Journey In Time is some wacky anti-drug propaganda from 1971. Chock full of unintentional humor and bogus facts about drugs, this sucker is a classic. The narration by director Alan Hodd sounds like it was written by a precocious, glue sniffing 12 year teenybopper.
What makes the film particularly groovy is the footage of hippies shot on location in San Francisco and Dallas and the soundtrack featuring The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Texas psyche-rockers Kenny And The Kasuals singing “Journey To Time.” Reputedly, the Kasuals disavowed the film and claim the song was used without their permission. As fas as I know, The Beatles and Bob Dylan have no comment.
I hope you enjoy every sordid minute of this hippie/rock’n’roll/drug scarefest.
Teenage Mother is one of a small handful of what could be called “quintessential” or even canonical, if you prefer, exploitation films of the 1960s. Which is not to say it’s all that “good,” either, but it does have a rather full quota of exploitation staples such as sleazy drug dealers, disapproving parents, gang violence, and of course, a lying slut! (Film School Rejects called Teenage Mother a “grindhouse Juno”—I’m not sure how true that is, but it sounds good in theory, doesn’t it?)
It’s also a peculiar cultural marker of pre-“sexual revolution” American history. Beyond the scare tactics and corny drama, the film’s pièce de résistance (and the real reason for this otherwise merely “okay” movie becoming so notorious) was, of course, its full color live birth reel complete with speculum and very close close-ups. You have to marvel at the business genius of director Jerry Gross. His company Cinemation Industries—which would later release Fritz The Cat, The Cheerleaders, The Black Godfather and Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song—pioneered an unusual traveling roadshow presentation with this film that included a sex education lecture at each screening. Why? Because it would make it defensible in court. It wasn’t “obscene” it was educational! In a pre-porn era, this stuff was box office boffo. Gross just wanted to show a woman’s vagina on-screen, but the only way he was going to be able to do it legally back then was in the guise of a “sex education” film with a ham-fisted moral message —as if he gave a damn about anything other than collecting the box office receipts—and… medical footage.
The existence of Teenage Mother is a reminder, not of a more innocent age, in my opinion, but an era just more ignorant of sex in general. The film jumps through several odd hoops at once, but If you know the back story, it makes it an even more interesting cinematic curio… I guess! Incidentally according to IMDB, Gross paid a hospital just $50 for the birth footage.
The hottie in the lead role is actress Arlene Sue Farber—undoubtedly a grandmother by now—who a few years later starred (as “Arlene Tyger”) in Gross’s fake Italian sexploitation flick Female Animal (which god help me, I own the soundtrack for). Teenage Mother also has an unexpected cameo from a baby-faced Fred Willard as the gym teacher.
Dangerous Minds will be at SXSW from March 10 thru March 20 and beyond. If you want to make contact with us, email Marc Campbell: marcdangermind@gmail.com. We’ll be covering both the film and music fest with our gypsy film crew and intergalactic reporters.
Anthony Stern’s San Francisco is a seminal work of British experimental and avant-garde cinema and one of the few art films to actually capture a little bit of the vibe of the hippie era. Stern describes the inspiration behind the film:
San Francisco was a response to hearing “Interstellar Overdrive” by Pink Floyd. It was my desire to make permanent the Pink Floyd lightshows created at the UFO club by Peter Wynne Wilson. The LSD-triggered psychedelic experience found its ultimate expression in this fusion of sight and sound, which achieved a visceral effect on the audience. San Francisco is ‘painting with light’ as well as a saturated archive of day to day life in the 1960’s. New rhythms were created in the language of film, in using single-frame exposures and freeze-frame techniques.”
Stern developed a friendship with Syd Barret while both were living in Cambridge, England. It was a relationship that would prove artistically productive, later evolving into a collaboration with Peter Whitehead on sixties pop culture documentary Tonite, Let’s All Make Love In London.
Here for your viewing and listening pleasure is Anthony Stern’s mindbending San Francisco:
Over the past couple of years, the hyper-ascension of everyone’s favorite street artist has led to all kinds of phenomena, including the mainstreaming of the artform and, yes, its commodification.
In the case of Banksy, the adventure of anonymously creating public pieces is being matched by the similar adventure of swiping and selling them. LA Weekly photographer Ted Soqui’s report on the theft of Banksy’s Caution (after it got tagged) in East L.A. (pictured in sequence L-R above) put me in the mind of Jamaican edge-culture worker Peter Dean Rickards’s 2008 jacking of a larger piece that ol’ Mr. Anonymous tossed onto the outside wall of a Kingston pub. Rickards—who does business as Afflicted Yard—shot the video below, which also documents the amazing dynamics that can happen when a dozen Jamaican men work on the same project.
Although it’s a touch more interesting than most awards shows, we tend to treat the Oscars as little more than a gossip source, fashion show, or fun subject for betting pools.
With that said, there are gratifying aspects about the awards themselves, including the fact that French filmmaker Bastien Dubois‘s gorgeous and surreal Madagascar - Carnet de Voyage was nominated for Best Animated Short Film.
It lost, but that takes nothing away from this meditation on mortality on the intriguing African island nation. It’s a dizzying yet coherent display of what seems like a dozen different animation and mixed-media styles. Check it out.
is one of a small handful of what could be called “quintessential” or even canonical, if you prefer, exploitation films of the 1960s. Which is not to say it’s all that “good,” either, but it does have a rather full quota of exploitation staples such as sleazy drug dealers, disapproving parents, gang violence, and of course, a lying slut! (
