Film Today: Cle Sloan's Bastards of the Party
4:00 PM, April 25, 2008
"FILM TODAY" CLASS
Independent filmmaker
CLE SLOAN
will present his ground-breaking documentary
Bastards of the Party
2006, 1:35 min.
Bastards of the Party explores the political roots of two of Los Angeles's most notorious gangs, the Crips and the Bloods from the 1950s through the 1990s. The film presents a humanizing view of this history from the perspective of past and current gang members from the Bloods and Crips, LA historian Mike Davis, whose book "City of Quartz" sparked Sloan's own project, former FBI agent Wes Swearingen, and Geronimo Pratt, the former Black Panther Party minister of defense, among others. The title of the movie, Bastards of the Party comes from a passage in City of Quartz (Mike Davis) that reads: "The Crips and the Bloods are the bastard offspring of the political parties of the 1960s. Most of the gangs were born out of the demise of those parties. Out of the ashes of the Black Panther Party came the Crips and the Bloods and the other gangs."