American Experience - Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst

Emerging from the cauldron of America's political upheaval over Vietnam and Civil Rights, the Symbionese Liberation Army set forth in 1973 to incite the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, brilliantly manipulating the mass media to advance their cause. Numbering fewer than a dozen members, their audacious kidnapping of teenage newspaper heiress Patty Hearst inspired what might be described as the first modern media frenzy, one that exploded further when Patty transformed into "Tania" and joined the ranks of her captors. Every detail of their descent into the surreal outer limits of political extremism and their subsequent disastrous self-destruction was played out in public, a bizarre drama that foreshadowed some of the worst excesses of modern TV journalism.

Guerrilla features never before seen archival footage, as well as the first ever on-camera interview with SLA founder Russ Little, whose incarceration inspired the Hearst kidnapping.