The Big Cigar review: Panther founder’s fake movie escape is the wrong story to tell

Screenwriter William Goldman first became interested in the story of the outlaws in the late 1950s, but admitted he didn’t fancy doing the research necessary to turn it into a fact-based novel.

So he wrote it as a movie instead, and what he didn’t know, he made up – with hugely entertaining and successful results.

The film was a box-office smash, Goldman’s screenplay won the Oscar and the Bafta, and he became Hollywood’s top screenwriter.

But it’s easier to get away with taking a few liberties with the truth (surprisingly, perhaps, the film doesn’t take quite as many as you might imagine) when you’re dealing two long-dead, Robin Hood-like outlaws whose recorded histories have a few gaps.

It’s a different matter when the subject is someone like Huey P Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, whose life and violent death – he was murdered on a street in Oakland, California in 1989 – have been exhaustively detailed in any number of books.

There’s no shortage of material for a fantastic television drama about Newton. Unfortunately, Jim Hecht’s six-part miniseries The Big Cigar (Apple TV+, since Friday, May 17) is not it.

Hecht and his team, which includes producer Don Cheadle, who also directs the two episodes available now (the rest follow weekly), don’t exactly ignore the history of the Black Panthers or the internal tensions and turmoil that caused its demise in the 1980s.

The main focus, however, is on one rather quirky incident: Newton’s escape to Cuba in 1974 under the cover of a fake film production.

The miniseries, which is flashily directed, is also a bit of a shambles as it jumps back and forth in time

Playing out like a caper movie, the story might make a decent two-hour film or maybe a standalone episode in a bigger series with a wider scope. The Big Cigar is telling the wrong story.

It feels like a sideshow to a main event that’s happening somewhere else.

Like 2012’s surprise Oscar winner Argo, which also concerned a fake movie production, in that case as cover for a CIA operation, it’s part-based on a magazine article by Joshuah Bearman.

It opens with Newton, played by André Holland, on the run from the police and the FBI, accused of murdering a 17-year-old girl who had been sex-trafficked.

Newton protests his innocence, claiming he was framed.

Given that we see him in flashback being persecuted by racist cops and railroaded into a prison sentence, much of it spent in solitary confinement, it’s possible he was telling the truth.

It’s just as possible that he was guilty, since the two subsequent trials ended in deadlocked juries.

Newton fetches up in, of all places, Los Angeles at the home of movie producer Bert Schneider (Alessandro Nivola), who had befriended him a few years before.

Schneider, who had his first huge success with the counterculture hit Easy Rider, which he followed up with films including Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show, is in the middle of prepping his Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds, which would win him an Oscar.

Like many Hollywood liberals of the time, Schneider was attracted to the Panthers and had contributed significant amounts of money to its social and educational projects.

Much to the distress of his nervous business partner Stephen Blauner (PJ Byrne), Schneider concocts the idea of spiriting Newton to Cuba on the pretence of making a film called The Big Cigar.

The operation is a shambles from the off when the plane, piloted by a drug runner, Schneider had hired fails to turn up.

The miniseries, which is flashily directed (lots of split-screen and some 70s blaxploitation stylings), is also a bit of a shambles as it jumps back and forth in time, giving us too little insight into Newton, a complex man plagued by paranoia, and too much of Schneider.

There’s also far too much time wasted on a pair of buffoonish FBI agents (Mark Menchaca and James Cade) posing as hippies, making you wonder whose story this is supposed to be: Newton’s or the white people’s?

Actors playing the likes of Richard Pryor and Jack Nicholson add nothing. The episodes are short (40 minutes), yet The Big Cigar manages to be a bit of a drag.