Robert Reich Doc ‘The Last Class’ To Hold One-Night-Only Screenings

EXCLUSIVE: The Last Class, the documentary about noted Trump critic, Berkeley professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, 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’s remarkable resonance with audiences.

“Why is it so successful? I think, well, because I’m Yoda,” Reich tells Deadline, tongue in cheek. He measures 4’10 or 4’11, depending on who’s wielding the yardstick, and like the fictional Yoda he’s 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 — 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.

Alas, 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. The film’s impressive box office totals are about to be augmented by a special one-time-only “Education & Democracy Night” to be held on Wednesday, October 22. The nationwide screenings, set up by distributor Abramorama and enabled by theatrical-on-demand platform GATHR, are already booked in 25 states and nearly 50 theaters. “Designed as both a cinematic event and a civic dialogue,” notes a release, “the event invites audiences to engage in nonpartisan conversations about education, inequality, and democracy at a pivotal moment in America.”

Reich tells Deadline when director Elliot Kirschner approached him about the project, he thought he was signing onto something relatively modest.

“It’s 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,” Reich explains. “And then through the magic of his directing and the editing of this very talented editor [Josh Melrod]… it became quite a, well — it’s hard for me; I’m kind of close to it — but it’s a very moving thing.”

Part 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.

“I realized that some of the emotional impact [of the film] has to do with the arc of life,” he observes. “It’s not just about my retirement, it’s 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’s a very powerful thing.”

The coming of age has not diminished Reich’s capacity to articulate complex political and economic issues in clear language. Wealth inequality – the enormous and growing chasm in the U.S. between those at the top and those without – 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.

“It’s impossible to comprehend unless you think about the consequence of that wealth,” Reich says. “That is, if Elon Musk can just blink an eye and buy Twitter for $42 billion and then turn it into the cesspool that he’s currently turning it into now — I’m still there [on X/Twitter]. I don’t know how long I’ll stay — 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 — I mean, what you have is all of these examples of how great wealth is distorting our ability to know what’s happening. And that’s 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.”

Reich’s readers and followers treasure his pointed takes on Pres. Trump, and in our conversation he didn’t self-censor.

“I think what’s happened over the last nine or 10 months is ‘the great reveal,’” he asserts. “I 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.”

In Trump’s 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 “woke” ideology.

“It is impossible to appease dictators,” Reich states flatly. “I mean, we know this. We should have learned it in the 1930s. And Trump’s authoritarianism cannot be appeased; that is, a university like Columbia University thinks that it is actually bargaining, negotiating with him. It’s not. It’s 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.”

Reich adds, “Harvard 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’s [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’t do that in a university where you want to protect the free exchange of thought and free expression and free speech. You don’t do those kinds of things. You don’t cave in that way.”

Reich 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 — Michael “Mickey” 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.

“My grandmother had a little cabin in the foothills of the Adirondacks, Sacandaga Park. And oh, I must’ve been about eight years old. And Mickey was up there. He was considerably older. He must’ve 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,” Reich recalls these many decades later. “His death changed my view about bullying… 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.”

Reich continues, “I 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.”

The Last Class, set to reach an ever-wider audience with next Wednesday’s one-night-only event, touches with a wistful quality as Reich completes his final semester. Ultimately, the film imparts a hopeful feeling.

“The fundamental message is upbeat at a time in our nation’s history when people are scared and many are despairing,” Reich comments. “And I think that part of it being upbeat is it’s 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.”