Professional Revolutionary
"I want things to change where the playing field is leveled,
where equality emerges as a reality. . . where the horrible
things about inequities are eliminated."

Those few words convey the life that Saul Wellman, who died
last December at the age of 90, tried to live since he was a teenager.
While PROFESSIONAL REVOLUTIONARY tells the compelling
story of Wellman's 75 years of political activism, his life's significance
reaches beyond his specific causes to his spirit and core beliefs.

The deepest goal of this film is to communicate one man's example
of political commitment: that living passionately in the wider world
does not detract from personal goals, that one must change in order
to stay the same, that taking risks makes one a fuller person, and
that living a political life without conventional rewards can be richly satisfying.

Saul Wellman
Near the beginning of PROFESSIONAL REVOLUTIONARY, a time-worn but vital and articulate Saul Wellman recalls that “at the age of 16, believe it or not, I decided I was going to become a professional revolutionary. And you know what happened? I became a professional revolutionary, for the rest of my life.” Saul Wellman, a political activist through much of the twentieth century, was at it until his last breath, in 2003. Thus his personal story is also the story of some of America’s most volatile and dramatic decades.

The film concludes with Wellman, in a wheelchair, participating in a demonstration in April, 2003. As the film ends, he asserts that “the worst thing is passivity.” The goal is “to react to your problems today – and to react to your problems today doesn’t mean you have to carry a red banner and yell revolution and so on and so forth. Do something about it.” This is the main theme of Wellman’s life and the film, reflecting a commitment so powerful that his whole life was immersed in the main causes and issues of his times.

Through the approach of placing the man in his time, the film portrays one of the most remarkable and stirring, though unheralded, figures of the past three-quarters of a century. Wellman’s riveting story incorporates three parts: his youth, and participation in both the Spanish Civil War and World War II; his Detroit adventures as a Communist Party functionary and as a union activist; and his life with the New Left.