson, New Jersey.  Very few cars were on the road.

Jewison on the scene at the hospital where one of the survivors is asked to identify Carter and Artis.

"Most of these scenes were built on the 16th Round where Rubin described what happened to him that night, he and John Artis. Apparently one witness who was shot, did deny that they were the killers.  A lot of this testimony was not accepted in the court case that ensued."

Jewison has it sooooo wrong.  Marins, the man in the hospital bed, did testify in court.  He said he couldn't tell if Carter and Artis were the shooters.  He'd taken a bullet to the head, after all. The witness whose testimony was excluded from court was Hazel Tanis, who gave descriptions of the shooters that strongly implicated Carter and Artis. She died before she could give a formal statement and it was her testimony that was excluded from trial, on the application of Carter's lawyer. So "the testimony [that] was not accepted in the court case" helped Carter, not the prosecution. Neither Marins or Tanis ever denied that Carter and Artis were the killers.  For more, see The Eyewitnesses.

Jewison on the scene where young Carter stabs a molester

"I think it was important that we started when he was a child simply because we’re going to try to get into his anger and into his feelings of injustice and he was a violent kid and ended up stabbing a man who he felt was threatening him and others and was sent to reformatory at the age of 11.  This film was shot in Paterson, at the famous falls there in the center of town."  

Wrong.  Carter hit a man with a bottle and stole his $55 wristwatch.  Carter was 14 years old -- not 11 -- when this happened, and was the leader of a street gang.  Judge for yourself whether a pedophile would approach a street gang and try to pick one up for sex.  
 

Jewison on Carter's black militancy

"This is where, in this period Rubin was quite outspoken, as was Malcolm X and Huey Newton and many leaders in the black community because of the turmoil that was taking place in the country."

Fact: Carter was not anywhere in the same league as Malcolm X and Huey Newton.  Carter wasn't political. There isn't a single quote, speech, photograph, article or anything else from the Sixties to back up Carter's contention that he was a black activist.  This scene borrows from Carter's distorted representation of an interview he gave for the Saturday Evening Post. Since the screenwriters couldn't draw on anything Carter actually did for the civil rights movement (since he didn't do anything,) they were forced to invent a scene where an anonymous racist breaks the windows at his house.

Jewison says that if you think it's unfair that Joey Giardello was falsely portrayed as a racist who "won" a fixed fight, then you are denying that racism exists, and high-minded idealists like himself can malign whomever they please to make a point.

Dialogue: “Joey Giardello is about to lose the crown to Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter!”

"Now here we stated a fact and whether the [fight] announcer really said [that it was obvious that Carter had won the fight], I have no idea. But we did want to build some of the kind of prejudice that existed and it did exist, whether people want to deny it or not."

(Note: Joey Giardello sued the movie's producers for their false portrayal of the championship bout and settled out of court). See Carter's boxing career.

 

"Nobody knew what was the truth." And it's just too complicated to understand anyway. Whatever.

"The only two witnesses were supposedly these two men, Bradley and Bello who said they witnessed and saw Rubin Carter and John come out of the bar, well, then they recanted their testimony, then there was a second trial, then they re-canted their recantations, in other words nobody knew what was the truth but I think that it was so complicated and it was so detailed, I mean, I couldn’t deal with all these trials, retrials, you know there was so much we had to leave out."

 

Jewison on motive

"I mean, what would the motive be, I can’t understand it, he was wearing a gold watch and a five hundred dollar suit that night, I mean it wasn’t robbery, what was the motivation, I never could figure out how it was possible for this verdict to be given in the first place."

The answers to Jewison's questions are readily available. The same day of the murders, the newspapers figured out the probable motive -- it was a revenge slaying for the killing of a black bartender by a white man six hours earlier.  The murdered black bartender was the stepfather of a friend of Carter's. The "racial revenge" motive was presented at the second trial. The movie substituted a different motive in the film -- the bartender was supposedly killed because he was a bigot, nothing more. Maybe if Jewison had read some prosecution documents, instead of relying on Carter's false versions, he would have understood the verdict.

Jewison on the ninety days in the hole

"And in this next sequence is probably some of the most brilliant film acting that I have ever had an opportunity to have.... I wanted to show that we’re now taking him on a trip... into ninety days in the hole, and I wanted the audience to feel it, to feel the desolation, the anguish and the pain, of being locked away from light...."

Comment: And Denzel gives a great performance of something that probably never happened.  It's not mentioned in Carter's prison records and there's no record that Carter mentioned the "90 days in the hole" ordeal until 1992 -- twenty-five years after it supposedly happened.  

Jewison on the shadowy conspiracy

"Terry, Sam and Lisa explain in Lazarus & the Hurricane of their --  pressure that was brought upon them by the police and by the authorities even so far as to disable their car, they had their car broken into, um, disabled on the freeway, and all of those things, and so where was this pressure coming from?"

Comment:  Maybe the Canadian's car was broken into.  Maybe it broke down on the freeway.  But this is not mentioned in the book, Lazarus and the Hurricane.  If the Canadians have a shred of proof that the police tried to murder them, or were breaking into their car, they really ought to report it to the proper authorities. I urge them to do so without further delay.