Rhode Island International Film Festival 2009

In the pre-dawn hours of April 27, 1913, the night watchman at an Atlanta pencil factory made a grisly discovery. The body of a young girl had been beaten, strangled, and so covered in soot that it was not immediately clear whether she was Negro or Caucasian.The death of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, a white worker at the factory, quickly became front-page news. She had apparently been robbed, and possibly raped. Several arrests were made, including Jim Conley, a black janitor who was seen three days later washing red stains out of his work shirt. Also arrested was Leo Frank, the factory's superintendent and the last person to admit seeing Mary alive. Suspicion of Frank soon mounted, based largely on his 'nervous' behavior upon being notified by police of the murder. A Jew raised in Brooklyn, Frank quickly became prosecutor Hugh Dorsey's prime suspect. On the fourth try, Dorsey coaxed Jim Conley to confess that he had helped to hide Mary's body, but the janitor insisted that Frank, his boss, was the killer. 'POLICE HAVE THE STRANGLER,' blared a major Atlanta headline the day of Frank's arrest, effectively convicting him in the public mind.Frank's trial lasted a month. Each day spectators packed Judge Leonard Sloan's downtown courtroom, with hundreds more outside shouting and jeering through the open courthouse windows. The proceedings descended into a free-for-all of racial stereotypes, hearsay testimony, questionable scientific evidence and mind-boggling contradictions on the stand. Despite Conley's conflicting statements and the lack of any physical evidence linking Frank to the murder, the all-white jurors accepted the word of the Southern black janitor over that of the Northern Jewish factory superintendent. Leo Frank was pronounced guilty and sentenced to death. Most Atlantans celebrated the verdict. But with a more distanced perspective, observers elsewhere grew enraged at what they considered to be a mockery of justice. Editorials from New York to San Francisco decried the verdict and called for a new trial. But the meddling of outsiders only further steeled Southern stalwarts and Frank detractors. The most vocal of them was Tom Watson, a populist newspaper editor who inflamed public sentiment with vicious anti-Semitic articles. In issue after issue of his paper, The Jeffersonian, Watson painted Mary Phagan as a 'pure little Gentile victim' defiled by a money-grubbing, sexually perverted New York Jew.Frank's lawyers appealed the conviction, but were rebuffed at every step, all the way to the Supreme Court. Their last hope was to petition Georgia's outgoing governor, John Slaton. Slaton weighed the evidence and concluded, remarkably, that Frank had not in fact received a fair trial. In an astounding turn of events and after some personal agonizing, Slaton commuted Frank's sentence from death to life in prison. The governor swiftly transferred Frank from his Atlanta jail cell to a state penitentiary 150 miles outside the city to safely serve out his sentence. A mob, enraged by the governor's actions and whipped into frenzy by Watson's Jeffersonian, descended on Slaton's home. Slaton was hung in effigy with sign s labeling him "King of the Jews." The most extreme vigilantes tried to run Jewish families out of town.Meanwhile, out of the public eye, a quiet group of influential Georgians - including a former governor and a sitting judge - made plans to carry out their own sentence on Frank. On a hot August afternoon, 25 men loaded up seven cars and drove from Marietta, Georgia, to the state prison in Milledgeville where Frank was being held. They arrived at ten that evening, descended on the prison, and - without firing a shot - abducted the prisoner from his cell. Frank was taken to the oak grove near Mary Phagan's childhood home. A noose was placed around his neck. The judge read the charges and proclaimed the sentence. Then, the small table Leo Frank stood on was kicked out from under him. The most famous lynching of a white man in America came to bear two conflicting legacies. Marked by the largest cross burning in history, a Southern group that had all but faded out since the final days of Reconstruction gathered just outside Atlanta to constitute the modern Ku Klux Klan. Its mission would expand from intimidating blacks in the South to spreading hate against Jews, Catholics and others across the country. Meanwhile, a fledgling organization suddenly found in the Frank case its reason for being. The Anti-Defamation League would become a powerful defender of civil rights and social justice in America. Its mission to stop defamation of the Jewish people and secure justice and fair treatment for all endures to this day.THE PEOPLE v LEO FRANK weaves together well-crafted drama with first-person recollections, commentary, and a rich trove of historical images. Filmed entirely in Georgia during the summer of 2008, the film has attracted significant talent. Will Janowitz (of the Sopranos) stars as Leo Frank opposite Seth Gilliam (of The Wire) who plays Jim Conley, the State's star witness against Frank during his trial. All dialogue in is taken directly from the historical record. By examining this dark chapter of a bygone age, THE PEOPLE v. LEO FRANK invites viewers to explore broad themes about human behavior that are timeless and universal.