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When the movie producer Bert Schneider met the Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton<\/a>, he swooned.<\/p>\n Schneider, who had helped revolutionize the movie industry (and made a lot of money) as a producer of films like \u201cEasy Rider,\u201d wanted to shake up things off the screen as well. He saw Newton, who had already done a prison stint for the killing of a police officer \u2014 Newton denied that he shot the officer, and the conviction was eventually overturned \u2014 as the real deal, a star on the front lines of the actual revolution.<\/p>\n Their unlikely partnership is now the heart of the new limited series \u201cThe Big Cigar,\u201d premiering April 17 on Apple TV+. It\u2019s a caper about how Newton (played by Andr\u00e9 Holland) fled to Cuba in 1974 after he was arrested and charged with the murder of a prostitute (also a crime he claimed he didn\u2019t commit). Schneider (Alessandro Nivola) ponied up cash and logistical assistance, including a fake film production, to help Newton escape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cCigar\u201d tells a wild tale with shootouts and chases and a couple of strange bedfellows: a Black revolutionary on the run and a well-coiffed Hollywood power player looking to bankroll him. Even as it takes some liberties with the facts, the series reflects the ties that existed between some counterculture entertainment figures and radical organizations of the \u201960s and \u201970s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t see it as a story of Hollywood patting itself on the back,\u201d Jim Hecht, a writer and an executive producer, said in a video interview. \u201cThere was a time when people actually did put their bodies on the line and do things for a cause that they believed in. They took personal risks to do things that were political.\u201d<\/p>\n Based on a 2012 Playboy magazine article by Joshuah Bearman, who also wrote the article on which another fake movie caper, \u201cArgo,\u201d<\/a> was based, \u201cThe Big Cigar\u201d recreates an improbable slice of underground history. In a video interview, Holland (\u201cMoonlight,\u201d \u201cSelma\u201d) recalled his initial reaction upon reading the script: \u201cReally? This actually happened? Let me go fact check this.\u201d He did. \u201cThough the story is largely fictionalized, the basic elements of it are based in truth,\u201d he said. \u201cCrazy story.\u201d<\/p>\n Holland\u2019s next concern was to see that Newton, rather than Schneider, would be the primary focus of the series.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to make sure that this wasn\u2019t a white savior story,\u201d Holland said. \u201cThat\u2019s something that we discussed all the way up until the very last episode. There were allies in Hollywood, people who were supporters of the party. At the same time, I think Huey P. Newton deserves a series all his own, and the party deserves its own series.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSince we don\u2019t have that much in the canon about the party,\u201d he continued, \u201cI felt like we had to be careful that we were telling a balanced story.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In tracking the actions of Newton and Schneider, \u201cThe Big Cigar\u201d also traces the inception of the Black Panthers, its mission and the relationships among its principal members.<\/p>\n Newton and Bobby Seale (played by Jordane Christie in the series) founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland in 1966 as a Black Power socialist organization dedicated to combating police brutality. Best known in mainstream culture for openly carrying firearms and \u201cpolicing the police,\u201d the Panthers were also active in their communities, including starting a program to serve breakfast to Oakland school children in 1969. There were big egos and personalities in the party, including Newton, Seale and Eldridge Cleaver (Brenton Allen), who also fled the police into exile, in Cuba, Algeria and France, and clashed over the direction of the party with Newton. The party\u2019s leaders were extensively surveilled by the F.B.I., which was determined<\/a> to bring down the group.<\/p>\n You can find many critical accounts of the Panthers and of Newton, who was murdered in 1989 by a drug dealer<\/a> in West Oakland, Calif. Much of the news coverage of the Panthers during their heyday, including by The New York Times<\/a>, was notably biased against the group, and works like \u201cJudas and the Black Messiah\u201d<\/a> (2021) have focused on the F.B.I.\u2019s elaborate efforts to disrupt and discredit it. \u201cThe Big Cigar\u201d is decidedly pro-Huey, depicting him as a sensitive soul driven to the brink by government surveillance, police persecution and subsequent paranoia. This Newton flashes a temper on occasion, but overall he is a man of principle, wary of the Hollywood influence that Schneider represents and willing to die for his absolute belief in revolution.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look at the story of Huey Newton, it didn\u2019t end the way we would\u2019ve wanted it to end,\u201d Janine Sherman Barrois, the showrunner and a writer and executive producer, said in a video interview. \u201cAnd that\u2019s heartbreaking. It\u2019s heartbreaking especially for Huey, who had such a dream of the future and of revolutionizing and changing things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Don Cheadle, an executive producer on the series who also directed the first two episodes, was drawn by what he sees as Newton\u2019s uncompromising nature.<\/p>\n \u201cHe stood 10 toes down, as they say, for what he believed in, and was willing to go all the way for it,\u201d Cheadle said in a video interview. \u201cI think whenever we see that, we are fascinated by it. It\u2019s compelling and it draws you in.\u201d<\/p>\n On the other side of the \u201cBig Cigar\u201d equation is Schneider, who died in 2011<\/a>. He was part of the New Hollywood pack that steered the film industry toward more personal, counterculture movies, producing films like \u201cEasy Rider,\u201d \u201cFive Easy Pieces,\u201d \u201cThe Last Picture Show\u201d and Peter Davis\u2019s Oscar-winning Vietnam War documentary, \u201cHearts and Minds,\u201d the making of which is a plot point in \u201cThe Big Cigar.\u201d BBS Productions, the company he ran with the director Bob Rafelson<\/a> and the producer Stephen Blauner (played in the series by P.J. Byrne), was at the heart of a movement known for giving filmmakers creative room to be artists. He and Rafelson also made a mint creating the prefab pop group the Monkees and the TV series that featured them.<\/p>\n Now he wanted to spend some of that cash on something more immediate than another movie. As Nivola\u2019s Schneider tells Huey in the series, \u201cI want to finance the revolution.\u201d Then he snorts a line of cocaine, a drug both men were known to abuse.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The Panthers had other famous benefactors, including Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Cohn Montealegre, whose lavish fund-raising party at their Park Avenue duplex in 1970 was immortalized by Tom Wolfe in a New York magazine article and in the book \u201cRadical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.\u201d But Schneider went the extra mile for Newton, not only bankrolling his Cuba escape but bringing celebrity friends (such as Jack Nicholson and Candice Bergen) to visit him there. Once Newton returned from exile and the prostitute murder case ended in a mistrial, Schneider continued to finance his lifestyle, including an apartment and a car.<\/p>\n Nivola\u2019s primary research source was the collection of tapes that Bearman recorded with Schneider in the course of writing his article. \u201cWhat started to emerge from those interviews was just how obsessed Bert was with Huey,\u201d Nivola said in a video interview. \u201cIt was almost kind of religious. He talked about him as being the smartest man he\u2019d ever met. He thought that his charisma was just blinding.\u201d<\/p>\n Countercultural rhetoric was fashionable in Hollywood at the time. If Schneider had dabbled in radical causes before meeting Newton, Nivola continued, he became fully committed under the Panther leader\u2019s influence: \u201cHe became a kind of acolyte and was just determined to help him succeed in every possible way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n