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Sacha Baron Cohen, meet Abbie Hoffman
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After playing Signor Adolfo Pirelli in the recent movie release of "Sweeney Todd", it looks as Sacha Baron Cohen (of Borat fame) might be becoming a choice pick for directors, or maybe just the soup du jour.
Steven Spielberg is making an adaptation of the "Trial of the Chicago 7" and Cohen is to be cast as the "self-identified Jewish Road Warrior, communo-anarchist, social and political activist," Abbie Hoffman. The co-founder of the Youth International Party ("Yippies") was arrested and tried for conspiracy and inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention with others that became known as the Chicago 7.
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing notes that "Cohen's the kind of merry anarchist who strikes me as the perfect and unlikely casting choice... [he] will not have to undergo a big transformation to play the part. Hoffman, who was Jewish, attended Berkeley University in California, while Baron Cohen, an urbane Orthodox Jew more than 6ft tall, cut his teeth entertaining friends at Christ’s College Cambridge with subversive wit and surreal pranks."
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