Movie By 'West Wing' Creator Films At Two Morris County Colleges

CONVENT STATION, NJ - Morris County is standing in for Illinois as a pair of college campuses are being used to for the filming of the movie "The Trial of the Chicago 7," written and directed by "West Wing" mastermind Aaron Sorkin.

The Fairleigh Dickinson University Florham Park campus in Madison and the College of Saint Elizabeth in Convent Station are being used to tell the story of seven people on trial stemming from various charges surrounding the uprising at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

Production crews set up base camp at Saint Elizabeth's on Thursday taking a chunk of the Lower Annunciation Center parking lot, a portion of lower Saint Joseph's parking lot and the lower level of Mahoney Library.

The Flex classrooms in the Annunciation Center upper and lower lobby were converted to waiting areas for crews and extras. Despite this, many students at Saint Elizabeth were unaware that filming was taking place.

Several students told Patch that they were concerned about though the crews to get to the cafeteria and others just wanted to know who was going to be in the movie.

According to IMDB the films stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Richard Schultz, Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, Jeremy Strong as Jerry Rubin, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Bobby Seale, Michael Keaton as Ramsey Clark, Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman, William Hurt as John Mitchell, Mark Rylance as William Kunstler and Frank Langella as Julius Hoffman.

Chicago Seven, group of political activists who were arrested for their antiwar activities during the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. A series of riots occurred during the convention, and eight protest leaders: Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, cofounders of the Youth International Party (Yippies); Tom Hayden, cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale; David Dellinger and Rennie Davis of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE); and John Froines and Lee Weiner, who were alleged to have made stink bombs, were tried on charges of criminal conspiracy and incitement to riot.

Beginning as the Chicago Eight Trial, it quickly became the Chicago Seven when Seale, after loudly disrupting the trial when he could not have the lawyer of his choice, was at first bound and gagged in the courtroom and then severed from the case for a later trial, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Writer/director Sorkin, whose new adaptation of "To Kill a Mockingbird" is currently running on Broadway, directed his first big screen film in 2017 with the Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba thriller "Molly's Game." Sorkin also won an Academy Award for screenwriting in 2011 for "The Social Network" and in between created and produced "The Newsroom" for HBO. He is most widely-known for the political drama "The West Wing" which ran for seven seasons on NBC.

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