Bouncer at the Gates of Love: REVOLUTION (1968)

"What we're seeing is a basic change in the evolutionary progress of mankind - something only priests and monks were into until a very long time ago, and that is consciousness expansion." 

So notes an unnamed head in Jack O'Connell's REVOLUTION (1968), a crazy, narrator-free documentary about the Haight Ashbury community that still glimmers with a bid of LSD sparkle even today. And O'Connell's right. The evolutionary progress of man was changed... and in 1968 we were yet to take the first of our steps toward changing it back.

It's hard to imagine a moment remotely similar in the history of the human race. Between 1966 and 1969, LSD was still semi-legal and becoming hugely popular, as much a middle class rage as Twitter is now, turning an entire demographic from self-absorbed mopes into eastern spirituality-embracing free spirits (instead of vice versa). And not only the young people but adventurous parents were jumping into the fire and disappearing from the 9-5 fidelity-based spousal system. Kids began to grow up in communes instead of two car garages; group marriages and swinging were acceptable substitutions for the exclusivity of the two person pair bond; and LSD was everywhere, recommended in 4 out 5 clinical psychiatrist offices, doctoral psychology experiments, and middle American homes. Owsley gave out thousands of pure 'purples' (from which "Purple Haze" gets its name) as free samples at Monterey Pop Festival alone. Tastemakers were jumping onboard right and left. One hit and your whole life opened up like a flower you never even knew had been closed. Films like Blow-Up, The Trip, Easy Rider, and The Endless Summer made a conventional three act narrative strictly for squares.

No matter what your age, it was pretty 'hip' in the upper and middle classes to at least have tried it, even if it was just so you had something to talk about during Friday night's bridge game. Having that 'experience' made you cool, like skydiving or bungee jumping (or cocaine) in the 1980s, or ecstasy in the 90s.

So along comes REVOLUTION, about which the always insightful Flickhead writes:

In the free spirit of the times, [filmmaker] O’Connell doesn’t bother with conventions like linear construction or identifying subtitles. Themes and locations shift at whim, interview subjects go unidentified. Anonymous faces provide scant commentary on David Smith’s Free Clinic, and The Diggers’ Free Store and free food program, both deserving more time and respect. As does the mystery existentialist envisioning a cash-free future run by computers necessitating the need for a pot-smoking leisure class. But these shortcomings don’t diminish some otherwise perceptive passages in Revolution, the most nostalgic of which concern the reach for a communal utopia, one the counterculture — countering greed, materialism, superficiality — believed would erase ego from the equation, to render the desire for personal reward obsolete…  (cont.)

Damn right, Flickhead. What the fuck happened to the pursuit of egolessness? With music by the Steve Miller Band (freshly formed), Country Joe and the Fish, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, we get some ideas of how to pick up the egoless thread. Watching today, the crunchy psychedelic guitars are a most welcome presence in one's living room (dig, the "living"... room) even if you're not paying full attention to the kids onscreen or the squares gawking from the sidelines at the never-ending parade of panhandlers along the Haight.

Whoa man. I'm totally tripping after seeing it. My Pupils are dilated in the mirror but reflecting someone 20-years old and foxy, dancing like a girl who just found freedom, who just stepped out her shell... a girl named... Today.

No, man, that's like her name. She changed her name to 'Today,' because that's all we have. That's everything there is. Dig? Can you imagine where that chick's head is at, man?

Her big LSD trip--captured by O'Connell's camera from start to finish--anchors the whole second half of the film: There's Today, begging for change in a really attractive, clean looking brown and light green poncho. She climbs trees and frolics in the park; she drives up the coast to dig the old growth redwoods. There's squiggly light shows. Flowers! Flowers! She strokes an apple --it's breathing! Someone eats a banana. Some dude paints some crazy colors. She lies in the grass with two girlfriends, giggling hysterically. Even with the 21st century's rose tint-free glasses you can see the auric waves as her whole body sighs in relief as five hundred years of socio-genetic programming is short-circuited and overcome with a single white pill and the kind of good set and setting the Haight in 1965-7 could provide.

Unfolding with one eye on the exploitation market, it could be argued on some level that REVOLUTION was meant less to wake the people up from their westernized stupor and more to turn on the raincoat brigade, all those lusty adults curious about the supposedly limitless free love available if they ever went to San Francisco. Hence there's a lengthy naked dance troupe going nuts under liquid psychedelic lights to Country Joe and the Fish's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 43" (below). But such a prurience is addressed in the film, too, as the Sexual Freedom League explains that only couples are allowed into the orgy to keep the numbers even (so dirty old men don't overrun the scene and turn it into the end of Requiem for a Dream or Viridiana).

In a way, it's sad the SFL had to do that, such rule-making is the first unraveling thread on total freedom's poncho. As someone who's done decades of grieving for the loss of the countercultural revolutionary dream, I've always had a keen hatred for male sexual aggression for just this reason. You can't have a free utopia with members who are obsessed with sex. It's like being an over-eating pig at a communal picnic and you didn't even bring anything--not even a jug of wine. But America's trained its men to be hungry ghosts when it comes to sex -- I guess you need to have a lot of it before you can see the forest for the trees. Look at Siddhartha! Or Mick Jagger! They orgied it up, but they were rich and attractive. No one wants to sleep with ugly raincoat pervs, so the problem just gets worse. Oh well, as long as they pay to see it, because bulbs for those light show projectors are frickin' expensive, take it from me

Decades later watching all this on our laptops we can either grin cynically at all the naive spiritual tomfoolery or we can cry in thinking what we lost. By now I've done some of both. The counterculture died, or did it? I used to argue this point with my guitarist all the time. He said no, the counterculture was alive, it had been integrated--driven underground perhaps--but all the stronger for being more exclusive. I argued that we failed, we blew it. But now of course I'm in AA with the chastened old men and my guitarist's in Ibiza with jet-set supermodels, so there you go. Frankly, I don't envy him. Sounds like an awful lot of bother.

To its immense credit, REVOLUTION keeps up the even-keeled in its discussion, even into the thick of the tripping. Interviewing cocktail hour executive types relaying the open-minded adult opinion, the front line reports from cops, and hospital doctors who deal with the bad trip freak-outs, to counterbalance the starry-eyed unity proponents. Many of the adults think the  hippies are just slumming middle class college dropouts. Change the world through love and spiritual union if you can, they say--power to the flower! Good luck to you all--but either get a job or stop using public bathrooms to wash your sandals! The rest of us work to pay taxes so we can use them on the weekends with our kids, not so you unemployed system-bashing vagrants can use them as free showers while making us feel like the imposers. The doctor talks about LSD casualties in the hospital, as if it's the drug's fault and not the hospital's and the bad trip victim's punkass friends! I wanted to scream at the screen: "Bro! the people who brought these poor kids to your gleaming white sanitary gulag are the problem. A tripping person has no place in a hospital - they belong in the garden, with the sunflowers, or on the roof deck, sunbathing in their body paint and funny hats. Being strapped in a hospital straitjacket is no way to come out of a downward spiral. Blame the youth again for though they don't pay taxes or acknowledge the relevance of the establishment, the minute something goes wrong on their acid trips they demand the hospital take their twitching friend off their hands. Soooo typical. Man when I was in that scene I was known as 'the doctor' for a reason, I could talk anyone off the ledge, a one-man chill-out tent, and it was to me door you'd go before considering a hospital.

Another interesting moment comes when a hippie leader (the one discussed by Flickhead above) discusses the rise of "cybernation," or the increased use of computers, resulting in something called: "massive compulsory leisure." The realization that "this job could be better done by a machine" becomes the prelude to dropping out: "Many, I think, need to learn to do nothing."

He also thinks "LSD should be used to reveal the divine," as opposed to just escape reality. "It's no accident that it entered the world right at the time nuclear fission did." He adds, "If you deny yourself access to that kind of experience, to that kind of energy, then you are simply a fool!" Word, brother. But what about if you continue to take it, over and over, every day, until you're a gibbering mess sitting in a puddle behind the stage at a Phish show? Don't say it didn't happen. I saw you there!

I remember feeling all lysergically connected to this kind of youthful hippie revolutionary moment, back in 1987 when I lucked into an instant loving relationship with my future bandmates and a cadre of beautiful, brilliant, blazing hippie chicks, and I feel deeply sorry for kids who may not have had such a 'trip,' for it truly changed my life forever. But after awhile even I realized LSD was like reading the same travel brochure over and over without ever quite starting the journey. Eventually you have to try and get there, like, permanently, the hard way, via meditation and good deeds, and (alas) AA meetings. My gorgeous Connecticut hippies got married and had mutant kids and I got sober and then stopped going to AA and then found what I was looking for in Effexor. But the revolution, as in a permanent change for the better, never quite happened for me, no matter how many trips I took, nor America. But we have the music, and a parameter of spiritual experience and knowledge we'd have missed otherwise (our western openness to yoga, Deepak Chopra, etc would never be where it is today without the LSD revolution) and the hopes for a next generation of snotty youth to latch onto something bigger than themselves.

Hopefully, this time, they'll figure out a way to shut out the pervs, tourists, and freeloaders who inevitably cohere around such a righteous fire like metal shavings to a beautiful magnet.

That's the ultimate problem with utopias... to really do them right you need to have brutal ways to keep the dirty old men out of the garden - or you need to keep evolving so fast the losers can't catch up. Exclusivity and a high vantage point are needed, as is a bouncer, a gate-keeper, otherwise, forget it. And if you need a bouncer at the gates of dawn, what kind of utopia is that?

Now let me in, goddamn it!

++++++

PS - There was sequel made to check up on Today Malone and see what those hippies 'grew up' to be, it's called THE HIPPIE REVOLUTION, from 1996. Avoid it! Who wants to see a flower child get old? If you must witness such tragedy, check out my tale of time traveling psychedelic gumshoes and the desire to return to that high water mark when LSD almost changed the entire world overnight for the better -- HIPPY IN A HELLBASKET.



PPS: REVOLUTION is no longer avail. on Netflix Streaming and has never been available on DVD but I'm sure it's 'out there' if you know where to look--like everything, man, it streams, dig?--REVOLUTION is from a different time, one where the word "revolution" hadn't yet been co-opted by the media to sell its fall line-up and dance-dance video games. I bet now even the word 'revolution' is trademarked by The Beatles-Macintosh Inc. What can you do about it? Capitalism controls the very words out of our mouths. No way to fight it, that's what we say today, no way to stop the corporate leeches. They're already in our bloodstream. But the hippies didn't know that, and in 1967-8 they did something about it, until they got sleepy. And they forgot what they were supposed to be fighting against. And needed to go home and get money from their corporate dads so they could buy Dead tickets and red feather boas. This is their story

The Rise and Fall of LSD counter-culture in Three Easy Clips.

1. Rise



2. Peak



3. End

How dare you tear down the walls, mate. The walls are there for your protection.

Max Vengeance per Gallon: DRIVE ANGRY, THE GREEN HORNET (in 2-D)

Two titles made it to Netflix in time for the heat: DRIVE ANGRY and THE GREEN HORNET (both 2011). Saw them and now can't remember the difference, but I remember the cars. America!!

ANGRY especially seems to labor under the impression that if it filters in enough Sons of Anarchy auto-erotic Americana --churches, faded American and/or Confederate flags rustling from their tin roof awnings, barbecues, Satanism, gasoline, redneck bars, hot blondes in jean short cutoffs with tattooed abusive juicehead boyfriends, trailers, diners, engine failures, and trigger-happy Arizona cops -- and of course cars, cars, cars--we'll forgive it its lack of any legit trespasses. It dresses awfully badass for a film afraid to drive even a hair outside the pre-established yellow lines of the "vehicular Satanist" genre. Even old Nic Cage is more or less on cruise control, unwilling to floor it with any of his signature hammy over-emoting. Outside of speeding and shooting some cops (who shot at him first, yo! Stay in school) he may as well be a Sunday school teacher.

Both ANGRY and HORNET  think they can get away with having opening scenes where a cool character is walking in slow motion towards the camera as some car or building slowly explodes behind him, like it's not been done to death, buried in an avalanche of parody, dug up, satirized, buried again, re-exhumed with reverse firing rockets after being buried alive by bulldozers. Such scenes are not cool or fun anymore, they are like blank spots in the screen while we doze off, dreaming of other films, from the 70s, when real cars were destroyed by the dozens instead of through pixelation. When we felt alive, tactile...

DRIVE finds Cage--once again back from the grave to avenge his daughter's death and/or save his granddaughter. Apparently Hell consists of watching helplessly from beyond the veil as your loved ones suffer. If the veil in this case was the screen and we were his loved ones, well, there you are, all meta and--unless you're at a drive-in or 3-D ready--choking on the exhaust fumes of cynical producers and product placement.

A pretty boy from the WB casting couch (Billy Burke) is the swaggering evangelical Satanist cult leader who's holding onto Cage's granddaughter until the moon is right for the solstice sacrifice which will herald doomsday. William Fichtner is 'the accountant' who's followed Cage up from Hell to ask him to at least call Satan and let him know when he intends coming home for dinner.

There are some plusses to DRIVE ANGRY: in one scene Cage is shooting bad guys while having sex with a naked waitress, fully clothed, with sunglasses (that's not the plus part) and holding a bottle of whiskey. He shoots the guys without spilling a drop and even takes a slow mo swig between bullets. Damn! The copious humiliated naked women parts however taint the film with that new leather misogynistic smell. Amber Heard, Nic's gal Friday has a lot of moxy and fighting skillz but does that really make up for her objectification? She all but grinds herself on the hood ornament like a frat pledge's dorm room poster. And doesn't she and that waitresss have mothers, too? Where's their moms roaring back from the grave to punch old Nic?

Hell, by the way, is depicted here as a kind of hustler's paradise, like Phoenix, AZ (where my brother Fred lives) but tinted red and with more ash. I don't know much about the autos in DRIVE ANGRY-- that's Fred's department--but I do know one thing, they're not stupid SUVs, and that's good enough for me. My first car was a 1976 Ford Maverick, which I could get up to 90 mph to jump this hill near my house and get massive air. A Maverick wasn't considered too "cherry" at the time, but now looking back that thing was the shit!

Mine was dark yellow, but you get the point

In DRIVE I do like that Heard is such a mega-badass and not afraid to really sink her teeth into the flesh of the guys she fights. But the whole thing with rescuing a baby from Satanists, that just doesn't work. Who can get fired up about the welfare of a baby? Unless your name is Wes Craven and your budget is three dollars, we know that baby's gonna be fine. When the budget's over a million and the target demo is 16 year-old boy, there's no emotional investment in a bunch of swaddling clothes - the kid may be cute, but he's not a character. He can't act. She can't act, excuse me. And if anything happened to that kid we would have heard about it from some concerned Christian group long before this.

GREEN HORNET is marginally more human, though Seth Rogen (who co-wrote) proves here that when shove comes to shovel he can bromance the crotch gags but he can't make us love again, and while director Jean Michel Gondry has made us love again--in the past--he doesn't do it here.  I was a huge Green Hornet fan thanks to an old radio show LP (left) I listened to five dozen times after getting my wisdom teeth out. Nothing like oral pain and opiates to make a 14 year old kid open to new ideas. I learned how to do an Irish accent based on Britt Reid's faithful chief reporter Axford (played by Edward James Olmos for some reason in this new version). I still use some of Axford's expressions in my everyday speech, such as "Sure'n it must be tha hornet!" So yeah, I know a little about this character... and that's what makes me dangerous. Broom Brooom!

Much as I revere some of Jean Michel Gondry's previous films I can only imagine how much more awesome HORNET would be with Jody Hill directing. The unsung genius behind the genuinely anarchic OBSERVE AND REPORT (see 'A Travis for Our Times'), Hill would have found the right note between comedy and chaotic, and the music would have been 15x as awesome! As it is, HORNET's music choices are too keyed to demographic market research to not whiff of cross-promotion, the best that can be said is that the songs avoid the 'word association' game these films so often rely on. I kept waiting for some emo cover of Joni Mitchell's "Just a little Green" or nu-metal crunk version of "It's Not Easy Being Green", or maybe "Green Onions" or Hold Steady's "Hornets! Hornets!"

The original Badass Batman-ish TV show

To its credit, GREEN plays with issues of class, sexism, race, and entitlement - stuff that also reveals its director's a socialist, which is okay (he's French). Shouldn't Kato be pissed that he's smarter, more talented and tougher than his boss? Of course he should! But Gondry is illuminating class resentment in a country that denies class exists. He brings up issues we in our American stupor have elephant in the roomed right out of our vision. How dare he suggest THE HELP is disgruntled? Jay Chou looks good in turtlenecks and underplays brilliantly but his martial arts skill is semi-buried under a ton of TERMINATOR DARK KNIGHT-style digital 'POV weapon-scanning' that's just not needed. All Seth Rogen as Brit Reid has going for him is a good party bro vibe and the ability to take a punch without losing a single tooth. A lot of prime real estate in the meanwhile goes to waste, and all the weirdly insular tics of rich kid cinema come wafting in from the pool like the stank of a maidless frat house.

For all that, a lot of people put a lot of effort into both of these films, which means they deserve respect, and yet this too is a negative. The cool part of something like the Batman TV show was how our own imaginations were required to complete the illusion. The last thing it wanted, deserved, or needed was respect. Seeing the threadbare candy-colored splendor of that TV show now, I realize just how much detail my childhood imagination supplied. Gondry's film, by contrast, is so over-produced we don't even need to see it --it's already seen itself so many times, been so tinkered-over in post-production houses, that the dick jokes bounce around like polished stones in a tumbler echo chamber until the sound imitates canned laughter and applause. Only a robot could truly love it. The rest of us are all just dollar-affixed attention spans required for its own self-justification.

In both films the fingers on the hand of genuine characterization and emotion are cut to fit the glove of ADD-addled CGI. These movies leave you nowhere but numb and, above all, not-bored. Sometimes numb and not bored is enough, but most of the time, having your ADD catered to by the cinematic equivalent of a rich kid's indulgent butler is enervating instead of exhilarating. Even something as ramshackle and off-the-cuff as RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975) had enough rough edges, goofball termite moments, and semi-improvised human interaction to let you feel there was something in it you could call your own. An ashtray you could use where an unseen butler didn't deftly replace it with a new one after every ash flick (or in DRIVE, making sure each ash tray has a new product placement logo clearly in focus at the bottom, the edges each painstakingly distressed to smack of Americana realness. In this overly visualized characters in DRIVE and HORNET have no breathing room. Every breath is measured out by the frame and market-tested.

I'll probably have forgotten these two films by the time I get an actual 3D TV and can see them how they're meant to be seen, and I'm glad I'll be able to see them so fresh, if at all. But, seriously? What's up with Cage and these undead avenging dad roles? I haven't seen GHOST RIDER but between this and that alone (I'm sure there are a zillion others), Cage seems self-typecast as an all-American semi "good ole" boy, destined to return again and again from the dead to air his turbo-charged grievance against the demon/man/infrastructure that killed--or is about to kill--his child, wife and/or grandchild. All I can do is cradle a stack of Cage's latest films (all purchased for $2.99 in the Blockbuster sale bin) and shout "NoooooO!" while shaking my fist in slow motion at the overhead camera... then, in even slower motion, the whole chain of video rental stores blows up as I stroll boldly forth into the realm of internet streaming. Nooo, indeed.

But even that's not the end of old Nic! He's ready to drive up from Hell again and again, whenever a child is missing or money is needed, in whatever "role" you ree-quair of him. If what you ree-quair is he get his 3D ass up in them woods then maybe you're in DELIVERANCE or maybe you're an industry suit afraid to step outside the dirtbag revenge genre, preferring to again and again force some female relative of Cage's to be abused or killed in order to warrant his dour vindictiveness. Mess with his baby girl, he'll kill you. Mess with his car, he'll give you the horn.

In the Windmills of SKIDOO (1968)

"it is part of you - you are part of it.
Remember the final reality - 

the all good, the all peaceful, the light, the radiant - 

let mind and body separate." 

Dig, man. Dig.

Jackie Gleason took acid. It's common knowledge, not that his acting gives you much indication. But thanks to a lifelong interest in aliens and a friendship with Nixon, he maybe saw some things so harrowing that the worst acid could dish out was as rum raisin instead of whiskey a-cocoa. By which I mean genuinely alien dead bodies. UFO author Jim Mars has the story:

According to Gleason's second wife, Beverly McKittrick, (Jackie) returned home visibly shaken one night in 1973. Gleason, who was known to have an avid interest in UFOs, said his friend President Richard Nixon had arranged for him to visit Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, where he viewed the remains of small alien beings under tight security. This story was confirmed by Larry Warren. who said Gleason met with him in May 1986 to hear Warren's account of a UFO experience in England [i.e. Rendlesham - EK]. During their conversation, Gleason related the Nixon aliens story and said the experience traumatized him for weeks. "You could tell he was very sincere," said Warren. "He took the whole affair very seriously and I could that he wanted to get the matter of his chest, and this was why he was telling me all this." Before his death in 1987, Gleason was asked about the incident but declined to comment, a most interesting circumstance, since it was an opportunity to refute the story if it was false. (1) 

SKIDOO was made five years prior to this alleged event and Gleason's character doesn't get to take his big LSD trip until halfway through at least, and then he mainly hallucinates twisting machine guns and overlapping bullet numbers ("I see mathematics!" he roars).

But that doesn't mean the aliens and the LSD are not connected. Why else would I have mentioned it?  Traumatizing as it must be to actually see dead aliens and learn the shocking truth about the alien reality, spectral hallucinations of Mickey Rooney dancing and waving cartoon-style sacks of spondoolicks are worse. Of course paranoia is going to result when you trip in prison, man! All one can see or do is within the confines of a cell, leading to Gleason's wondering if his daughter is his 'own' as he looks into the cracked, dirty mirror. "She's got my ears! She's got my ears!" He claps hands to his head, as if to feel the empty holes, as if wondering if she'll ever them give them back.

Hey, man, don't laugh --we've all been there. Oh wait, laughing is okay. It's a comedy.

This scene is fairly great once Gleason finds his footing, but SKIDDOO starts real rough, with an ear for comedy so leaden it's literally pain-inducing: It's a quiet night at post-modern Beverly Hills home when a remote control war erupts between Gleason's retired gangster (named, heaven's preserve us, "Tough Tony") and wife Carol Channing (wearing so much mascara her lashes stick together), meant to wow us with its 'critique' of pop culture; the fight is interrupted when Cesar Romero shows up at the dock and orders Tony to get himself arrested and hauled into jail in order to 'kiss' (kill) "Blue Chips" (Mickey Rooney), a wiseguy who's about to turn state's evidence. But he was having such a good time at home. It doesn't seem fair, but Tony is tough - so he bravely goes. Antics ensue!

If you say 'screwball' once more I'll SCREAM!

Nothing goes according to plan, of course, and rather leadenly, until Tony licks the "wrong" envelope while prison letter pen-palling. His mind opened, Tough Tony ain't so tough anymore. He gets a conscience ("Gimme a flower") and hallucinates various smoky images, most notably mob kingpin "God's" (Groucho Marx's) head on a turning screw (above).

Meanwhile Gleason's lovely daughter (Alexandra Hay) and her hippy boyfriend (John Phillip Law) head off to see "God" on His yacht. While they're gone, wife Carol brings home all their hippie friends, realizing they're living out of their VW vans, and starts washing their ratty hair in her nice modern kitchen. She's so selfless!"Let mind and body separate and remember the final reality!"

The plot after that involves the now awakened Tony's plan to bust out of jail by putting all the remaining blotter pages in a vat of mashed potatoes, thus drugging the entire prison population and creating so much confusion Gleason and his cellmates can sail past the prison walls in a balloon filled with their hopes and aspirations (after first hypnotizing the guards with an electric rainbow colored trash can dance, set to unbearably trite Nilsson music). Carol Channing turns navy admiral, the hippies turned into her galley slaves, as she pursues her daughter yachtward. When Tony fails to kiss Blue Chips, God orders her daughter's death, but by then everyone is tripping way too hard to load a gun without hallucinating smiley faces on the bullets. Channing sings the drecky/catchy theme song. What was the name of it? I had the lyre lick sheep here somewhere... whoa, leer -ick sheep... that... sounds.... right. Sounds Oww-nnnns

I can imagine how unpleasant tripping while locked in a jail cell would be, sometimes during really bad trips it could feel like that anyway, sometimes a single night could feel like 20 years in the hot box, but having to endure listening to Nilsson singing all of the closing credits in his precious little voice is surely worse than life. Tripping at the theater back in 1968 would, I imagine, have been different. Worse, I mean. No offense to Nilsson overall, but he always gave me the impression he hadn't been beaten up enough as a child.

Nilsson also plays a guard at the jail alongside Fred "Slow Burn" Clark.

Some aspects of this film are less cool than others, but one thing that is cool? Groucho Marx... on acid!

"... I was hanging around with friends from the Hog Farm, who were extras in the movie. Skidoo was pro-acid propaganda thinly disguised as a comedy adventure ... One of the characters in Skidoo was a Mafia chieftain named God. Screenwriter Bill Cannon had suggested Groucho Marx for the part ... [Groucho] was concerned about the script of Skidoo because it pretty much advocated LSD which he had never tried, but he was curious. Moreover, he felt a certain responsibility to his young audience not to steer them wrong, so could I possibly get him some pure stuff and would I care to accompany him on a trip. I did not play hard to get. We arranged to ingest those little white tablets one afternoon at the home of an actress in Beverly Hills ...

... Groucho was holding on to his cigar for a long time, but he never smoked it, he only sniffed it occasionally. 'Everybody has their own Laurel and Hardy,' he mused. 'A miniature Laurel and Hardy, one on each shoulder. Your little Oliver Hardy bawls you out - he says, 'Well this is a fine mess you've gotten us into.' And your little Stan Laurel gets all weepy - 'Oh, Ollie. I couldn't help it. I'm sorry, I did the best I could ...'

... Later, when Groucho started chuckling to himself, I hesitated to interrupt his reverie, but I had to ask, 'What struck you funny?' 'I was thinking about this movie, Skidoo,' he said. 'I mean some of it is just plain ridiculous. This kid puts his stationery, which is soaked in LSD, into the water supply of the prison, and suddenly everybody gets completely reformed. There's a prisoner who says, 'Oh, gosh, now I don't have to be a rapist anymore!' ... But I'm getting a big kick out of playing somebody named God like a dirty old man. You wanna know why ... it's because - do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?'

... He recalled Otto Preminger telling him about his own response to taking LSD and then he mimicked Preminger's accent: "I saw tings, bot I did not zee myself.' Groucho was looking in a mirror on the dining room wall, and he said, 'Well, I can see myself but I still don't understand what the hell I'm doing here." A week later, Groucho told me that the Hog Farm had turned him on with marijuana on the set of Skidoo. When Skidoo was released, Tim Leary saw it, and he cheerfully admitted, 'I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He's much hipper than me ...' Posted by Kliph Nesteroff - Classic Television Showbiz 

Gut Gott! If I didn't know from cinema history that Preminger did acid I never would have believed it because SKIDOO is mighty square. The harder it tries not to be square the squarer it is, like quicksand. I've never taken LSD on a film set (that I know of, man) but one thing I do know: psychedelics can make things seem a lot funnier at the time than they 'really' are.... know what I mean? Need I say more? Terry Southern might have saved it. He almost saved Candy. Lord, could you imagine how much worse it would have been with a Nilsson score?

For awhile, a long long time, SKIDOO was totally MIA. It was much better that way. The thought of Groucho playing God seemed so appetizing--Groucho being such an acidhead-friendly icon to begin with (watch any of the Marx's first five films after tripping at a Dead show and see what I mean)--we longed to see this film for decades. How deserved was its rarity! It was hard to see for our protection.

Still, Pandora's Box and all. We couldn't believe it could be as half as bad as those who had seen it claimed.

Right there you have an inkling: what looks good on paper....

HEAD (above), which came out the same year - gets it all right where SKIDOO gets it all wrong

But I also know this from way, way too much personal experience: after awhile even the awesome visuals and life lessons of LSD can get redundant, like being thrown up against the same aquarium window time and time again, able to see paradise but cut off from it. It's like being on a Disney ride that can neither be slowed nor speeded up, nor exited, on endless repeat. The paranoia gradually lessens as you get the hang of not fighting it, but the surrealism ends too soon and the paradise-- where you long to stay-- is just something you pass by on the ride. And the ride doesn't stop. And you can't get off til it does. You end up forced to confront the fact that all was revealed to you years ago, the first time you ever tripped. You were given homework by gods and spirit animals. You were told how to make use of those revelations granted. But all you did was trip more, until the spirit animals didn't even bother to show.  Coming down off of the acid that showed you what to do once you were no longer on it and so going back onto it to try and remember, becomes the whole show, an endless loop of diminishing returns, gradually giving way to alcoholism and idiocy.

Now the list of things you must do to be free from ego's headlock has doubled and that goal is so far away it's no brighter than the candle at the far end of the room, dancing like a cigarette tip in the hand of the night.

And this all happens over the course of four hours. Endlessly.

Like so many comedies of the era, SKIDOO is packed with old timers from the 30s-40s looking for a few days work, a cameo saying whatever, and they mirror in their own confusion that of an audience far too easily amused and passive due to their own smuggled-into-the-theater chemical stash. In Hollywood, I guess, if word gets out you're making a big-budget youth market boondoggle your set fills to overflowing with weird old character actors looking for a walk-on and free craft services. A chance to connect with the younger generation could mean supporting spots and star turns and god knows what for years to come. Just look at all the old fogey greats racing around the AIP beach party movies: Boris Karloff, Don Rickles, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre--that's just off the top of my head. None of those cats made it to SKIDOO, but there is Slim ""Major Kong" Pickens as a radio operator, George Raft as a sea captain, Peter Lawford as a senator, Frank Gorshin as a hipster capo in on the Rooney job...

Surprisingly, Frank Gorshin looks the worst. Prison disagrees with him. BUT!!! between him, Cesar "the Joker" Romero (as Tough Tony's godfather) and Burgess "Penguin" Meredith (as the warden) there are no less than three villains from the Batman TV show in here (Preminger himself being 'Mr. Freeze' makes a fourth, albeit behind the camera)! Would there was a Newmar! Would there was a willowy Julie Newmar indeed. Ah well, it's nice to see John Phillips Law (DIABOLIK! Pygar!) as the beautiful white hippy version of Sidney Poitier in GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER, i.e. tall, and engaged to Alexandra Hay--she who us born to knock your socks off in a mod miniskirt, and bound to unnerve her father whomever she marries. Proving this is all just a very expensive major studio version of an AIP beach movie, Frankie Avalon even plays Romero's playboy son. He's the reminder that 'youth' can still be square, the last gasp reminder of pre-hippie cool. Hippies is stolen your girls, Frankie! Frankie you're old!

It's worth noting how genuinely revolutionary, relative to today's inclement times, it is that Groucho Marx and Otto Preminger did LSD as preparation for making the movie. The former, as we've learned, did it expressly so he could be sure he wasn't leading the kids down a wrong path, as the movie was considered an advocation of LSD use (which may have something to do with its being so hard to see until lately); Preminger took it because he was originally scheduled to direct an anti-LSD movie and decided contempt prior to investigation was wrong! That a 78 year-old man like Groucho and a 63 year-old man like Otto would decide to take LSD before either advocating or condemning it marks how superior they are to the 'just say no' fearmongers of today (and the 80s). Has lack of investigation prior to demonization ever stopped out current flock of old white mwen from their displays of 'think of the children!" hysteria? Some relatives of people I know even prefer to die of malnutrition rather than smoke weed-- even if told by their doctors it will help relieve post-chemo nausea.

As Preminger might say, People.... zey used to be so awesome.

One of SKID's biggest promoters is Christian Divine, who lays out some backstory:

Based on a more satirical, whimsical script by rebel scribe Doran William Cannon (Brewster McCloud; Hex), Skidoo was to be Preminger's first real comedy since 1954's The Moon Is Blue, which caused a scandal by using the verboten word, "virgin" and led to the destruction of the prohibitive Production Code. Preminger invited controversy all through his career, often battling the forces of political censorship to tackle now issues in his films. Par for the course, he had originally planned to direct John Hersey's LSD cautionary novel, Too Far To Walk, but after meeting with counter-culture impressario Tom Law -- whose brother John Phillip Law had appeared in Preminger's Hurry Sundown (1966) -- the director had a change of heart. Tom Law explained, "When I met Otto, he told me he was making an anti-LSD film. I asked him why and tried to explain he wasn't being truthful to the subject, that I knew many people who had positive experiences and he was contributing to stereotypes. He listened and agreed. He was cool."

Although Bill Cannon had been brought in to adapt Too Far To Walk, Preminger impulsively decided to buy his sample script Skidoo. Francis Ford Coppola urged the wary Cannon to sell his screenplay, advising him that this would be a perfect entry into Hollywood. He sold it for 75,000 dollars and Otto Preminger immersed himself in the world of the hippies with a paisley vengeance. As a genuinely progressive soul, he hung out with Tom and John Phillip Law, who owned the legendary 60s rock mansion, The Castle, high in the Hollywood Hills. Bob Dylan composed on a typewriter while Nico lounged and Harrison Ford did carpentry. (Christian Divine, Six Degrees of Skidoo )

I'm very happy this film has a champion in Christian Divine. I don't think SKIDOO's anywhere near as engaging as HEAD, YELLOW SUBMARINE and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, but it holds its own against the similar bloated spectacles cranked out by the fading old Hollywood studio system as they vainly to meet the youth of the 60s halfway. It at least dares to imagine a bright, truly deranged future for all concerned, outside the limitations of cultural difference like the differences between inside jail and out, crime and the law, straight and zonked or alien and human. While AIP movies like THE TRIP had to show Peter Fonda's head crack open in the final freeze frame and run disclaimers to appease nervous producers, SKIDOO sets sail with God on a candy-colored sailboat. Suck as it may, it keeps its tab on its tongue, and stays pro-LSD down to its prison-striped socks.

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1. Mars, Jim - Alien Agenda, p. 122 (Harper, NY, 1997)