Based on true events! The AIP/MGM police/hippie hybrid movie RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP (1967) reminds us that back LA's rock venue-packed Sunset Strip was once so clogged with amok youth that the lawmakers had to enforce a 10 PM curfew for everyone under 18. The kids took to the streets in protest, or were already there. Sonny, Cher, Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda attended to show their solidarity. Fonda got handcuffed! What a world.
Today, those of us who don't live in LA probably just hear the words Sunset Strip and prepare for yet another old rocker to start in about seeing the Doors at the Whiskey a Go Go back in whenever or how the man made them change the name to 'the Whisk' or how they razed Pandora's Box--the main all-ages (non-alcoholic) venue--to the ground. Or how Buffalo Springfield's inescapable "For What it's Worth" was written about the protests. But I'll just say that you can draw a dotted line down the road of AIP counterculture classics, from the Strip to The Trip and then Wild in the Streets, the year after that it's films like the (AIP-influenced) Easy Rider. And then Cult of the Damned, and Manson! It's all connected like a dashed highway line...going straight to hell! For fans of the scene, of LSD and of the Doors and Jack Nicholson, then, come and dig the Strip - and see the dance that lit the flame, the Helen of Hippie film Troy, the wig that launched a thousand swigs, Mimsy Farmer!
Released an astonishingly short four months after the riots happened, Riot on Sunset Strip alternates between the police and the kids camps. The kid camp revolves around a sweet, innocent girl named Andi (Mimsy Farmer) from a broken home (she lives alone with her alcoholic mom - below) who starts out as a nice kid just digging bands with her girlfriend Liz-Ann (Laurie Mock) and their two nameless boyfriends. Her slow slide begins when she starts smoking, gradually dressing sexier, craving some kind of parental structure but just getting mom's incoherent babbling (and dad nowhere to be found). just hanging out digging bands at Pandora's Box, but getting busted for being young, but still trying to be good--she ends up dosed on acid, and dancing! Come on, Liz-Ann says, "it's a freak-out!" Andi says she's never done acid. "Come on, Alice in Wonderland," says Liz-Ann: "You haven't lived!"
As we follow her descent we also bounce back and forth to the precinct struggles of her absentee father (Aldo Ray) a police captain in charge of the youth problem to be fair to both sides of the argument. He doesn't want his men to start cracking heads, nor does he want the local business owners to form their own vigilante task force. In trying to be fair to both kids and adults, he pleases neither; that doesn't bother him though, when gives interviews for local TV, preaches a modicum of tolerance: "These are your sons and daughters!" It's a fair point. But Aldo, what about your daughter?
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At last, and worth every second of waiting, comes her crazy acid dance. Overall, Riot is rather pedestrianly directed by (59 year-old) Arthur Dreifuss, but--though he's clearly a generic square, old Arthur wisely lets this one moment land, with a keen eye for how dancing on acid feels in the moment (had he done any?). Though the music never strays from generic acid rock instrumental, Farmer's movements are nicely matched to it and she's clearly drawing on something. Wearing what seems like three identical wigs, all slowly growing, widening in a halo gyre, and a pink and light green tie-dyed style dress that seems in parts to disappear in the lavender-pink lighting scheme, adding ceremonial import to the subliminally cult-like surroundings of the house the kids have broken into, her movements become timeless, pre-dimensional, abstract. Watch how, as she slinks to the ground and leans against a corner, she notices her arms and hands as if the first time, alive to the joy of movement, reacting to any stimulus with a second-by-second switch--from revulsion to agog fascination to cautious luxuriance.
Dreifuss captures it all, beginning to end, with just a hint of slow motion here and there, perfectly matched to the music even so, as if she's slipping in and out of linear time, floating in the tehrer somewhere between the vampire cult converts floating around in 1972's Deathmaster and the fairies in 1935's Midsummer Night's Dream.
If you've ever felt those kind of things while slinking around a living room in a surrendered-to joy of movement, then you may feel as I do while watching--i.e. my palms start to sweat and I feel a metallic tang on my tongue, as if in anticipation of the inevitable 'kicking in' of the drug one's taken. It's like getting all the sensations of going up a very steep incline on a roller-coaster, up and up and up - even though you're just sitting there on the beanbag chair, rolling joints in a Pink Floyd gatefold, watching as the blood rushing in your hands slowly starts to redden and glow just below the skin, like a latticework spider web, and they feel like they're trembling but they're actually steady as rocks.
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But of course, the slimy lad who slipped it into her 'diet drink' has been keeping an eye on all this, waiting for the right time to slink up and make a move, bringing her upstairs with all the finesse of Sidney Berger in Carnival of Souls. It's clearly his and his buddy's MO to dose young girls and take advantage, en masse, once the girl is too zonked to complain or resist. In other words, loathsome date rape behavior wasn't solely the proclivity of frat boys spiking the grain alcohol punch with 'ludes and then all sticking to beer (1).
Alas, I hope this doesn't turn off Andi to the wonders of psychedelics. Then again, it's not for everyone.
Today, those of us who don't live in LA probably just hear the words Sunset Strip and prepare for yet another old rocker to start in about seeing the Doors at the Whiskey a Go Go back in whenever or how the man made them change the name to 'the Whisk' or how they razed Pandora's Box--the main all-ages (non-alcoholic) venue--to the ground. Or how Buffalo Springfield's inescapable "For What it's Worth" was written about the protests. But I'll just say that you can draw a dotted line down the road of AIP counterculture classics, from the Strip to The Trip and then Wild in the Streets, the year after that it's films like the (AIP-influenced) Easy Rider. And then Cult of the Damned, and Manson! It's all connected like a dashed highway line...going straight to hell! For fans of the scene, of LSD and of the Doors and Jack Nicholson, then, come and dig the Strip - and see the dance that lit the flame, the Helen of Hippie film Troy, the wig that launched a thousand swigs, Mimsy Farmer!
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| Hanging around at Pandora's Box, clearly starting trouble |
As we follow her descent we also bounce back and forth to the precinct struggles of her absentee father (Aldo Ray) a police captain in charge of the youth problem to be fair to both sides of the argument. He doesn't want his men to start cracking heads, nor does he want the local business owners to form their own vigilante task force. In trying to be fair to both kids and adults, he pleases neither; that doesn't bother him though, when gives interviews for local TV, preaches a modicum of tolerance: "These are your sons and daughters!" It's a fair point. But Aldo, what about your daughter?
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| above -Mom, in bed with her demons; Andi - smoking (there was no age restriction on it then and damned if it doesn't make her look cool) |
Andi, tired of being harassed by the cops, forced to call her teacher to pick her up from the police station rather than her drunk mother, acquiesces to the freak-out. But once there--even though she's vibing with the cute older boy who's got the sugar cubes, she just says no - preferring to hang around the broken into home like a wet dishrag.
The whole film is building up to a key moment, one we maybe heard about before seeing the film: Mimsy Farmer's sublime acid dance freak-out. It's one of the great moments in all acid cinema! Since it's this early in the AIP countercultural LSD movie sequence one could consider it the opening act in the huge paisley cavalcade to come, and as such setting the mood and opening the gates for talented, maybe slightly legitimately crazy, actors to go deep.
Thus we're with all the elements it takes to get her to that moment. We want her to do LSD. So her saying no and acting all glum and moody puts us in an uncomfortable position. We're forced to go along with the older boy who eventually sneaks a cube into her (non-alcoholic) drink. We know it's for the movie's and our own good: she may have a bad time on her journey down the rabbit hole, but at least she'll finally feel something and stop just hanging out in the trestle blocking traffic, standing at the doorway refusing to go in, just begging to be pushed.
As someone who has had some "freak-outs" in his day, I can testify that is annoying to have some drag of a drip tag along and then decide they don't want to do any psychedelics after all, or don't need it to have a good time, when they clearly do need it, because their milquetoast banality is dragging down the whole vibe. They won't go home and they won't get the stick out of their ass either, like some self-appointed buzzkill chaperone.
If she had any kind of reliable home life she might have been warned about strange boys passing her strange drinks after unsuccessfully trying to get her to try a tasteless odorless easily-dissolved-in-any-liquid drug. Sometimes people 'let' themselves be dosed this way, subconsciously wanting to and acquiescing to this end run around their toxic superego injunction. Why else would she be there?
At last, and worth every second of waiting, comes her crazy acid dance. Overall, Riot is rather pedestrianly directed by (59 year-old) Arthur Dreifuss, but--though he's clearly a generic square, old Arthur wisely lets this one moment land, with a keen eye for how dancing on acid feels in the moment (had he done any?). Though the music never strays from generic acid rock instrumental, Farmer's movements are nicely matched to it and she's clearly drawing on something. Wearing what seems like three identical wigs, all slowly growing, widening in a halo gyre, and a pink and light green tie-dyed style dress that seems in parts to disappear in the lavender-pink lighting scheme, adding ceremonial import to the subliminally cult-like surroundings of the house the kids have broken into, her movements become timeless, pre-dimensional, abstract. Watch how, as she slinks to the ground and leans against a corner, she notices her arms and hands as if the first time, alive to the joy of movement, reacting to any stimulus with a second-by-second switch--from revulsion to agog fascination to cautious luxuriance.
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| Andi sees her hands for the first time |
If you've ever felt those kind of things while slinking around a living room in a surrendered-to joy of movement, then you may feel as I do while watching--i.e. my palms start to sweat and I feel a metallic tang on my tongue, as if in anticipation of the inevitable 'kicking in' of the drug one's taken. It's like getting all the sensations of going up a very steep incline on a roller-coaster, up and up and up - even though you're just sitting there on the beanbag chair, rolling joints in a Pink Floyd gatefold, watching as the blood rushing in your hands slowly starts to redden and glow just below the skin, like a latticework spider web, and they feel like they're trembling but they're actually steady as rocks.
But of course, the slimy lad who slipped it into her 'diet drink' has been keeping an eye on all this, waiting for the right time to slink up and make a move, bringing her upstairs with all the finesse of Sidney Berger in Carnival of Souls. It's clearly his and his buddy's MO to dose young girls and take advantage, en masse, once the girl is too zonked to complain or resist. In other words, loathsome date rape behavior wasn't solely the proclivity of frat boys spiking the grain alcohol punch with 'ludes and then all sticking to beer (1).
Alas, I hope this doesn't turn off Andi to the wonders of psychedelics. Then again, it's not for everyone.
Maybe it won't. Andi doesn't seem to be too traumatized afterwards. We never hear her complain or resist. We only learn she had 'entertained' five of them when she tells it to her father, who--of course--walks in on her in the bed, now totally 'down' from her trip, apparently, and this behavior on the part of the boys as apparently engrained in the LSD ritual, at least in the mind of MGM, as oral sex for bracelets is for Fox News viewers today. In a way, it's her ultimate fuck you, meant to drive him swinging pathetically into a waiting room full of dudes held in a kind of limbo custody because he overhears them mentioning his daughter not being special.
That it was released by AIP might throw you, but since it was made by MGM, dad and daughter must heal their relationship in order to stop further moral decay. For AIP, family is broken, useless, but MGM can't let the parents go, so even when delving into lurid subject matter they tend to employ a kind of roundhouse morality uppercut that dates back to pre-code films like 1931'a A Free Soul (left), wherein the real enemy isn't booze, premarital sex, or drugs--they're just the symptom of parent-daughter estrangement due to parental addiction and/or absenteeism. In Soul, Shearer hungers for the safe, flaccid decency of Leslie Howard and the long nights nursemaiding daddy in and out of alcoholic sanitariums. In Sunset, Mimsy Farmer wants to go home with her cop dad and start dressing like everyday is church.AIP has other ideas. The question is, where will the roots of their budding flowers of evil find purchase?
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Dreifuss went from Riot to another AIP drug movie after this: The Love-Ins (above) next, a tale that functions as a Tim Leary roman-a-clef about a disillusioned college professor who drops out and becomes a cash-minded LSD guru. I haven't seen it myself, but the insightful Chuck Esola notes the incorrect way acid use is depicted: "not only are the hippies high on it all the time but one hit and the characters in the film are either flailing about wildly on the lawn, jumping out of windows or becoming convinced that they've become Alice in Wonderland (I'm honestly not sure which is worse)." Hey, in the words of Bruce Dern's guide in The Trip, you're really into some beautiful things here, man.
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As for Mimsy, she would soon escape to Italy where she was to specialize as totally cracked giallo heroines, as in Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Armando Crispino's Autopsy (1975), and Francesco Barilli's Portrait of a Lady in Black (1974). Her character in these films was often the same, as if she became so splintered by her LSD/rape primal moment in Riot she splintered into shards that all fell into different giallo movies. Her characters all had the same short blonde hair, exhibiting the violent revulsion/attraction approach to sex, repressed lesbian desire, and habit of talking through clenched teeth when enraged. Walking the razor line between being a totally free spirit engaging in sex and drugs as self expression, she turned on a German math student to hard drugs and group sex a mere two years after Strip in Barbet Schroder's More (above), which has a great Pink Floyd soundtrack if nothing else).
As for the curfew riots are forgotten today but the music they inspired--and that was heard on the Strip at the time--endures. Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" was written about them (and now it's inescapable) and The Byrds, The Seeds, Love, The Chambers Brothers, and The Doors are all classic rock radio staples and were bands in residence on the Strip. None of them either appear or are heard in the film. Instead, we get the garage rock of the Standells (they sing theme song, noting that "even parents are beginning to scare" over their crazy children and the cops) and the Chocolate Watchband rips some raucous, royalty-free standard blues. But, like the AIP movies it stands with (Psych-Out, and The Trip, for example), the good bands are offset with a lot of dated paisley drippiness courtesy dull treacly sludge by bands like The Mugwumps and The Sidewalk Sounds, (who coo: "I want to make the music pretty / for me") not to mention a lot of generic library flute rock instrumentals. When you think of the great stuff being played at the time (or the great songs on the Cynthia Weil/Barry Mann songs on the similar AIP gems Wild in the Streets and Angel Angel, Down We Go), it's kind of a drag, like seeing a fictional movie made about Altamont and just hearing the Flying Burrito Brothers.
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Still, its great. Newly arrived on Amazon Prime and looking good (these screenshots are all from it),
POST SCRIPT /ASIDE/ RANDOM THOUGHT
- HaPPy TRails!
Maybe it was because I saw it the morning after getting back from a mostly-overcast vacation in St. Maarten but I was in just the right mood for Riot. And well, the crazy psychedelic dance of Mimsy is really a showstopper. I made the collage above myself, though there's nothing like it in the film. There should be, for 'trails' in tripping are a sign of transcending space/time and perhaps the origin for the multi-armed effect of Hindi gods and goddesses.
And in a way it's too bad. Neither Corman nor anyone at AIP ever figured out how to do "trails" correctly (they're aren't any in Gilliam's Fear and Loathing either, though at least he gets some good subliminal mileage out of the hotel carpeting). in an effort to capture the true nature of acid hallucinations (they don't come out of nowhere, they build up through paredolia and just seeing the world more clearly and without the usual structuralist blinders.
Actually, I saw a great Mimsy movie on Prime last night that did some decent psychedelic acid trails (or DXM if you want to be fancy), Autopsy (1975)! It wasn't acid but tiredness or insanity or something - but here you go:
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| Busted - for being teenagers |
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| Pandora's Box was a real club (above), at the center of the riots as it was being demolished by the establishment for its role as a lightning rod in the disruption. |
POST SCRIPT /ASIDE/ RANDOM THOUGHT
- HaPPy TRails!
Maybe it was because I saw it the morning after getting back from a mostly-overcast vacation in St. Maarten but I was in just the right mood for Riot. And well, the crazy psychedelic dance of Mimsy is really a showstopper. I made the collage above myself, though there's nothing like it in the film. There should be, for 'trails' in tripping are a sign of transcending space/time and perhaps the origin for the multi-armed effect of Hindi gods and goddesses.
And in a way it's too bad. Neither Corman nor anyone at AIP ever figured out how to do "trails" correctly (they're aren't any in Gilliam's Fear and Loathing either, though at least he gets some good subliminal mileage out of the hotel carpeting). in an effort to capture the true nature of acid hallucinations (they don't come out of nowhere, they build up through paredolia and just seeing the world more clearly and without the usual structuralist blinders.
Actually, I saw a great Mimsy movie on Prime last night that did some decent psychedelic acid trails (or DXM if you want to be fancy), Autopsy (1975)! It wasn't acid but tiredness or insanity or something - but here you go:
