The Source Family, an extraordinary new documentary feature about a little-known hippie counterculture enclave living in Los Angeles in the 1970s is being released today in New York and coming soon to 25 other cities. Co-directed by Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos, The Source Family intimately examines the lives of a group of spiritual seekers who came to follow a charismatic but deeply flawed polygamous guru who opened one of the very first vegetarian restaurants in America. The Source restaurant was a Sunset Strip landmark for over two decades, attracting clientele like Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Willam Morris super agents and various other Tinseltown notables with its healthy food and good-looking staff. (I used to eat there a lot myself in the 1990s, but the Source family members were long gone by then.).

Who were the Source Family?

Jodi: They were a utopian group of 140 beautiful young people who, for a time in the 70s, lived together in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills and explored the cosmos with a man named Father Yod, a controversial restaurateur turned spiritual leader. They had a popular vegetarian restaurant on the Sunset strip that movie stars and musicians frequented and they had their own rock band.

What was it about Father Yod that was so special that he could attract followers so easily?

Jodi: He was a wizard, a war hero, an outlaw, a conceptual genius, a father figure and a friend. He was fearless and he had a sense of humor. He showed those who were seeking how to make magic real in their own lives. And the ladies loved him.

Didn’t Woody Allen use the commune’s health food restaurant as the backdrop for some anti-Los Angeles sentiment in Annie Hall?

Maria: Indeed he did. It’s an iconic scene because it defines the great polarity at the time between the two coasts. The Source was an epicenter and represented the West Coast’s fixation on health and mysticism, which his character, “Alvy Singer,” a cynical New Yorker, perceived as self-indulgent and superficial.

 
How did you come to make a film about The Source?

Jodi: While I was helping to put together the book about the group (The Source, Process Media 2007) with Isis and Electricity Aquarian, Isis suggested we shoot our interviews with family members on video. Once Isis’ showed me her mind-blowing Source archives with the Super 8 home movies, color slides, scrapbooks, and hundreds of hours of audio recordings, I knew we had to make a film. I then brought in Maria, a talented and experienced commercial director and a longtime friend, to help bring things to the next level. The universe unfolded from there.

Are the Source Family still together, today?

Maria: They’re no longer an active family— they dispersed in 1977 after Yod’s death. But the internet has reconnected many of them and they also have occasional Source Family reunions. The band reunited in 2007 when the book came out, and since then they’ve toured nationally and released new three albums. While the Source Family members all have their own lives now, it’s clear when you talk to them that most still have one foot in Yod-land.

Below, the trailer for The Source Family.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Father Yod’s flower-powered ego trips and the utopian wet dreams of The Source Family

Father Yod and his 13 wives.
 
At the age of 18 I thumbed my way from Northern Virginia to Los Angeles. Picked up by long-haul truckers, who introduced me to Black Beauties, and an ex-con in a Rambler American who generously shared his Lucky Strikes, I managed to make the trip in three sleepless days and nights. When I got to the City Of Angels, I made my way to The Source restaurant, a hub of hippie activity that I was anxious to experience. The place had a rep for being a very cool gathering place for spiritually-inclined hipsters, Laurel Canyon rockers and Hollywood celebrities. John and Yoko frequented the joint. They liked the menu’s wide selection of salads and protein drinks. Woody Allen satirized the place in a scene in Annie Hall when he orders bean sprouts and “mashed yeast.”

The Source had energy and its long-haired white-robed staff generated some genuinely good vibes. For a hippie from the downcast East Coast, The Source radiated a sunny magnetism that drew you in and made you feel that the future might be golden.  And for awhile, The Source was golden. It made money (as much as ten grand a day) and it made converts to the Aquarian Age philosophy spun from the ego of the restaurant’s massively charismatic owner, Jim Baker (Father Yod).

Baker was a former WW2 war hero, martial arts expert, bank robber and an acquitted killer (two quick karate chops, two dead bodies). He possessed the well-honed patter of a con man and an unquenchable lust for life. When he discovered the hippie movement, it was like a hardboiled character out of a Jim Thompson novel wandering into Richard Brautigan’s world of LSD, poetry and hippie pussy. A few hits of Orange Sunshine, some classes in Kundalini yoga and the scent of patchouli-basted pubes propelled Baker into a spiritual phantasmagoria that transmogrified the warrior into the cosmic Father Yod.

Baker attracted a following of young hippies looking for alternatives to their suburban alienation and middle-class angst. In Father Yod they found both a guru and a sense of paternal security. He established a commune of about 150 flower children, the Source Family.

Transfixed by his personality and lulled into blissful acceptance of his “Enlightenment For Dummies” distillation of the teachings of Yogi Bhajan, Alan Watts, Swami Satchidananda, Krishnamurti etc., his followers got a brain-addling dose of the cosmic warm and fuzzies. Throw in some exotic rituals involving group sex and ganja and you had one very happy cult-like collective with the usual misogynistic tendencies lurking under the groovy free love surface. Yod ended up with 13 submissive wives, most in their late teens and early twenties. He was 50 years old and he knew how to nasty.

Despite Baker’s power-tripping ways, the Source Family was to many of its members the real fucking deal. In the downhome archival footage that comprises much of the new movie, The Source Family, you can see genuine happiness on the faces of Baker’s followers. In filmed interviews conducted in recent years with core members of the family, few have any serious regrets. Many attribute their successes in life (several are millionaires) to Baker’s teachings. Some, on the other hand, do bear scars, most of whom are women. Their deep love of Baker was betrayed by his lust for the seemingly endless flow of teenyboppers streaming through his bedroom door. Baker displayed the classic behavior of many new age gurus during the ‘60s and ‘70s. From Rajneesh to Chogyam Trungpa, these cosmic poonhounds couldn’t resist the power and glory of the peach-fuzzed meat pit of mortal delight.

The Source Family is a fair-minded film that benefits from a motherlode of footage and photographs taken over the course of several years documenting the group from its beginning to its bittersweet end. Behind the scenes at the restaurant, home births, group gropes, concerts by the Source Family’s psychedelic rock band (Sky Saxon was briefly a member) and various westernized tantric practices were filmed by one of Baker’s wives, Isis Aquarian, who also wrote a very fine book on the commune. This makes the movie uniquely intimate and powerful (even Baker’s death is filmed).

The Source Family is opening theatrically and on demand in May. I urge you to see it. It’s refreshing to experience a movie about American counter-culture, particularly the hippies, that doesn’t present its subject with a snicker and a sidelong glance. This is an honest exploration of something real and significant: the search to find what we already are but have forgotten, the search for the self. It ain’t easy and it can get sloppy, but it’s the only game in town worth playing.

In Alejandro Jodorowsky’s masterpiece El Topo , a cosmic gunslinger goes in search of his spiritual master in order to kill him. The idea being that in order to really be free, we must be free of our masters, our gurus. In the case of Jim Baker, he didn’t wait for his students to kill him. He did the job himself. After years of proclaiming his Godhood, he awoke to the revelation that he was a mere man and had nothing left to offer his followers. He calmly flew off a mountain cliff in a hang glider that he had no idea how to operate. The God literally crashed to earth and died nine hours later. The coroner found no broken bones or internal bleeding. His body was whole and intact. For three days his corpse was attended to by his beautiful young wives. As in life, Father Yod died with a contented smile on his face.
 

 
The Source Family band, Yahowha 13, has a growing reputation among fans of psychedelia and it is well-deserved. The following tune, “Fire In The Sky,” is pretty amazing. Positively Beefheartian. It’s from the rare and highly collectible album Savage Sons Of Ya Ho Wah.

 
Previously on DM: ‘THE SOURCE’: AN EXTRAORDINARY NEW DOCUMENTARY FEATURE ABOUT THE ‘SOURCE FAMILY’