Screening the Sixties

Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of Memory

Oliver Gruner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137496324
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137496331
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book provides a detailed and engaging account of how Hollywood cinema has represented and 'remembered' the Sixties. From late 1970s hippie musicals such as Hair and The Rose through to recent civil rights portrayals The Help and Lee Daniels' The Butler, Oliver Gruner explores the ways in which films have engaged with broad debates on America's recent past. Drawing on extensive archival research, he traces production history and script development, showing how a group of politically engaged filmmakers sought to offer resonant contributions to public memory. Situating Hollywood within a wider series of debates taking place in the US public sphere, Screening the Sixties offers a rigorous and innovative study of cinema's engagement with this most contested of epochs.

© The Author(s) 2016

Oliver GrunerScreening the Sixties10.1057/978-1-137-49633-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Mourning the Age of Aquarius

Oliver Gruner¹

(1)

University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

End Abstract

By the autumn of 1967, when Czech director Miloš Forman watched the premiere performance of hippie-themed stage musical Hair at New York’s Public Theater, the Sixties counterculture was both a media phenomenon and, for long-time observers, on a rapid journey into self-destruction. Thriving hippie enclaves could be found in major cities across the country, from New York and Chicago to Austin and Atlanta. That year the so-called ‘Summer of Love’ had seen as many as 75,000 young people populate San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district in search of alternative lifestyles and mind-altering substances. ¹ Time magazine dedicated its 7 July 1967 front cover to ‘Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture’. ² The Monterey International Pop Festival showcased a new generation of ‘acid rock’ bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead as the vanguard for popular music’s celebration of a new drug-inspired consciousness. ³ Timothy Leary was a household name, his appeal for people to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ a much-repeated anthem of the counterculture.

At the same time, however, there was uneasiness that the counterculture’s newfound prominence was killing the ideals for which it stood. Placing hippies in the limelight had, according to many commentators, paved the way for exploitation by big business, the media and those less interested in communal living than unchecked debauchery. Concerned with what they saw as establishment co-option of hippie values, San Francisco activists the Diggers staged a funeral for ‘Hippie, devoted son of mass media’. ⁴ Author and journalist Joan Didion published a damning critique of Haight Ashbury, described as bedevilled by con artists and misogyny. ‘Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street’, went the communiqués posted around San Francisco. ⁵ One 1968 study argued that around 15 per cent of the Haight’s inhabitants were ‘psychotics and religious obsessives’. ⁶

This public tussle over the hippie movement’s impact was but a fragment of widening debates on the Sixties, and a harbinger of things to come. As Coming Home (1978), Hair (1979) and The Rose (1979) began their journeys from script to screen in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a fight to define the era was in the making. Disputes over policies in South-east Asia, over women’s and minority rights, over sexual morality—here were the opening salvos of the bellicose rhetoric that would come to pervade Sixties remembrance. If this period is renowned for its anti-war demonstrators, feminist activists, hippies and Black Panthers, the concurrent rise of a noisy New Right ensured the US public sphere was riven with conflict. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin suggest that the respective administrations of President Lyndon B. Johnson and President Richard Nixon were attacked from both the Left and the Right throughout the period. ⁷ Senator George Wallace and California governor Ronald Reagan were but two prominent figures to attack what they perceived to be an out-of-touch liberal intelligentsia and ‘spoilt’ band of left-wing radicals. Their outspoken rhetoric further limned the idea of a nation divided. ⁸

This chapter examines the development and production of Coming Home, Hair and The Rose against evolving debates on the Sixties. In particular, I am concerned with how each shaped and reshaped its representation of hippie communities and lifestyles. The very word ‘hippie’ is fluid and used to signify a range of ideas and values. Sam Binkley provides a useful list of definitions which indicate some of the social, cultural and sexual personas attached to this Sixties archetype: ‘civic firebrand, vagabond, swinger, and LSD mystic […] pastoralist, domestic technician, farmer, technologist, and specialist in the new arts of authentic living’. ⁹ Whether challenging traditional perspectives on sex and the family, remaking the private sphere, adopting alternative lifestyles, developing new music and art, protesting against the Vietnam War or experimenting with drugs, the hippie’s legacy remained a flashpoint in Sixties commemoration of later years.

On the one hand, hippies were part of a broader ‘counterculture’ on the rise after World War II. Turning a critical eye on a range of ills—race and gender inequality, conformity, obsession with material goods, militaristic tendencies within government and a bland, stultifying popular culture—proponents of counterculture values sought to challenge dominant beliefs through art, literature and political protest. On the other hand, as Christopher Gair argues, there are problems with identifying an ideologically coherent counterculture: ‘many within the hippie community saw politics as a “drag”’, while others involved in political activism ‘appeared to be both fascinated and appalled by the activities of the Diggers, Yippies and other groups’. ¹⁰ Similarly, while feminists may have practised hippie lifestyles and been involved in New Left organisations, the formation of a separate women’s liberation movement was in part a response to misogyny within the counterculture. ¹¹

Nevertheless, to detach ‘the hippie’ from politics—to parlay its myriad contributions to Sixties life into a waxwork image of ‘peace, love and dope’—is to ignore its contribution to broader issues and causes. The filmmakers analysed here began their projects with an idea of the hippie that crossed a range of ideological debates, from the Vietnam War to gender relations and sexual freedoms. However, they eventually removed and/or toned down their representation of what may be considered its more controversial features. Jerry Lembcke and Peter Krämer have conducted detailed analyses of Coming Home’s production history. Lembcke explores the extent to which the film emphasised supposed antagonisms between Vietnam veterans and anti-war protestors. Krämer is concerned with lead actor Jane Fonda’s contribution to the production process, and how she instigated changes that enhanced the film’s female political awakening narrative. ¹² My analysis builds on such work, adding further consideration of Coming Home’s development. A script that at one point presented its protagonists as heavily involved in communal living, psychedelic culture and a large-scale anti-war movement ended up focusing on the personal transformation of its central female character. This offered a powerful narrative about a woman’s political ‘coming of age’ in the Sixties, but did so at the expense of aligning this transformation with broader social movements.

Hippie-themed musicals Hair and The Rose were both in development throughout the 1970s, a time when popular debates on the counterculture frequently resorted to narratives of downfall and despair. Radically altering the original stage musical, screenwriter Michael Weller and director Miloš Forman used Hair as a channel through which to engage with these contemporaneous discourses, while at the same time providing a positive account of the counterculture’s legacy. The Rose presented a far bleaker rendition. While it initially had many similarities with Hair, changes to the screenplay ended up charting a narrative so despondent towards Sixties culture that it intersected with broader conservative denunciations of the era.

‘Where Do I Go?’ Writing the Sixties in the 1970s

According to Forman, who would go on to direct Hair, he first proposed a film adaptation in October 1967 after watching the stage show. ¹³ His latest Czech production, The Fireman’s Ball (1967), had just been banned by the Communist Party. And though briefly released the following year when Alexander Dubček swept to power during the Prague Spring, it would again be pulled from cinemas after Soviet tanks rolled into the city in August 1968. Winning plaudits around the world and selected to close the 1967 New York Film Festival, The Fireman’s Ball did, nevertheless, announce Forman on the international stage; it was, as he put it, his ‘ticket to America’. ¹⁴ One can see why Forman, after fighting and losing a censorship battle in his home country, was drawn to a musical that revelled in the freedoms promoted by the counterculture. A collaboration between actors-turned-writers Jerome Ragni and James Rado and composer Galt McDermot, the original Hair musical was born out of the experimental atmosphere afforded those working in New York’s ‘Off-Off-Broadway’ theatre scene. ¹⁵ Written through the mid-1960s, its counterculture and anti-Vietnam War themes chimed with issues then gaining prominence.

By the end of 1965, approximately one hundred and seventy-five thousand US troops were in Vietnam. One of the first large-scale demonstrations against the war took place the same year, with rallies in Central Park, New York, drawing twenty-five thousand people, and later protests taking place in Washington, DC. ¹⁶ By the time Hair reached theatres, the peace movement had grown to a nationwide phenomenon. Four days after its 17 October premiere, one hundred thousand people marched on the Pentagon. As Lembcke notes, the event spawned some of the era’s most iconic photographs: ‘veterans wearing Vets for Peace hats handing leaflets to Pentagon guards and […] civilian anti-war activists putting flowers in the barrels of the weapons held by the troops’. ¹⁷ With hippies and anti-war protests dominating news reports, Hair rode a wave of conflicts within the American public sphere.

Describing any single plotline to Hair, the musical, is problematic. Ragni and Rado were notorious for modifying and altering their book throughout its theatrical runs. However, it is possible to identify a ‘cohesive, albeit somewhat skeletal plot’, which was developed through 1967 and 1968 (when the play began its Broadway run) and is radically different to that which eventually made it to cinema screens in 1979. ¹⁸ For this reason, it is worth providing a brief overview. Central protagonist Claude Hooper Bukowski leaves his middle-class parents’ home to join a community of Greenwich Village hipsters, among them the charismatic leader George Berger a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Mourning the Age of Aquarius
• 2. Bringing Them All Back Home
• 3. Go Away and Find Yourself
• 4. Something’s Happening Here
• 5. Come Together
• 6. A Change Has Come
• 7. More Funk In The Trunk
• Backmatter