{"id":227714,"date":"2025-10-16T00:06:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T00:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/227714\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T00:06:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T00:06:11","slug":"robert-reich-doc-the-last-class-to-hold-one-night-only-screenings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/227714\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Reich Doc ‘The Last Class’ To Hold One-Night-Only Screenings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEXCLUSIVE: The Last Class<\/a>, the documentary about noted Trump critic, Berkeley professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich<\/a>, has become a major hit, earning $700,000 at the box office to date. The diminutive scholar and social media star offers a theory for the film\u2019s remarkable resonance with audiences.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhy is it so successful? I think, well, because I\u2019m Yoda,\u201d Reich tells Deadline, tongue in cheek. He measures 4\u201910 or 4\u201911, depending on who\u2019s wielding the yardstick, and like the fictional Yoda he\u2019s known not for his physical stature but the heights his mind can reach. His intellectual brilliance is savored by his X\/Twitter following (1.4 million) and Substack subscribers (more than 1 million). A select group has enjoyed special access to his cogent observations \u2014 the thousands of students he has taught at UC Berkeley over the years, where his course titled Wealth and Poverty became a must-take on campus.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"'The<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018The Last Class\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAbramorama\/CoffeeKlatch Productions<\/p>\n

\n\tAlas, Reich has brought his academic career to a close. His final semester in the classroom is documented in The Last Class, directed by Elliot Kirschner<\/a>. The film\u2019s impressive box office totals are about to be augmented by a special one-time-only \u201cEducation & Democracy Night\u201d to be held on Wednesday, October 22. The nationwide screenings, set up by distributor Abramorama<\/a> and enabled by theatrical-on-demand platform GATHR<\/a>, are already booked in 25 states and nearly 50 theaters. \u201cDesigned as both a cinematic event and a civic dialogue,\u201d notes a release, \u201cthe event invites audiences to engage in nonpartisan conversations about education, inequality, and democracy at a pivotal moment in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tReich tells Deadline when director Elliot Kirschner approached him about the project, he thought he was signing onto something relatively modest.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s bait and switch actually, because Elliot originally said to me it was going to be a video and he just wanted a video of my last class,\u201d Reich explains. \u201cAnd then through the magic of his directing and the editing of this very talented editor [Josh Melrod]\u2026 it became quite a, well \u2014 it\u2019s hard for me; I\u2019m kind of close to it \u2014 but it\u2019s a very moving thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Former<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tFormer Labor Secretary Robert Reich testifies before the Joint Economic Committee January 16, 2014 in Washington, DC.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWin McNamee\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\tPart of why the documentary moves audiences is its acknowledgement of the passage of time. Reich began teaching more than 40 years ago, serving on the faculties of Harvard, Brandeis, and finally at Berkeley (with stints in between serving in the Ford, Carter, and Clinton administrations). In June, he turned 79.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI realized that some of the emotional impact [of the film] has to do with the arc of life,\u201d he observes. \u201cIt\u2019s not just about my retirement, it\u2019s about people moving through life as children, as students, as young people, as middle-aged people. And then finally the twilight, the inevitability of death. And it\u2019s a very powerful thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe coming of age has not diminished Reich\u2019s capacity to articulate complex political and economic issues in clear language. Wealth inequality \u2013 the enormous and growing chasm in the U.S. between those at the top and those without \u2013 has been a primary focus of his academic work. The scale of riches amassed by Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos, for instance, defies our ability to grasp rationally, yet Reich finds a way to capture it in understandable terms.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"President<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tPresident Donald Trump and White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk greet each other on March 22, 2025 in Philadelphia, PA.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tKayla Bartkowski\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s impossible to comprehend unless you think about the consequence of that wealth,\u201d Reich says. \u201cThat is, if Elon Musk can just blink an eye and buy Twitter for $42 billion and then turn it into the cesspool that he\u2019s currently turning it into now \u2014 I\u2019m still there [on X\/Twitter]. I don\u2019t know how long I\u2019ll stay \u2014 or if Jeff Bezos, the second richest or third richest person in America, can buy the Washington Post and then tell its editorial board not to endorse Kamala Harris and enforce a kind of code of what is going to be appropriate for that editorial board to editorialize about, or if Shari Redstone can basically intimidate the heads of CBS and CBS News to the point where the head of 60 Minutes resigns \u2014 I mean, what you have is all of these examples of how great wealth is distorting our ability to know what\u2019s happening. And that\u2019s where people, it seems to me, can get a notion of the damage of that degree of inequality is having. Otherwise, inequality is just kind of an abstraction.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tReich\u2019s readers and followers treasure his pointed takes on Pres. Trump, and in our conversation he didn\u2019t self-censor.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think what\u2019s happened over the last nine or 10 months is \u2018the great reveal,\u2019\u201d he asserts. \u201cI call it the great reveal. I think people are seeing that the choice is not between traditional left, traditional right, Democrats-Republicans and stuff. The real choice here is democracy or no democracy. And that great reveal, I think is the silver lining on all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Trump\u2019s second term, the president has devoted considerable energy to bringing academic institutions to heel, threatening to withhold funding and research grants unless they agree to various terms, including a pledge to eliminate what he deems \u201cwoke\u201d ideology.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt is impossible to appease dictators,\u201d Reich states flatly. \u201cI mean, we know this. We should have learned it in the 1930s. And Trump\u2019s authoritarianism cannot be appeased; that is, a university like Columbia University thinks that it is actually bargaining, negotiating with him. It\u2019s not. It\u2019s opening the door to even more intrusions into its academic freedom by the government. The government has no business telling universities what to teach or what to do or who to hire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tReich adds, \u201cHarvard really did put up and has put up a fight. And that fight has given, I think, the entire higher education [system] some hope. Berkeley, my own institution, has done, I think a poor job. It\u2019s [given] 160 names of people that the Trump administration wanted to know who had been involved in a pro-Palestinian demonstration, including students and faculty and others, some of whom are on visas. You don\u2019t do that in a university where you want to protect the free exchange of thought and free expression and free speech. You don\u2019t do those kinds of things. You don\u2019t cave in that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tReich was bullied as a child for his short stature. One of the few kids who stuck up for him was a boy a few years older than Reich \u2014 Michael \u201cMickey\u201d Schwerner. Schwerner was fated to go down in American history as one of the three Civil Rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964. Reich talks about Schwerner in the film and wrote about him in his bestseller published in August, Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy grandmother had a little cabin in the foothills of the Adirondacks, Sacandaga Park. And oh, I must\u2019ve been about eight years old. And Mickey was up there. He was considerably older. He must\u2019ve been about 13. But he was such a good-natured boy, such a kind person that he basically kept the boys who would otherwise bully me at bay,\u201d Reich recalls these many decades later. \u201cHis death changed my view about bullying\u2026 When I heard about his death, I was in college, I was a freshman, but I had always thought about bullying as kind of the toughs on the playground, teasing me and tormenting me. And I really suddenly saw bullying all around me in terms of white supremacists bullying Black people and brown people and men bullying women and employers bullying employees. And I saw the fundamental moral question that we all have to deal with, and we are dealing with it right this minute, as how to constrain the bullies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tReich continues, \u201cI think part of your question, why is [the film] resonating is because there is a bully in the White House, and because I talk about bullying and people pick it up. They just pick it up, they know it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"'The<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAbramorama\/CoffeeKlatch Productions<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Last Class, set to reach an ever-wider audience with next Wednesday\u2019s one-night-only event, touches with a wistful quality as Reich completes his final semester. Ultimately, the film imparts a hopeful feeling.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe fundamental message is upbeat at a time in our nation\u2019s history when people are scared and many are despairing,\u201d Reich comments. \u201cAnd I think that part of it being upbeat is it\u2019s about the wonder of teaching and students and learning and the faces of those students and the hope that they represent in terms of our future is impossible not to feel and not to be excited by and be uplifted by.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: The Last Class, the documentary about noted Trump critic, Berkeley professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227715,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[95788,127367,88,127368,206,68595,95790],"class_list":{"0":"post-227714","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-abramorama","9":"tag-elliot-kirschner","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-gathr","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-robert-reich","14":"tag-the-last-class"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}