Morgen took on several roles, including Julius Hoffman, the arrogant and elderly trial judge who could not have made a better villain if he had been cast by the Yippies themselves.

Even so, Morgen still had some reservations about the final results. “One thing I wasn’t happy with at the end of the day was the final render style -- the last thing that’s applied is the actual look of it. A lot of what I wanted couldn’t be achieved because of the lighting scheme in the courtroom.” At one point in the film, Abbie Hoffman is performing in what looks like a comedy club, lit up by a harsh spotlight. “I really like that footage of Abbie onstage -- I was able to use a hard keylight on that for a really dramatic rendering effect. I wanted that effect with him on the witness stand, but I couldn’t recreate it in the courtroom wide shot -- it had to be evenly lit for practical, not esthetic, reasons.

“I told the tech guys from the start that I was worried the mocap would look synthetic, and I wanted to maintain a grungy, hands-on esthetic. We tried to minimize 3D elements in the design. There was actually a button we were pressing that allowed us to control the amount of 3D in the picture, from 80 to 60 percent and so on. We kept it 10 percent 3D, something very nominal -- I wanted that rough-around-the-edges look. Even though it’s obviously not hand-drawn, it’s definitely got that organic feel that most mocap lacks.” The mocap animation’s coloring has a posterized look with faces and textures broken into distinct bands of color, but Morgen says “it would’ve been more posterized. When we first started, the shadows were really distracting [as they shifted in relation to the light sources] so we ‘baked’ them onto the characters, locking them permanently in place.”

Making sure the voice actors matched their characters’ original voices -- and the mocap performers likewise captured the originals’ physical presence -- was one of Morgen’s key goals. There was no shortage of interview footage of the flamboyant Hoffman and Rubin for Hank Azaria and Mark Ruffalo to study; the pair nailed their characters so closely it’s all but impossible to tell where archival recordings leave off and the vocal recreations begin. Audio of some of the other players was harder to come by. In the film, U.S. Attorney Thomas Foran’s hatred of, and Judge Hoffman’s oily contempt for, the defendants approaches melodramatic proportions, but according to Morgen the two are accurately portrayed (respectively by Nick Nolte and the just-deceased Roy Scheider) thanks to a bootleg recording made by one of the defendants during the trial. “They may seem a bit one-dimensional, but it’s a fairly accurate reflection of what was happening inside that courtroom. Nolte sounds identical to Foran. You think Judge Hoffman can’t be real, but that’s exactly what he sounded like -- a cartoon voice somewhere between Elmer Fudd, Mr. Magoo and Jabba the Hutt.”

Morgen used a hard keylight to create a dramatic rendering effect in a scene where Abbie Hoffman is performing in a club, but was unable to duplicate the look in the courtroom scenes.

When it came time for the mocap actors to study their real-life counterparts, Morgen restricted them to the live-action footage that would be appearing in the film, to help them mimic the originals’ attitudes and body language as closely as possible. (The movie does include the occasional flight of fancy, as when Allen Ginsberg floats cross-legged in the air during a meeting with Chicago city officials, a reference to a 1967 antiwar protest whose supposed goal was to levitate the Pentagon.)

Several minutes of 2D animation, created in a style reminiscent of 1960s underground comics by New York’s Asterisk Animation, round out the film. Once again it was an unhappy experience for Morgen, and again, one he is not reluctant to detail. “I don’t want to badmouth anyone, but I will in this case -- it was a nightmare. I commissioned them to do 12 minutes of animation, but I had to cut six minutes out of the film before we premiered -- they didn’t deliver the footage to me [in time] even though they had nine months to do it. There was supposed to be a lot more 2D in the film, but there are only one or two scenes that survived.”

When asked for his side of the story, Asterisk’s Richard O’Connor was more circumspect and declined to comment, except to say “anyone curious can call me.” Other sources were willing to match Morgen’s bluntness, calling the director “one of the worst people” to work with, and one who “keeps changing his mind.”

After opening last year’s Sundance festival, Chicago 10 is about to be commercially released into a world that is at once more conservative, more polarized, and more open to ideas about politics and lifestyles once considered unimaginable. Morgen may not be as flamboyant as the radicals he returns to the spotlight, but like them, and right or wrong, he is unafraid to step on more than a few toes in pursuit of his vision.

Joe Strike is a regular contributor to AWN. His animation articles also appear in the NY Daily News and the New York Press.