New West Pick: Documentary Film Festival
Big Sky Film: “The Drug Years” Gives the ‘60s a Fresh Look
By Andy Smetanka, 2-14-07
Editor’s Note: “The Drug Years” is one of NewWest.Net’s top picks for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which opens Feb. 15 at the Wilma Theater. “The Drug Years,” part of the special presentations program at the festival, shows on Saturday, Feb. 17 at 1:40 p.m. in Wilma 2. Check back to www.newwest.net/bsdff for more NewWest.Net picks this week and coverage of the festival.
I like to tell my composition students that the narration on “The Wonder Years” strikes the sort of nostalgic, reflective, humorous tone they should aspire to as they think about the 750-word memoir unit. You know: “As I watched my sister drive off in her VW bus, I felt a little piece of my innocence slip away ... turn, turn, turn...”
On the other hand, too many made-for-TV documentaries about drugs and the counterculture in the late ‘60s aspire to much the same thing: that “Wonder Years” tone—too tidy, too compact, too sentimental, too simplified. If you weren’t there, you grow up thinking about flower power, the Haight-Ashbury, the First Human Be-In and so forth in rose-tinted terms because they’re so often presented that way. Everyone wants a piece of Woodstock; no one wants to claim Altamont.
The Drug Years, a four-part co-production between Perry Films, VH1 and the Sundance Channel, goes some distance toward, if not a radical re-imagining of the decade, then at least the inclusion of some younger, fresher voices. The film doesn’t start and stop with the ‘60s (although subsequent decades and the drugs that characterize them don’t get as much screen time as weed and LSD), but it’s rooted in that decade and so are most of the celebrities interviewed. And much of what, oh, say, Ray Manzarek has to say is so tamped-down and polished from almost forty years of telling it over and over, a little thatching and aerating of the litany is no bad thing.
Of course, at first you might wonder, “Wait, what are Henry Rollins and Liz Phair doing in a documentary about the ‘60s?” Rollins was, what, like nine years old when they ended? But that’s what I mean by the inclusion of some other voices. There’s that old saw about how “if you can remember, maaaan, then you weren’’t there,” but, of course, a lot of people did remember, wrote about it, and helped calcify many of the hooray-for-us tropes that are still getting handed down to young ‘uns whose sexual and chemical awakenings just weren’t as cool, sorry kid. There’s perhaps never been a group so keen to celebrate its own wonderful amazingness as the baby boomers who were in the right few places at the right times in the ‘60s—it shouldn’t be their prerogative to canonize the legacy as well.
The Drug Years is intriguing viewing. On the pro side, the stock footage is wall-to-wall amazing and apart from the ‘60s bias—director/producer Hart Perry was there and he shot a good deal of the footage—it maintains a sense of perspective. On the con side, the interview list cleaves tightly to the old Known Quantities, like Ray Manzarek, and it was obviously assembled with TV in mind: predictable breaks and turn-on-a-single-celebrity-mention-of-a-different-drug transitions. It’s worth it, though, for the sense of excitement it establishes in all these things happening for the first time. A time to be born, a time to die, a time to get so high on mushrooms you pee in your dorm roommate’s crock pot because you’re scared of mirrors in the bathroom. [Byrdsy guitar jangle here].
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As Hunter Thompson wrote:
“We’re all wired into a survival trip now… no more of the speed that fueled the 60’s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling conciousness expansion, without ever giving a thought to the grim meathook realities that were lying in wait for all those peoples who took him seriously. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy peace and understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss, and failure, is ours too. What Leary took down with him was that the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the acid culture. The desperate assumption that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.”
I look forward to them movie and can only hope it does talk more about Altamont than it does Woodstock.