Free My Year of Flops by Nathan Rabin Page B

fantasy of a revolution in consciousness that would free inhabitants of the prison of self from their dark, corrupt, fragmented realm, and usher in a brave new world where everyone was connected. During that initial rush, I felt a deep spiritual communion with gutter punks whose stench and sounds could be detected several area codes away. Then I came down and realized we were just a bunch of fucked-up kids taking drugs.
    The last and perhaps most potent weapon in the counterculture’s arsenal was the ripe sexuality of sexy hippie chicks, Manic Pixie Dream Girls whose spacey smiles and lithe young bodies promised to liberate brooding depressives from the grim realities of the workaday world. In
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
and darker squares-meet-the-counterculture films like
Save The Tiger
and
Joe,
hippie Eves lead establishment Adams into a world of sex and toking.
Skidoo,
havingalready traumatized audiences with the image of Carol Channing in her underwear, thankfully gives protagonist Jackie Gleason a spiritual awakening instead of a sexual one. Nobody wanted to see Gleason’s flabby Irish belly slapping angrily against some stoned little minx, including Gleason himself.
    The more you know about the brilliant, mercurial, wildly controversial Otto Preminger—scion of one of Austria-Hungary’s most prominent families and one of the most feared figures in American film—the more poignant
Skidoo
becomes. In a strange way, Preminger lived the movie; he dropped acid, collaborated with scruffy, long-haired countercultural types, and tried his damnedest to plug into the spirit of open-mindedness sweeping the country.
    A successful director, producer, and part-time comic book villain—he played Mr. Freeze in the ’60s TV
Batman
—Preminger wasn’t about to throw it all away to live in a VW van and follow the Grateful Dead, but he clearly admired the hippie mind-set and the Black Panthers’ brash rebelliousness. (Preminger’s flirtation with Black Power is cruelly, though cleverly, chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s classic article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”) But casting off the shackles of the establishment and embracing hippiedom isn’t as easy as it seems.
    It’s no surprise that Preminger couldn’t convincingly connect with the hippie mentality in spite of the best intentions. The film’s cast reflected the violent conflict between Preminger’s jones for capturing youth culture and his old-school aesthetic. To make the ultimate hippie acid film, Preminger apparently scoured the nursing homes of Hollywood to find the perfect cast for his suspiciously geriatric cinematic love-in. I suspect he posted flyers inscribed with the following words in retirement home rec rooms:
    Otto “Moonbeam Sunshower” Preminger is looking for spunky senior citizens for supporting roles in ultimate hippie freakfest. Experience in campy superhero television shows and/or Judy Garland movies a plus; letters of reference from grandchildren welcome.
    The posters yielded instant results: In addition to Jackie Gleason and a 77-year-old Groucho Marx, Preminger scored supporting roles for such young people’s favorites as Arnold Stang, Mickey Rooney, George Raft, Peter Lawford, Slim Pickens, and Preminger’s fellow
Batman
villains Cesar Romero, Frank Gorshin, and Burgess Meredith. And don’t forget Carol Channing. Can’t make a counterculture movie without Carol Channing.
    In
Skidoo,
low-level hood gone straight “Tough Tony” Banks (Gleason) and his sidekick (Stang) spy on Tough Tony’s flower-child daughter (Alexandra Hay) in a car with a hippie played by John Phillip Law, who looks like a cross between Tonto and Jesus, and communicates through Zen koans like, “If you can’t dig nothing, then you can’t dig anything, you dig?” Sitar noodling accompanies his stoned musings; apparently if you smoked pot in the ’60s, an