Astral Weeks

by Ryan H. Walsh

  The guards, in general, welcomed Wiseman, but it was made clear that he was never to come into contact with Albert DeSalvo—who now, as the self-confessed Boston Strangler, was Bridgewater’s highest-profile inmate, with a lawyer who complained about hospital conditions to the press on a daily basis. Gaughan’s deputy told Wiseman that if the director approached DeSalvo, he would personally “belt him.” (“I don’t think this constitutes censoring,” Gaughan said.)

  After shooting eighty thousand feet of film in twenty-nine days, Wiseman began the arduous job of assembling the footage. The final eighty-four-minute black-and-white film is a singularly powerful experience: no formal interviews, title cards, or soundtrack, only a series of stark scenes conveying the terror and confusion of Bridgewater State Hospital. Patients are stripped naked, grilled about their masturbation habits, taunted by guards, and in one instance force-fed through a tube.

  In August 1967, Titicut Follies was accepted to the New York Film Festival. An early notice in the Saturday Review praised it as “a startling example of film truth,” while raising an ethical question: “Where does truth stop and common decency begin?” Then came a chain of events that would hound the director for decades. “Some little biddy from Minnesota wrote to [Attorney General Elliot] Richardson, saying she read the review asking how can you allow something like this to happen?” Wiseman grumbled to Newsweek that fall.

  It’s ironic that a filmmaker so lauded for documenting reality over the years started his career with a bitter legal battle in which prosecutors argued that he was distorting the truth. Wiseman claimed that all of the state’s postediting restrictions were never discussed; the state disagreed. He initially seemed to prevail. In late September, despite the efforts of the state of Massachusetts, Titicut Follies screened at the New York Film Festival and began a commercial run at another New York theater. Wiseman’s Follies were on the loose. The Avatar reviewer had a unique angle: He was a Bridgewater alum. The article, in issue 12, takes the reader through a beautiful New England town, along a wooded path, to a looming structure like a medieval castle. He mixes his own memories of his dark residency at Bridgewater with commentary on the film:

  The doctor is like nothing I have ever seen before. His suit is a cheap flannel and most of his teeth are missing. What is left of his blond hair is pulled back over his fleshy face. “Have you ever had a Homosexual experience? Sucking and Fucking? Are you addicted to marijuana? Do you hate your mother? Your father?”

  “Obviously you are a gentleman, it is too bad I would like to have you as a guest at my house. We should drink wine and listen to Mozart. But unfortunately I am not allowed to do that.” I try to impress him with my lucidity.

  I never knew for sure how long I was in solitary.

  After several days a fellow starts to talk to me. I am thrilled now to have a friend. I ask him questions. Soon however I realize that he is completely out of his mind. He is the Third Eye and sees into the minds of all men. But he is a human being and I am so alone. [ . . . ]

  Titicut Follies was shot entirely in the F ward. This means that they concentrated on the men that are genuinely insane. We are allowed to hear only one man who raises doubts of his insanity. We are not allowed to see E ward where at least half the men are fully rational.

  The therapy is Thorazine. At every meal the guards come around and give out the pills. The men try not to take them because they realize that Thorazine means the sleep walking death. Once you are on Thorazine they take you deeper and deeper always more Thorazine until there is no mind at all.

  Once every two weeks you take a shower. Once a week you get a glass of milk, once a week an orange, once a week a movie.

  “What do you think of your Mental condition?” [Dr.] Robey asks.

  “I do not wish to give an opinion as I feel that I am under observation and that my remarks may be construed against me.”

  They look at each other and nod as if in a show of hands vote. “You are very sick. Prepare yourself for a long stay, but don’t worry we will cure you.”

  The state won a temporary ban on Titicut Follies on September 22, 1967, and hearings on the matter began in October. Bridgewater’s Gaughan deplored the film’s “message of shock.” Commonwealth v. Wiseman, like DeSalvo v. 20th Century Fox, constituted a tug-of-war over the right to show a movie, both questioning whether the participants had the mental awareness to sign a release form. During the testimony of John Marshall, Wiseman’s primary camera operator, someone noticed that one person in the room, acting as a member of the press, was actually Timothy Asch—the second camera person for Titicut. Asch, it turned out, had been filming the entire proceedings. He was promptly accused of deception, and people theorized that Wiseman and company were making a new film about the trial of Titicut Follies. All of Asch’s footage was going to be edited into a sequel (possibly titled Beacon Hill Follies, it was nervously conjectured), or worse, intercut into the existing film to reveal a new layer of bureaucratic hypocrisy. This turn of events did Wiseman no favors. The trial now focused on three principal allegations against Wiseman: that he had breached an oral contract, perpetrated a gross invasion of privacy, and intended to profit from the film.

  “The real privacy sought to be protected in this case,” Wiseman’s lawyer argued in court, “is the privacy of Massachusetts not to be made a laughing stock.” A Globe op-ed agreed, saying that the film “causes ‘rational,’ middle class people to confront their own lack of abiding concern for the fate of Bridgewater’s unfortunates, and therefore stirs the deepest pangs of guilt. Could it be that this is the central reason why [the movie] has met with such outrage in Massachusetts?”

  When asked to explain the intent or effect of certain scenes in the film to the court, Frederick Wiseman time and again gave a five-word answer: “The film speaks for itself.”

  In January 1968, Judge Harry Kalus ruled that Wiseman had breached an oral contract and invaded privacy rights with the creation of Titicut Follies, calling it “80 minutes of brutal sordidness and human degradation” and “a piece of abject commercialism, trafficking on the human misery . . . of these unfortunate humans.” It was the first ruling based on the right to privacy made in a Massachusetts courtroom and set a chilling precedent for documentary filmmakers. “On the contract issue, the judge simply believed the state over me,” Wiseman told Vice magazine in 2007. “He also declared the negative should be burned.” The negative was spared, but Titicut Follies was permanently banned from being shown in Massachusetts. Later that spring, Judge Kalus extended that ruling to apply anywhere outside of the state as well, essentially sentencing the movie to life in a vault.

  A few months after the ruling, a film starring Tony Curtis portraying a supposed mass murderer opened nationwide. The Boston Strangler was free to disseminate misinformation for profit, but Wiseman’s film—one that could actually trigger positive social change—had been rendered invisible.

  Even after a new hospital was built in 1974, Bridgewater superintendent Gaughan maintained his opinion that Titicut Follies hurt more than aided the institution. (Wiseman, who later said that he never had political motivations for creating the film, was pleased to learn about the improvements at Bridgewater.) In the ensuing decades, Wiseman made numerous appeals to free his debut film—all failures. But after Wiseman came upon a headline in the mid-eighties that read “TITICUT FOLLIES JUDGE DEAD,” he began a fresh, aggressive campaign. In 1990, a judge ruled that Titicut Follies was protected by the First Amendment and could be publicly screened. Titicut Follies had escaped its life sentence.

  * * *

  • • •

  TWO MONTHS AFTER the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and three days before Robert F. Kennedy was killed, an icon of a different sort was shot dead—at least briefly. Valerie Solanas, a feminist author and schizophrenic, slipped into Andy Warhol’s studio and fired her gun three times. The first two shots missed, but the third hit its tar
get. Warhol was on the phone with one of his performers, who mistook the sound of gunfire for a Velvet Underground–era whip being cracked inside the Factory. At 4:51 p.m. doctors declared Andy Warhol dead. A minute and a half later, he came back. “Since I was shot, everything is such a dream to me,” Andy Warhol told The New York Times in November. “I don’t know what anything is about. Like I don’t even know whether or not I’m really alive or—whether I died. It’s sad.”

  As Warhol convalesced, Jonas Mekas, the forty-four-year-old Lithuanian-born New Yorker, found himself the de facto spokesman for the experimental film world. Headlines like “UNDERGROUND MOVIES GET PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE” appeared in major periodicals throughout the year, and every story had a quote from Mekas. Over at WGBH, What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? showed Mekas’s Notes from the Circus, with a soundtrack by Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band, in its entirety. This episode of the show explored the idea of what an experimental film was exactly, which was kind of like defining a word using that word.

  Despite the failure of Mel Lyman and George Peper to create a successful Boston Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, Mekas was happy to see his friends find popularity and controversy with Avatar, to which he occasionally contributed. In one piece, he wrote: “DON’T CRITICIZE. If you think you don’t like something—don’t write about it. Try to write only about what you like in a movie, write only about those movies which you like, why you like them. . . . Remember, that when you are criticizing, you may be criticizing God. So think twice. See if you can separate man’s work from God’s work.”

  Wondering how he might have felt about his old friend Mel actually declaring himself God, I visit Jonas Mekas in Brooklyn, where his loft holds a flood of books, films, posters, and ephemera. There seems to be no delineation between his living quarters and his archives.

  “In private, when Mel didn’t have to sing or play loud, he was very low, you could barely hear him, but it was incredible,” the ninety-two-year-old Mekas says, his accent still strong. “Quite incredible. I just cannot compare to anybody.”

  Mekas gives me a DVD of his film In Between, a collection of sequences that didn’t find a place in Walden, a diary film that’s like a who’s who of the New York avant-garde of the 1960s. It ends with a long shot of Mel Lyman playing banjo on a Manhattan rooftop as the sun rises. The bewitching music somehow invokes Americana while utilizing a Middle Eastern scale. Between footage of Salvador Dalí and Allen Ginsberg, there’s a snippet from the time Lyman lived with Mekas in the mid-sixties. “MEL (GOD) MAKES COFFEE,” reads the title card.

  “It was one of those long, hot, slow summer days,” Mekas recalls. “Mel brought some coffee beans but we had no coffee pot. So he collected all kinds of parts and dishes and Mel put a perfect coffee pot together. We never had better coffee.” Around the time of the coffee miracle, in 1966, Mekas watched Mel write an entire book in one sitting, which he modestly titled Autobiography of a World Saviour. Mekas decided to publish it. “Mel was a nice guy, so I said why not?”*

  “The mind is a beautiful instrument when it is played with love, when it is used to REVEAL, to HELP, to bring together that which has been separated,” Lyman wrote, introducing his signature all-caps emphasis mode of writing. Autobiography is what converted future Crawdaddy founder Paul Williams to the Church of Mel, even though Lyman would later describe the book as an elaborate put-on to amuse his Scientologist friends. “I never understood this admiration where everyone was looking at Mel in awe when he said ‘I’m God,’” Mekas says. “He always said it with a smile, like a joke, but everyone else took it like a gospel. He did not look at life and universe and God with such seriousness. He thought it was all closer to the laughing Buddha. You can see from my footage of him, as little as I have. This idea of this Puritanic seriousness—he did not believe in that type of God.”

  In the spring of 1968, Mekas lectured at Boston College, a gig he used as an excuse to visit his old friend’s commune in Roxbury. To him it resembled a “little village,” with no strangers or tourists around, and marijuana plants growing right outside the door. He filmed the plants, and the members too. “I got one shot of all of them, the whole family in one room, like a family portrait. It was not that they were afraid of Mel . . . they were obsessed with him.” It’s then that Mekas confirms a legend about the Fort Hill Community: a basement of one house known as the Vault, where they put members of the community who had misbehaved. “They had their own laws and if someone did something really nasty they had their own prison. Mel showed it to me! He gave me a tour and they had their own prison for punishment. They were in some ways strict with regulations they had to follow. There was something very old-fashioned about them, not very modern. But you felt good being there.”

  Mekas doesn’t find the idea of his friend running a private basement prison completely beyond the pale: “Instead of turning to the police they solved their own problems,” he says, adding, “I don’t think he was capable of doing wrong. Whatever happened that was wrong must have come from the people around him. They went overboard in whatever they were doing.”

  * * *

  • • •

  MEL HAD A NEW MULTIMEDIA VISION in 1968, something he named “The Magic Theater”—a potential two-story complex with a screening area, recording studio, and film lab—and instructed the community to start building it behind 5 Fort Ave. Terrace. George Peper described the plan’s crown jewel: the Cockpit, a small command station just big enough for Mel, where he could “run the films, the music, the lights, everything at once.”

  Around this time, Don West, an assistant to a vice president at CBS, became enchanted by the Fort Hill Community. He began working on a pilot about the Family, presciently entitled The Real World. “I just fell in love with the Hill,” he said. “And, I thought, they with me [sic] . . . [T]hey thought I was the route to taking over CBS. . . . I suspended most of my critical judgment and just let it happen, if you know what I mean.” West worked closely with Peper until he was finally granted an audience with Lyman, who screened for him some of his recent work. One documented all of the community’s children waking up in the morning; another captured Jim Kweskin in the middle of an acid trip.*

  Despite Lyman’s lack of technical training, West was “really affected” by the films. When West asked Lyman if he could follow a script for a possible TV project—a documentary about communes—Lyman declined, dissing him with an astrological slight: “You double Cancer!” Later, when West screened a rough cut of The Real World for the community, Family member David Gude pulled out a gun and said, “You talk about The Real World? This is the real world.” Undeterred, West showed the pilot to CBS, which declined to pick it up. When West returned to the Hill for his equipment, they refused to give it back. It’s one of the incidents that the Fort Hill Community claims Rolling Stone fabricated, but even today Don West confirms it happened.

  The Magic Theater never materialized. Growing impatient, Mel ordered that the unfinished structure be razed. A film studio in Roxbury was not going to be how the Family attained mainstream film or television exposure. Miraculously, it seemed, by the time they leveled the Magic Theater, a new path had appeared: A member of the Lyman Family was on the cover of Look magazine promoting his debut starring role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s hotly anticipated movie Zabriskie Point.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NATIONWIDE SEARCH for a leading man had dragged on for a solid year before finally hitting Boston in the summer of 1968. The stakes were high: Zabriskie Point was going to be Antonioni’s first film shot in America. The acclaimed Italian director wanted to tell a story about America’s counterculture youth, the very same demographic that was so adept at sniffing out phonies—meaning that the film’s authenticity hinged on his choice of the right actor.

  Antonioni had been shooting compelling, critically praised art house movies since the fifties, such as the enigmatic L’Avventura, but his breakthrough was 1966’s Blo
w-Up, a hip mystery that captured mod-filled swinging London. The news that this major auteur’s next film would be shot in the United States, released by MGM, and star American actors sent a wave of excitement through the counterculture.

  Sally Dennison, nineteen, from Framingham, had an inkling that directing might be her calling, but in a pre-film-school world, she had to figure out her own path. After briefly working for Fred Barzyk on What’s Happening, Mr. Silver?, she decided to simply seek out her favorite film director. “I’m a pistol,” she says. “When I wanted something I went after it.” Dennison flew to Rome and asked where the “film people” hung out; a day later she was sitting in the same café as Michelangelo Antonioni. Like Alan Trustman mailing his script to Hitchcock’s office and getting a reply, Dennison had taken a blind leap and found a soft landing. She passed along a note saying she’d love to work with him, and he immediately hired her to be part of his American adventure.

  A few months later, Dennison was scouring the United States for the angry young man who could manifest the director’s dark American vision. She visited city after city, interviewing hundreds of hopefuls. In Los Angeles, casting director Fred Roos found someone “on the money perfect” for the role: an unknown carpenter named Harrison Ford. Antonioni wasn’t impressed by the future Star Wars actor, but it wasn’t because he was inexperienced. “Like many European directors, Antonioni felt he could get a performance out of anyone,” Roos explained. The search continued.

  Dennison returned to her home base in June 1968, where she connected with Avatar contributor Ed Beardsley, who gave her names of promising locals, including himself. The area scene was enthralled by the project. A reporter for the Boston Free Press badgered her for details as she held auditions at Arlington Street Church. “All I can say is that it’s a story about American contemporary youth,” she offered.