Seale, now 58, has no intention of seeing it and has called it “a bootleg fiction, nothing to do with real events”.But then Seale, who wrote a best-selling cookbook in 1988 and now runs barbecue restaurants, has a vested interest. He is under contract to Warner Bros, which is developing its own film about the Panthers, based on Seale’s 1991 book Seize The Time. Seale has said he may sue the Van Peebles for portraying him without his permission.A screening of the film was held in Oakland recently for ex-Panthers, now all middle-aged Opinions varied wildly. Huey Newton’s brother, Melvin, said nothing in Panther struck him as grossly inaccurate. Bobby Seale’s ex-wife, Artie, called it “a gross misrepresentation” with dates and incidents wrong. Others thought it failed to show the degree of violence that surrounded the Panthers.You’d expect members of an organisation so chaotic as the Panthers to argue among themselves even 25 years on.

But the reporters at the screening noticed that one issue united them; the charge that the black population was deliberately narcotised. Yes, the ex-Panthers all agreed, that was accurate.! ‘Panther’ will open in Britain in the autumn.. THE OTHER day, David Elstein, director of programmes at BSkyB, was speaking at a conference on the future of television. As he discussed Sky’s investment in Bristish films, he was asked how many Oscar nominations the films had received. “More than him,” was his odd riposte.
This non sequitur was immediately understood by the delegates who are accustomed to, and entertained by, what has become the biggest war of words in British television. David Elstein was vying for Oscars with Michael Grade, chief executive of Channel 4.It is doubtful whether even actors would be so competitive. In the exaggerated chumminess of TV, where even top executives become infected with luvviness, the Grade v Elstein hostilities are famous and rather refreshing.

Michael publicly calls David ”one of Murdoch’s minions”; David says Michael is abusing his position David snatches C4’s Oprah Winfrey show in a secret auction. Michael explodes with anger and declares: ”Once again Sky’s claim of offering viewers choice turns out to be anything but that.”The battle seems to stretch into most corners of the two gentlemen’s remit. Sky sports service is a ”rip off” says Grade, who tried hard to trump Elstein’s Premier League coup by introducing Italian football to C4. Grade publicly berates Sky for its ”endless succession of violent and exploitative films”. Elstein notes that Grade skates on thin ice following C4’s recent Red Light Zone ”porn” series.But it is Rupert Murdoch, owner of Sky, not Elstein, who is really Grade’s bete noir. Grade has an obsessive distaste for the way Murdoch’s tentacles reach over the media, and he is one of the few senior figures in television to say so openly and frequently But Murdoch is in America and untouchable. Elstein is his representative on earth.”Michael calls me one of Murdoch’s minions,” Elstein says, ”but I see Rupert Murdoch for 30 minutes a year.”These two famous enemies have taken different routes to the top.

He regards Newton, a college student, as a political theorist, but Bobby Seale, six years his senior, a part-time student who had worked on the Gemini missile project, as just “an ordinary guy in the right place at an extraordinary time”.The Van Peebles’ film makes few concessions to mainstream – ie white – taste. Yet what were the consequences? Unlike Malcolm X, and unlike Martin Luther King’s peaceful leadership of the civil rights movement, the Panthers have left behind a slender legacy – a point I put to Melvin Van Peebles.”Yeah, well,” he growls, “the Panthers were like a blip on the screen of Americana that’s been written out of history.” They have, he thinks, been dismissed by white historians: “Their story was suppressed initially, then overlooked later.” America’s white establishment, he says, believes that the Panthers were just vicious, trigger-happy criminals: “If they were just a few goons strutting around, how could they manage to grow into so many branches nationally? Something didn’t fit.”Van Peebles Snr views the Panthers now as a movement whose time had simply come. In 1969 police shot Fred Hampton – 21-year-old leader of the Panthers’ Chicago chapter – dead in a raid on his house as he slept. Newton fled to Cuba for three years.Middle America was, by turns, gripped and appalled by all this frenzied activity. He was eventually convicted of manslaughter and served two years in jail. Early on they raised money by selling copies of Chairman Mao’s Quotations to white kids on campus at Berkeley.