R.I.P. 2014: the 60s

From 60s music: most recently singer Joe Cocker.  Earler in the year: Jack Bruce (bassist for Cream), guitarist Johnny Winter, Bobby Keys (sax player for the Rolling Stones and a solo artist), Ian McLager (keyboards, the Faces), Glenn Cornick (bass, Jethro Tull), Paul Revere (lead singer, Paul Revere and the Raiders.)  Bobby Womack, Jay Traynor (Jay and the Americans.)

Also lyricist Gerry Goffin (with Carole King) and songwriter Peter Callander.

From the folk world, Pete Seeger, who belongs in every decade from the 30s on, but reemerged with the 60s folk boom, including mentoring Bob Dylan; and (speaking of Dylan) Carla Rotolo, whose enthusiasm got Dylan gigs and a recording contract.  And a girlfriend--her younger sister, Suzy.

A major if recently forgotten figure of the 60s counterculture was Steven Gaskin, whose Monday Night Class at the Family Dog in San Francisco was immense and amazing (I was there for several, including the First Annual Holy Man Jam.)  He later left the city and established The Farm, an experimental community that still exists.  Marking his passing, the Sun Magazine re-published a 1985 interview  and an example of a Monday Night Class.

Movies lost director Mike Nichols (The Graduate) and French director Alain Renais, actor Maximillian Schell ( Academy Award for Judgement at Nuremberg.)

Writers crucial to the decade: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Amiri Baraka (then known as Leroi Jones).

R.I.P. 2013: the '60s

Among the many lost in 2013 boomers remember from the 1960s: astronaut Scott Carpenter, comedian Jonathan Winters, actress Karen Black, actor Milo O'Shea (Ulysses); Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for The Doors; Lou Reed, first of the Velvet Underground; Paul Williams, founder and editor of the pioneer rock magazine Crawdaddy;  singer Richie Havens; Bobby Rogers of Motown's first big group, The Miracles; David Frost, who first attracted American attention by importing his hit series of topical satire from the UK, That Was the Week That Was. 

 Not pictured: actor Tom Laughlin (the Billy Jack movie series), Ray Dolby (Dolby sound), musicians J.J. Cale, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Alvin Lee, Mary Love, Rich Huxley (the Dave Clark Five).  Liberal Catholic writer Andrew Greeley; perennial White House reporter Helen Thomas, documentary filmmaker Ed Pincus; cinematographer Marcello Gotti (Battle of Algiers),  record producer for the Rolling Stones etc. Andy Johns, poet Anselm Hollo, and Syd Bernstein, the promoter who brought the Beatles to America.  

Jonathan Winters

Karen Black

Milo O'Shea

Lou Reed

Ray Manzarek of The Doors

Paul Williams, ed. of Crawdaddy

Richie Havens

David Frost (That Was the Week That Was)

Bobby Rogers of The Miracles

R.I.P. 2010: the 60s

Early and middle boomers remember them from the 60s: Lynn Redgrave (Georgy Girl), Robert Culp (I Spy), Ted Sorenson (Special Counsel and speechwriter for JFK), director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde), Stewart Udall (JFK's Secretary of Interior), Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider), author George Leonard, operatic star Joan Sutherland. Not pictured: Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet), country singer Jimmy Dean and Walter F. Morrison, creator of the Frisbee. May they rest in peace. We remember them.

R.I.P. in 2009: the 60s

Among those we lost in 2009 who came to boomer fame in the 60s: actor James Whitmore ("The Law and Mr. Jones" and the 50s' Them!); singer Gordon Waller of Peter & Gordon; actor Patrick McGoohan (TV's "The Prisoner") singer Mary Travers of Peter, Paul & Mary; singer Koko Taylor; TV news icon Walter Cronkite; dancer Merce Cunningham; actor Wendy Richard (Gumshoe and "The EastEnders") impressario Allen Klein (with the Beatles); Ed McMahon (with Johnny Carson.) Not pictured: Robert MacNamara, Senator Edward Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who all first became prominent during the JFK administration. (That shot of Cronkite shows him announcing the death of JFK.) Also not pictured: Henry Gibson ("Laugh-In")

Gumshoe on DVD

Finally on DVD, this gem from 1971. I remember Gumshoe as a 60s style romp with Albert Finney playing another working class hero, alongside his favorite mate as the working class heroine, Billie Whitlaw (most famous as a stage actress in Beckett). (That's not her in the photo, though--that's a nice set piece towards the end with the young Wendy Richard, who has also had a good long career.) But there's some other historical interest here now, in this tale of the Liverpool bingo parlor comic who puts an ad in the paper on a whim to hire himself out as a Bogart-style private eye. It turns out to be the first (or maybe second) feature directed by Stephen Frears, whose had quite a career since (My Beautiful Launderette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, High Fidelity, etc..) I also noticed from the start of watching this again--for the first time since it disappeared from theatres-- that the music was unusually stylish. Turns out the composer was Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Surprised I liked it, actually.) The cinematography--and the print--have held up remarkably well. Sometimes going back to favorite films from the 60s isn't as striking an experience now, but this one holds up--it's a smart delight. It's funny, both in its homage to those Bogart as Philip Marlowe movies, and as a contemporary comedy, but it's got some complexities as well as wit. Check it out.

Update: A sad addendum. The Guardian reports that Wendy Richard, pictured above, just died, after a bout with cancer. She became best known for the British TV series The EastEnders, where she starred for 22 years. Her career was capped by an MBE from the Queen. She was 65.

Across the Universe

The best movie about the 60s made since the 60s so far is Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, which tells its story with songs composed by the Beatles.

The Best 60s Movie Yet

It's been out for awhile, but after seeing it for the third time I'm ready to pronounce Across the Universe as the best movie about the 60s made since the 60s.

This movie that tells a very 60s story mostly with Beatles songs has all the hallmarks of its director, Julie Taymor: the masks, the hints of Balinese dancing and whirling dervishes, the vivid and colorful imagination and surprising stylized sequences together with realism. But with an ingenious story and script by Ian La Frenais (who I remember as the first writer of the Lovejoy series from the BBC, which by coincidence I'm currently watching again on DVD), it depicts the 60s as I remember them, especially emotionally. There may be a few instances of incorrect chronology, but truly there are no false notes.

Using brilliant unknowns as stars, and pretty much hiding stars in musical performances, the story of a boy from Liverpool named Jude and his romance with an American girl named Lucy covers so much and so many characters that ring true. The dinner table debates with parents, the idiotic measures friends advised to flunk the draft physical--it's all exactly right.

So is the clash between a politically radicalized Lucy and the artistic Jude, whose drawings even resemble John Lennon's. The movie plays with 60s myth as well as realities, imagining what might have happened if Janis Joplin had hooked up with Jimi Hendrix. Or the clash of psychedelic egos when a Ken Kesey type is dissed by the Tim Leary figure, as West Coast fails to meet East. (There's even a brief shot on Kesey's bus of a guy typing madly--a Tom Wolfe joke?)

Sure, it's a romance, so instead of dying young from overdoses, the Janis and Jimi figures find true love in each other, and after Jude gets girl, and Jude loses girl, Jude and Lucy seem to reunite. And the LSD episodes are playful and magical and innocent--but the truth is that for a lot of us, it all was pretty innocent. At first anyway. The draft physical sequence may be overstylized to make a familiar point, but it does suggest how helpless and strange the experience was, and the Vietnam sequences have that Apocalypse Now surreal tinge that vets suggest was very real.

And sure, there's a lot left out (my beef with these stories about anti-war awakenings is that people are never seen reading, which is mostly how we learned this stuff. Not very cinematic I guess, unless you're French New Wave--they could show people reading as a dramatic act.) But it's stripped down to myth, and this myth represents the reality. If you weren't there and you want to know what the 60s were like, this gives you a pretty good idea.

At the same time it's also wish fulfillment--that is it fulfills our fondest wish of life as a series of Beatles songs. So that's a pretty satisfying way of identifying with this.

For serious Beatles fans, it's got endless layers. The music is done very well, first of all. By now that music has been absorbed into the cultural and musical bloodstream. But there are lots of wonderful references, right down to shots that homage Beatles videos and movies, A Hard Day's Night, Yellow Submarine and the last Beatles concert, on the rooftop in Let It Be. Early in the film there's a "With a Little Help From My Friends" sequence that veers from a fairly straightforward Sergeant Pepper's cover to referencing the Joe Cocker version. What ever happened to Joe Cocker? you're wondering. Well, in a few minutes, there he is, the real Joe Cocker: probably as you figured he'd end up, as a bum singing in the subway tunnel, and looking comfortable doing it.

Anyway, if you haven't seen it, do. It's long but there isn't a second wasted. The "Dear Prudence" sequence alone will knock you out, and the whole movie gets better with repeated viewings. It's visually brilliant, eclectic without being overbearing. (The 60s themselves mashed artistic and historical styles, with a lot more meaning, sincerity and glee than subsequent glib or grim postmodernism.) The casting is brilliant--you'll feel through these actors. Across the Universe is a boomer classic.

The Little Film That Did

The Steven Speilberg movie empire, including his production company--that's a photo of the entrance--started with a 25 minute student film in 1968, called "Amblin." And I've just seen it. On YouTube. See the post below.

The Speilberg 60s Mystery

In 1967-68, I was the go-between on my campus for an experimental film series. Compilations of films were sent from Hollywood or somewhere, and I booked the room, put up the posters and, not incidentally, saw all the films.They were short films, probably a lot of student work. As I recall, there was a lot of trippy animation and even trippier live action films, all very psychedelic. There was one short film in the first bunch, a narrative so straight that it was almost embarrassing. But it had charm, reality, and a line that I loved and still remember. It was about a guy hitch-hiking.

Several years ago I read something about the famous director, Steven Speilberg: that he made his first film in 1968, called "Amblin'," which is also the name of his film company, and that it was a short film about a hitch-hiker. So I immediately thought of those experimental film packages and that one short film I remembered.

Speilberg by the way was one of the earliest official baby boomers--not as early as me, but he was born just a few months later in 1946. He was the first boomer filmmaker to make it big in Hollywood, with a distinctly 60s sensibility.

But I could never find a video of "Amblin.'" Nor did I ever see it screened wherever I happened to be. (In Cambridge years ago, I actually saw director Brian DePalma's student film projected on a barroom wall--it was this weird combination of Godzilla and Beowulf done with like clay models.)

I was lamenting this the other day when I suddenly realized: oh yeah, YouTube. Sure enough, there it was, all 25 minutes of Amblin'. Not a great transfer, and really, not a great film. I was glad to see that Speilberg's youthful insecurities and neuroses were as obvious as mine probably were in my "art" of the period. He was probably more honest about his relationship to the counterculture than I was.

Anyway, big disappointment: it's not the same film.

"Amblin" is about this sort of Paul Simon lookalike shy neurotic, hitching with this willowy very 60s and very English looking beautiful young wish fulfillment hippie chick. And it was kind of trippy, in a hey hey we're the Monkees kind of way.

But the movie I remember was about a guy (not particularly freaky in the long-hair sort of way) hitching, who is picked up by a beautiful young woman in like a sports car, and they spend the night in a romantic cabin, or anyway, I remember a fireplace. But when he wakes up in the morning, she's gone. And the last shot is of him sitting on a hillside, looking down at the highway.

Here's the line I remember. She asks him more or less what he wants to do with his life. He doesn't know, but he confesses, "I'd like to be a Beatle."Well, of course. That's exactly what I wanted to be--what we all wanted to be! In 1967-68, absolutely!

So now I'm disappointed that I wasn't one of the first to spot Speilberg's genius, or even that I now knew that he made this movie and I could see it again, to see how it matches up with my recollection. And it leaves me with the mystery: who did make this movie? What's it called? Is it on YouTube?

R.I.P. in 2007: 60s Stars

Two classic film directors influential in the 60s died on the same day in 2007: Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow up, Zabriskie Point) and Ingmar Bergman (Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through A Glass Darkly, etc.)
Laszlo Kovacs was an esteemed and influential cinematographer, beginning with the 60s classics Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and 70s classics Paper Moon and Shampoo.
Denny Doherty was the closest that the Mamas and Papas had to a lead singer. With just a few albums in a few years, this was one of the most important groups of the 60s, here headlining the Monterry Pop Festival, the first of the great 60s music events, organized by Papa John Phillips.

On the right in this photo is Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., already a noted political historian when he became an advisor to President John Kennedy, and promoted 60s liberalism as the "politics of hope." His sad duty later was to write indispensable chronicles of JFK and Robert Kennedy, after their assassinations. His book on RFK in particular is well worth reading today.

Movies: To Kill A Mockingbird

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch with Mary Badham
as his daughter, Scout, in To Kill A Mockingbird.

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and Brock Peters as Tom
Robinson.

Movies

To Kill A Mockingbird

Released in 1962 and starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch , To Kill A Mockingbird was an immediate hit. Peck won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and only Lawrence of Arabia could deny this movie the honor of Best Picture. More than 40 years later, it is still among the most popular and acclaimed movies of all time. Recently the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch as the greatest film hero in the history of movies.

The movie was based on the novel by Harper Lee, also both an immediate and lasting success. She wedded childhood memories with a courtroom drama that struck a chord as the Civil Rights era was reaching its fruition. For example:

In the town of Monroeville, Alabama, a rich man’s son was caught joyriding in a stolen car. His father persuaded the sheriff not to arrest the boy, but to leave the punishment up to him. He imposed three years of house arrest, but it turned into a life sentence when even after that time the young man found he could no longer face leaving the confines of his house, except at night. He became an object of mystery and fear in the neighborhood. Or so the local story goes.

This was Nelle Harper Lee’s hometown in the 1930s. She left it for college, then law school in her father’s footsteps, though she stopped just shy of completing her degree. Instead she went to New York, where she worked as an airline reservations clerk and accompanied her childhood friend, Truman Capote, as he researched his book about two murderers in Kansas, In Cold Blood. (Catherine Keener plays her in the film Capote, and looks very much like her 1960s photos.)

[text continues after photos]

Gregory Peck with Harper Lee as the movie was shooting.

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote and Catherine
Keener as Harper Lee in Capote (2005).

She began writing in earnest in the mid 50s, returning frequently to Alabama to nurse her ailing father. One Christmas in Manhattan, a songwriter friend and his wife gave her a unique gift—a year’s income, to support her writing. (The songwriter was Michael Brown, who made his reputation and probably his fortune producing industrial musicals for clients like DuPont and Woolworth.)

She used it to write the first draft of To Kill A Mockingbird. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961, and remains among the top 10 best selling novels from then until now. It is one of the five most assigned novels in American schools, and American librarians recently voted it the best novel of the twentieth century.

Harper Lee transformed memories of her childhood: her father was the inspiration for Atticus Finch, Truman Capote became Dill, and that ghostly young man was the probable prototype for Boo Radley. (That story is not well known, by the way. I found it in an academic thesis online by the director of a University of Alabama production of the play, who visited Monroeville.)

To refresh your memory of the story: Atticus Finch is the widowed father of the tomboy Scout (Harper Lee’s self-portrait) and Jem (Scout’s older brother). Atticus is a lawyer appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a young black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. This event is based partly on a case of her father’s, and partly on the infamous Scottsboro Trials of young black men falsely convicted of raping a white woman, also in the 1930s, when Harper Lee was about the same age as her fictional stand-in, Jean-Louise, known as Scout.

Boo Radley's sculptures of Scout and Jem.

Mary Badham with Robert Duvall as Boo Radley.

Lee’s first submitted version of the work was reportedly more of a series of linked stories (ironically, a very hot form in fiction at the present moment.) But her publisher insisted on a more unified novel.

Lee was able to achieve this partly by following in linear time the education of the young girl, Scout and her brother, Jem, and partly by weaving a few important themes throughout the book. The first was about innocence, both of children and of “the mockingbird”—the innocent who only sings and does no one any harm—which applies to both Tom Robinson, the accused black man Atticus defends, and to Boo Radley, the neighbor who lives in darkness, the stranger in their midst who receives their projections of violence, and is therefore a source of fear.

He is different (and a kind of artist, who creates sculptures and leaves them for the children to find, along with talismans of his own “normal” childhood). He is literally unseen, and so represents the aspects of people we are blind to, because of our preconceptions. This obviously applies to race, and there is also a strong theme of class in the novel—which cuts both ways. (It can be argued that Atticus has his own class prejudices.)

The second theme, which follows from the first and is explicitly stated as a lesson to the novel’s children, is that of cultivating empathy and understanding by trying to see the world from the other’s perspective (as Scout does finally when she stands on Boo Radley’s porch at the end), by metaphorically living in someone else’s skin, walking in their shoes. This is a lesson about life and specifically about race. It remains the most crucial lesson in our public as well as private lives, and so this too accounts for this novel’s standing.

It is reinforced in other ways throughout the novel, notably by the brief story of Mrs. Dubose, a surly neighbor who insults everyone, including Scout and Jem, and says harsh things about Atticus. When Jem loses his temper and destroys her garden flowers, Atticus sends him to Mrs. Dubose to apologize and make restitution. Mr. D. requires him to read aloud to her everyday. When she dies, they learn that she was always in pain and addicted to morphine, which accounted for her harsh behavior. She decided she would die free of her addiction, and Jem reading to her was a way for her to bear the pain. It’s another example of assumptions and projections contradicted by understanding, as well as a story of redemption and the power of simple acts to do good.

Mary Badham and Gregory Peck reviewing the script.