| THE BOSTON GLOBE JUNE 27, 1997 Movie Review TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD Directed by: Paul Davids Screenplay by Paul Davids and Todd Eastan Mills At: Kendall Square Cinema Running time: 80 minutes TURNING ON, TUNING IN TO "LEARY" By Matthew Gilbert GLOBE STAFF Timothy Leary Never liked the Moody Blues' lyrics that gives this documentary its title. He thought it portrayed him as ineffective and passe - qualities he wouldn't hear of, even in his final days, when he asked to have his head removed so that his brain could be cryogenically frozen for future implantation in a brain dead body. "How you die can be the greatest decision of your life," he said shortly before cancer took him in 1996. 'Timothy Leary's Dead" is filmmaker Paul Davids's affectionate look at the man who lived only to explore new frontiers, whose raison d'etre was to gather no moss, who thrived on being considered "the most dangerous man in America" by Richard Nixon. The documentary is arranged in chapters that are in mostly chronological order, and it features recent interviews with peers like doctors Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, and extensive 1990's interviews with Leary himself, his mind sharp but his body wasting away beneath his Nehru outfit. It also includes a good amount of historic media footage, with Leary being demonized in voice-overs as "the Harvard professor who became the outlaw acid king." Some of the most compelling segments revolve around Leary's years at Millbrook, a 3,000-acre estate in upstate New York, where he and a constant stream of countercultural icons raised consciousness together on LSD. The idyllic first year deteriorated once officials began to harass the rebels. Led by none other than G. Gordon Liddy, who used his high-profile Leary bust to further his notoriety as a drug expert. Also fascinating are Leary's recollections of his years in prison and his escape, including a dissonant stay in Algeria with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who preferred a violent revolution. "I believe the revolution is a neurological revolution," Leary said at the time. When he was returned to jail, his punishment included a cell next to Charles Manson for a week. The film contains some analysis of the long-term impact of LSD and Leary's 1960's mantra to "turn on, tune in, drop out," noting that many who pursued the doors of perception in the 1960's went on to become the lawyers and doctors of today. But the bulk of "Timothy Leary's Dead" is homage, somewhat incomplete and random as a thorough portrait of a man and his times but nonetheless interesting right down to the last scenes, when we actually see Leary's head being removed. The movie captures the high points in the career of a searcher whose days were bound up with some of the most exciting historical adventures in 20th-century. "It was my ambition to liberate the world," Leary is heard saying at the very beginning of the movie, and by the end you believe him. | ||
| BOSTON HERALD JUNE 27, 1997 "TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD" CAPTURES SUBVERSIVE FORCE ON FILM "Timothy Leary's Dead." Not rated. At the Kendall Square Cinema. According to the Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle, "the history of the world is the biography of great men." "Timothy Leary's Dead," Paul Davids' documentary about the Harvard professor turned LSD prophet, proves that often in the 20th century, the operative words are "great" and "infamous." Like the contents of a time capsule, Davids' affectionate film is a slice of history, leavened with nostalgia and an elegiac sense of the end of an era. Leary appears in the film as both the unlikely, LSD-espousing, counterculture symbol he became in the '60s and as the ravaged, still questing man he was shortly before his death in 1996 from prostate cancer. Also appearing are Leary's friends, colleagues and relatives, including Baba Ram Das (the former Richard Alpert), a couple of respectful ex-wives and an adoring stepson. What strikes you at once is how telegenic the "outlaw acid king" was and the role that played in his mystique. The Leary we meet in the more re-cent footage is a cheerful, alamingly emaciated man in a nehru jacket who describes death as a "promising adventure" and offers to experience it live on the World Wide Web. He also describes his body as a "spaceship," suggesting a disturbing line of convergence between Leary and HeavenÕs Gate cult leader Marshall Applewhite. As Davids shows us, Leary was many people: Harvard psychology professor, high priest, world traveler, flower child, prison breaker, bane of Republican administrations and church leaders, egomaniac and a man who might seriously, and erroneously, describe San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury section in the 1960's as "a holy place." After living in exile in Europe and North Africa, Leary was incarcerated in the 1970's in Folsom Prison (described by him as the Harvard of the penal system) and temporarily placed in a cell beside a talkative Charles Manson. Celebrity continued to make strange bedfellows. Leary and G. Gordon Liddy, former Nixon attack dog, formed a dog-and-pony show and took it to college campuses across America in the late 1980's. In his endless quest to reinvent himself, Leary made a name as a futurist and a cyberpunk toward the end. Whatever one may think of Leary and his notorious dictum - "tune in, turn on, drop out" - he was a subversive force to be reckoned with and man on a quest for self-awareness until the end. Asked to ascribe himself a place in American history, a dying Leary cites Henry David Thoreau, especially the Thoreau who went to jail rather than pay taxes to support what he believed was an immoral war. Although Nixon once described Leary as the most dangerous man in America, Leary prefers to compare himself to Socrates, another philosopher accused of corrupting youth. Asked if he'd like one day to be restored to life, he says, "Yes, but not during a Republican administration." In what must be the most hair-raising footage in any recent film, Davids' camera was present beside Leary's deathbed. Leary, who believed in a cosmic mind and whose remains were sent, in part, hurtling into orbit (along with the remains of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry), nonetheless left instructions for the preservation of his brain after death. Although the veracity of the film's grisly final scene is in doubt, Timothy Leary is apparently still - ahem - ahead of his times. | ||
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CONTRA COSTA TIMES JULY 4, 1997 "REELING" BY KAREN HERSHENSON DID TIMOTHY LEARY REALLY LOSE HIS HEAD? The Woodchipper scene in "Fargo" was jarring enough, and that hypodermic needle being jammed into Uma Thurman in "Pulp Fiction." Now director Paul Davids takes his place in the Bizarre Movie Moments Hall of Fame with the decapitation sequence in "Timothy Leary's Dead." Yes sir, right there in the film's final frames are people in medical scrubs carrying out Leary's alleged final request - that his head be removed from his cancer-infested body and cryogenically stored until some future date when it can be successfully reattached to another body, or whatever. The shocking scenes are followed by the filmmakers making a mask of Leary's face, but Davids isn't telling whether that explains away the beheading. News reports following the 75-year-old LSD guru's death a month ago stated that he had abandoned plans to have his head frozen. "I've never said that my ending is real; I never made that claim," says Davids. "I've never denied that it might be, because I love confusion. It's like an Escher ink drawing where you can see it both ways." And should cloning spill into the human realm, there are 50 vials of Leary's blood ready and waiting in various countries, says Davids. There are also 7 grams of his ashes in orbit. One gets the feeling he was having a hard time letting go. "Now he's dead, now he's in the realm of myth, larger than life," says Davids. "It's definitely a warning to the establishment, don't be so sure you've snuffed him under your heel." Apparently handbills advertising the film - with their instructions to "lick this poster" - have been disappearing in Berkeley. Davids figures it's either police, who think the paper really is soaked in an illegal substance (it's not) or Leary fans seeking souvenirs. The filmmaker was in Roswell, N.M., when we spoke, participating in the frenzy surrounding the 50th anniversary of a supposed UFO crash landing in the desert. Davids co-wrote and executive-produced a 1994 TV movie, "Roswell," starring Kyle MacLachlan, Martin Sheen and Dwight Yoakam. He has organized a Flying Saucer Film Festival featuring his movie along with several classics including "Forbidden Planet," "War of the Worlds" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still." A Princeton graduate and Leary admirer, Davids says he made the documentary to carry on Leary's legacy. The film covers his early days as a Harvard psych professor and evolution into drug-use advocate, lecturer and finally cyberspace regular. Along with old and recent film footage are interviews with counterculture peers, including Baba Ram Dass (one-time Harvard professor Richard Alpert). "I think he's one of the most controversial figures of our time," Davids says. | ||
| TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD - REVIEW - "L..A. WEEKLY" - JULY 1997 These days the idea of tuning in, turning on and dropping out has more to do with either getting high and watching "The Simpsons" or outright self-destruction than it does with changing the world. Any talk of consciousness-expanding through psychedelics sounds like the quaint naivete of first trips and bygone days - and it has always had the ring of privilege. Paul Davids' celebrated documentary on Timothy Leary is awash in such nostalgia. And though the director tries to give it shape with segment titles like 'Heretics at Harvard' and 'Culture vs. Counter Culture,' the film is largely a jumble of the eras and ideas that form Leary's path from Harvard Square to hippie guru, from outlaw to deathbed ringmaster. Throughout it all, the only thing that still seems even remotely relevant about the philosopher-huckster is the playfulness with which he pulled it all off. Indeed, as an icon, Leary has the resilience of a cartoon character. What a stroke of genius then to film a team of doctors cutting off his head. Whether real or not - and Davids isn't saying either way - the postmortem footage of Leary being prepared for cryogenic freezing drives home his mischievous persona more than any of the talking heads that came before. Sunset 5, Monica 4-Plex, Los Feliz 3) (Paul Malcolm) | ||
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THE NEW YORK TIMES - REVIEW OF "TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD" - JUNE 6, 1997 TIMOTHY LEARY'S FINAL TRIP: HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS ORBIT "TUNED OUT, TURNED OFF, DROPPING IN" BY JANET MASLIN
When the Moody Blues sang "Timothy Leary's Dead," on an early album, they intended a 60's-style compliment: that the acid guru had attained a better vantage point and was "outside looking in." But three decades later, dead really means dead. Or at least it might for someone without Leary's love of self-promotion and gift for gamesmanship from beyond the grave. So in an authorized documentary intent on securing for "this rogue intellectual, this visionary genius" his place in history, the piece de resistance is an act of cryogenic defiance. When last seen in Paul Davids's hippie-filled, hagiographic film, Leary is a severed head in a freezer and wears a solemn, meditative expression that might have suited him in life equally well. The film's biggest accomplishment is to make this image seem'a logical extension of Leary's escapades and create one last trippy frisson: he's not gone. HeÕs waiting. That's the right final vision of Leary and his times, which are nostalgically evoked by Mr. Davids (the author of several "Star Wars" novelizations, like "The Glove of Darth Vader"). Beyond the flower-power stock scenes are glimpses of an adventurous life, tributes from Leary's admirers and a few lingering assessments that are legitimately bittersweet. While all the tuning in and turning on are being celebrated, the Los Angeles police officer Frank DiPaola speaks persuasively about less groovy aspects of the Leary legacy. Thanks to this powerful pop avatar, the 60's embraced sensuality over accountability and gave an aura of enlightenment to drug use, with lingering consequences passed down to the next generation. As an attractive role model for such escapism, the officer insists, Leary was "worse than the drug dealer on the street." ("It was not the least bit recreational," insists the middle-aged, paunchy Marty, part of a group identified as the Naked People of Berkeley, about his drug use. "It was very serious work.") Meanwhile, this documentary, which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, also listens to Leary friends recalling their halcyon days (particularly during a long idyll on a Millbrook, N.Y., estate that became a game preserve for mind-expanding adventurers). The former Dr. Richard Alpert, now Ram Dass, beams fondly while he speaks of the Leary evolution and even its final extreme. "He is carrying philosophical materialism to an exquisite, penultimate point," Ram Dass says about the Leary cryogenic scheme. The idea is to freeze his brain and thaw it during some felicitous time ("not during a Republican administration"). Leary is seen at various stages: as a rebel at Harvard, exultant over having discovered magic mushrooms; as the master of ceremonies, at countless shaggy love-ins; as a wild-eyed old man whose prostate cancer has not dimmed his frenetic energy. He is also seen cavorting with John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Garcia, other free spirits who defined those vanished times. This is an epitaph for them, too. | ||
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STATIN ISLAND SUNDAY ADVANCE - JULY 27, 1997 "TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD, BUT THE STORY LIVES ON" BY KAMNI KHAN - ADVANCE TEENAGE CORRESPONDENT MOVIE REVIEW "I RATE IT AN 'A' SAYS KAMNI KAHN" Timothy Leary is finally deceased, decades after The Moody Blues sang of his demise. But don't be too sure, director Paul Davids seems to be warning viewers of his movie - or maybe he's just trying to assuage their sense of loss. With glee and reverence, he ends "Timothy Leary's Dead" with what has to be one of the most memorable scenes in documentary history, the sawing off of the head of the popularizer of LSD. (His brain was cryogenically salvaged for the future of mankind... or possibly just to be stimulated to new highs in the year 2213, for instance.) How that brain got to where it was, and what effect this cranium-enclosed collection of cells has had upon society is the thrust of this often witty, constantly thought-provoking feature. Born in 1920, in Springfield, Mass., and raised a Roman Catholic, Leary wound up early on being kicked out of a few parochial schools. His grandfather had advised the boy: "Don't be like everyone else," and the lad complied. There were, however, a few uneventful years thereafter, until his first wife died. Leary confronted the late 1950's as a widower with two children. At the time, he was director of psychological research for the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, Calif. He took the change in his fortunes to travel with his newly condensed family to Spain, Mexico, Italy and Denmark. But it wasn't until he went to work in 1959 at Harvard's Center for Research in Personality that the groundwork was laid that would catapult the man into a cultural consciousness. While on vacation in Cuernavaca in 1960, Leary munched down seven mushrooms, Psilocybe mexicana, and his trip began. He noted of that experience, "I realized I had died. That I, Timothy Leary, the Timothy Leary Game, was gone." Five hours of a mushroom high, he insisted, benefited him more than his previous 15 years of therapy. Soon the professor and the author of such forthcoming books as "High Priest," "Politics of Ecstasy," and "Psychedelic Prayers," was tripping regularly. Over 100 times with psilocybin. Then in 1961, he tried LSD for the first time. The rest is history. "My mission was to really liberate the world. Why not? Why settle for less? I had a sense about it. I know the odds were against me. But we only have a few years, so why not leave the Spaceship Earth a better place?" Using archival footage (Allen Ginsberg, sitting cross-legged, decorated to blend into the wall behind him, hallucinatory be-ins) plus interviews with the likes of Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass), the Naked People of Berkeley, a disapproving police officer, former wives, and Leary himself, Davids has created a film that bears repeated viewings. This is not just a fascinating biography about the gent credited with inspiring everything from the Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," to the various liberation movements of the seventies, to the drug dilemma of today. And this is not just the tale of the smiling guy Richard Nixon branded the "most dangerous man in America." Nor is it just the story of the guy once married to Uma Thurman's mom or the convict who escaped from a minimum-security prison in 1970. This is a film that for 80 minutes asks you to question the purpose of your existence. What is this reality that most people accept without questioning? Is the body like a computer, as Leary vows, and can it be easily reprogrammed? Just look around you. Does this look like a planet that can't use some new software? "Learn how to use your nervous system... We're in the Neurological Age." In "Mug Shots," a 1982 look at the purveyors of the supposed "New Earth," authors Jay Acton, Alan LeMond, and Parker Hodges ask: "What is Leary that he can, smiling and chanting, freak out people at every point on the political spectrum, from Martha Mitchell to Eldridge Cleaver? What is he that he can draw reactions from gratitude to hatred? What is he that his statements can be laid to either massive and terrible brain damage or ecstatic and glorious insight? Is he pusher or prophet - though he might equate the words? Is his co-religionist Buddha or Al Capone?" "TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD" seems to be posing these same questions 25 years later, and has a blast doing so. | ||
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"THE TORONTO STAR" - JUNE 20, 1997 - FILM REVIEW BY PETER HOWELL Documentary doesn't just praise Leary, it idolizes him
"TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD" - A documentary starring the late Timothy Leary and his friends, Written by Paul Davids and Todd Easten Mills. Directed by Paul Davids. At the Bloor Cinema Somewhere over the rainbow, Timothy Leary is laughing his head off - if he still has a head, that is. If the overly reverential documentary "Timothy Leary's Dead" achieves anything, it's in showing that the late tripmaster had as great a talent for merry pranks and self-promotion as he did for turning on the masses. And man, did he ever know how to yank everybody's chain, from the straights who damned him in the '60s, to the hipsters who embraced his "Turn on, tune in. drop out" call to inaction, to the people now left puzzling over where his head is at. Leary wasn't the first Harvard prof to drop acid. But he was the best at promoting it, and in recognizing that Baby Boomers instinctively wanted an Establishment figure to endorse their alternative lifestyle. They needed tacit permission from Big Daddy that they weren't being too bad. First-time director Paul Davids comes not just to praise Leary, but to idolize him. He rounds up all the usual suspects, including former prof colleagues and the Naked People of Berkeley, who are delighted to extol Leary as a prophet for the ages, and keeper of drug secrets - didja know JFK once took LSD in the White House? The one serious critic presented is a uniformed Los Angeles drug cop (the symbol of the oppressors!) who rants as if he's walked out of the sprockets of Reefer Madness. Leary's stepson Zachary tells us Leary wouldn't let him smoke dope until he was 15, which is not the kind of edict you'd expect from someone Richard Nixon called "the most dangerous man alive," as Leary proudly recounts. Leary's former colleagues, including Dr. Richard Albert and Dr. Ralph Metzner, let us know they didn't think all of Leary's ideas were received wisdom. They joke about his plan to freeze his severed head after death, saying he was too cheap to pay for the entire body. Leary is seen in interviews with Davids planning this act, his "final taboo," as he calls it. It's more a sideshow stunt, which Davids is now attempting to turn into a mystery to keep the cult of Leary alive. Perhaps the most telling anecdote in the film is Leary's reaction to the 1968 Moody Blues song, "Legend Of A Mind," which is all about him. It repeats the line, "Timothy Leary's Dead," giving this film both its title and theme song. Leary hated the song, not because it spoke of his death 28 years before it actually happened, but because it suggested he was no longer an influence. He couldn't bear the thought of being ignored. This film shows his lasting achievement was in keeping the flame of notoriety burning for three decades, and in leaving us with much to think about, and even more to laugh about. | ||
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"ROSWELL" MOVIE REVIEW - LOS ANGELES TIMES - JULY 30, 1994 SHOWTIME'S "ROSWELL" AN ENGAGING UFO ENCOUNTER By Ray Loynd, Special to the Times Flying saucer stories may have fallen out of fashion, but Showtime's "Roswell" is not a mere sci-fi hardware yarn. It dramatically re-examines the social and human side of a controversial 1947 UFO incident in the New Mexico desert that many observers on the scene insist was covered up by government authorities. Everybody, it seems, was spotting flying discs in the summer of '47. But the most controversial sighting, later dubbed "a cosmic Watergate," occurred outside of Roswell, N.M., the then-home of the 509th (Atomic) Bombardment Group that had leveled Nagasaki and Hiroshima two years earlier. One morning, a New Mexico sheep rancher named Mac Brazel (played by country singer Dwight Yoakam) discovers shiny, light-weight, foil-like fragments scattered over a wide surface of his scrubby outback. Soon a Roswell Army Air Force intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel (Kyle MacLachlan), surveys the crash site and proceeds to set in motion the country's most notorious UFO case: the only instance in which the Air Force announced that it had recovered a flying saucer only to frantically retract the statement two days later. Based on the nonfiction book "UFO Crash at Roswell" by Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt, the production succeeds because it's not so much a space odyssey but the story of a man's discovery and search for truth by MacLachlan's dogged and humiliated Major Marcel. Combing those sheep fields and taking some of the bizarre crash particles home to his wife and son, Marcel in no time becomes the classic fall guy for higher-ups who insist the crushed vehicle was not a UFO but a mangled weather balloon. UFO fanatics and conspirators of all stripes will have a field day. The movie paints the picture of a Washington security cover-up despite 350 military and civilian witnesses who observed and later talked about the wild and murky events. The late '40s period production values are exceptionally sharp and the writers (Arthur Kopit, executive producer Paul Davids and director Jeremy Kagan) wisely integrate "Hiroshima"-like multiple viewpoints, including that of a mysterious ex-airman played by Martin Sheen. Blending past and near-present, the script unfolds within the framework of a 30th anniversary reunion of the 509th Bomb squadron that was caught up in the top-secret Roswell story three decades earlier. "Is it all true?" Sheen's character is asked at the reunion party by the now embittered intelligence officer who first touched pieces of the UFO. "None of it is true," Sheen replies, then pauses and teasingly adds: "Or maybe some of it." | ||
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DAILY VARIETY -- TELEVISION REVIEW -- JULY 29, 1994 Kyle MacLachlan plays an Army man trying to discover the truth about a UFO crash in Showtime's "Roswell." "ROSWELL" Director Jeremy Kagan and his co-writers, Paul Davids and Arthur Kopit, have fashioned a gripping fictional account based on events in the summer of 1947 in New Mexico, where unidentifiable debris, including strangely shaped bodies, was found in a field north of Roswell. Those who discovered it suspected a crash landing by extraterrestrials. A U.S. Air Force press release announced that a UFO had been recovered; a day later, however, the release was retracted, the original finders discredited, and a pall of secrecy was imposed that is still in force (officially if not actually). Telepic achieves the ring of, if not truth, at least possibility. Working from the known facts, and from recent attempts to reopen the investigation - impressively detailed in Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt's 1991 book "UFO Crash at Roswell" - vidpic focuses on Army Intelligence Maj. Jesse Marcel (Kyle MacLachlan), who first broke the story and was then made the goat at the retraction. Thirty years later, Marcel still lives uneasily with the unjust disgrace. Taunted by former buddies at a reunion, he is obsessed with clearing his name. Afflicted with emphysema (which killed the real-life Marcel in 1986), he fights off the persuasions of his wife (Kim Greist) and son (Doug Wert) to abandon the case. His obsessions touch the few survivors who share his memories and are willing, at long last, to come forward; gradually the old secrets take on new flesh. A former mortician (Nick Searcy) remembers seeing the bodies of four crew members on the "saucer" and then being shoved aside by Army brass. Another veteran with his own memories (Martin Sheen) steers Marcel toward the realization that the Army's handling of this one incident may have been part of a larger secrecy pattern regarding UFOS. The excellence of "Roswell" lies not in its definitive answers to long-unanswered questions, but in its interweaving of several possible scenarios. As Marcel, MacLachlan, at ease in the sci-fi/fantastic milieu of "Dune" and "Twin Peaks," is equally so in "Roswell's" well-managed flip-flops between fact and something less certain. He splendidly rides the time warp from 1947 to 1977, and is especially convincing as the honest old Army pro struggling to regain a self-respect undeservedly forfeited. Wherever the truths of the Roswell incident may lie, director Kagan paces his story convincingly and, in the suspicions it raises about American military mendacity, unflinchingly: Superior made-for-TV fare, in other words. The extraterrestrial bodies, by the way, are terrific. -Alan Rich
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THE WASHINGTON POST - REVIEW - JULY 30, 1994 Earthling's Tale 'Roswell': Where Army Met UFO By Tom Shales "Roswell" offers a nice chilly case of the creeps. Showtime's movie, premiering tomorrow night at 8 on the pay-cable channel, looks back on a widely reported UFO sighting near Roswell, N.M., in 1947 and how it affected the life of one particular earthling who lived to tell about it. He told but, says the film, few would believe, because the military systematically discredited him as part of its overall coverup. You don't have to be Oliver Stone to find such a conspiracy entirely plausible. Kyle MacLachlan plays the man, Jesse Marcel, an Air Force intelligence officer who investigates the discovery of strange scattered debris on a sheep ranch owned by Mac Brazel (Dwight Yoakam, the country singer, in a darned good performance). Marcel takes samples home to show his wife and young son an amazing metal that heals when cut, returns to its original shape after being crumpled, and. later, shatters a drill bit attempting to penetrate it. Marcel's initial elation soon turns to anguish when the Army decides the story is too hot for the public to handle and sets about squashing it, even to point of kidnapping Brazel off a Roswell street for three days of interrogation. Even if you don't believe in UFOs, you can certainly believe the military establishment could behave this way. The story is told in flashbacks prompted by a 1977 reunion of Marcel's military unit. Writers Arthur Kopit, Paul Davids and Jeremy Kagan let the story unfold methodically, new details coming from each witness's account. Near the end, Martin Sheen, who has been lurking about through the whole movie, steps forward to play about the same knowledgeable source role Donald Sutherland played in Oliver Stone's "JFK." And we actually get to see members of the crew of the UFO that crashed in 1947, if indeed it did. MacLachlan, who's always seemed at least a tad extraterrestrial anyway, was a good choice to play the obsessed man, but all the casting is good. Like MacLachlan, Kim Greist, as Marcel's wife, has been very credibly aged with makeup for the reunion sequences. Charles Martin Smith plays the local sheriff, and Kopit has a bit part as a doctor. Director Jeremy Kagan measures thirigs out shrewdly, and the period details are deftly evocative. As speculative fiction goes "Roswell" is definitely more persuasive than last year's overwrought theatrical film "Fire in the Sky", and lingers hauntingly in the mind long after the closing credits have crawled away. | ||
| THE ARTIST AND THE SHAMAN The film tells the true story of a vision quest undertaken by an artist in Sedona, Arizona. After the death of his father, a famous scholar of American history who assisted President Kennedy with the writing of Profiles in Courage, the artist seeks guidance from a native American shaman to restore his spirit, vision and artistic productivity. The shaman, Rahelio, noted for his mystic nature tours of the spectacular Sedona region of Arizona, guides the artist to selected power points along the trails and cliffs. There, the artist undertakes the "Sedona summer series", sixteen paintings created while the shaman conducts ceremonies with prayers, chants and traditional native American songs accompanied by flute, drums, rattles and chants. Although the two men are from different worlds, they find a unique connection as spiritual brothers. Together, in an Arizona region long held to be sacred, they explore the wheel of life, the cycle of birth and death, artistic creativity and powerful native American traditions. Paul Davids A graduate of Princeton University and the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film Studies, Paul Davids published his first book, The Fires of Pele: Mark Twain's Legendary Lost Journal, in 1986, and from 1990 to 1992 he was commissioned by George Lucas to write six novels based on the STAR WARS films: The Glove of Darth Vader, Lost City of the Jedi, Zorba the Hutt's Revenge, Mission From Mount Yoda, Queen of the Empire and Prophets of the Dark Side. In 1994 Davids co-wrote and executive produced Roswell for television and then made his directorial debut in 1997 with TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD, His subsequent feature, STARRY NIGHT (1999), was shown at the Montreal World Film Festival. | ||
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| THE LOS ANGELES TIMES - CALENDAR SUNDAY, APRIL 18, 1982 MOVIE REVIEW OF "SHE DANCES ALONE" MAD DANCE: TALES OF NIJINSKY By Sheila Benson There is a way of approaching "She Dances Alone" (at the Continental and Monica 4-Plex) that makes everything easy, and that is knowing what this original and personal film is not. It is not, as one of its characters describes, "a dusty biography about a dead dancer," although Vaslav Nijinsky is its subject. Well, twin subject. It is not a ballet film, although it contains moments of absolutely breathtaking dancing by Patrick DuPond, premier danseur of the Paris Opera Ballet, who seems the ideal choice to interpret the film's excerpts from some of Nijinsky's roles in "Giselle," "Prince Igor" and "Le Spectre de la Rose." And it is not even a biography of Nijinsky's only child, daughter Kyra, 68, living semi-reclusively in San Francisco as a lay sister in a Dominican order - although her chubby imperiousness dominates the film. "She Dances Alone" is not a usual film at all. It feels like a work that exploded in the making from enormous interior pressures and re-formed itself into something unique, endearing and rather madly fascinating. The force was Kyra Nijinsky herself, the child Nijinsky so wanted - "as a reincarnation of me, as I'm afraid I'll soon die." He did not die young, of course. Only a part of him died. As attacks of schizophrenia mounted, he ceased performing and took up residence in a series of sanitoriums, beginning in 1919. Kyra saw him last in 1939. He died in 1950. Austrian director Robert Dornhelm, whose earlier film was the remarkable "Children of Theater Street," had in mind a fairly conventional biographical documentary of Nijinsky with perhaps comments by Kyra, whom he had tracked down to a modest apartment on a San Francisco hillside. Ha. The eccentric, irrepressible Kyra turned out to be no footnote. She could not be crammed into marginal comments. She went off like a Catherine Wheel, sputtering sparks, and took Dornhelm's project with her. So director Dornhelm, fascinated, reformed his film around her. He created a character, the young, soft-bearded, put-upon director, charmingly played by Bud Cort in the best use of his talents since "Harold and Maude," who attempts to coax Kyra into appearing in his film. She resists, telling him "No! '' 'N' for never, 'O' for over my dead body." He mutters into his bicycle basket. "Who is she. How anonymous can you get? SheÕs Nijinsky's daughter and no one even knows her first name." The two, obviously, are destined for collaboration. The result is a collage; psychodrama, as the Director enlists the help of a very young ballet student, Sauncey Le Sueur, to "play" Kyra as a child and perhaps prompt memories; a strange sort of cut-on-the-bias biography; snippets of absolutely superb ballet and Max Von Sydow's voice reading from the tormented diary of Nijinsky. (When Von Sydow himself appears, as himself, perhaps too many layers were applied to the texture.) "She Dances Alone" will infuriate purists and raise a rash on realists. They should perhaps relax and float with the film. It has to do, actually, with memory and madness; with the irrepressible urge to create; with genius and its burdens, and with the full weight of the inheritance Kyra has carried as her father's only heir. (It was a claim her mother, Romola, now dead three years, jealously disputed. "I am the only Nijinsky," she proclaimed more than once.) In the film, like a spirit argument, Kyra re-enacts scenes from a tormented childhood. She takes, in turn, her mother's, her father's and her own character as a child. All the while, the Director is fighting his budget, Kyra's monumentally exasperating yet somehow touching personality, and his own dawning feelings. Like a medical student who develops sympathetic symptoms of every disease in his textbook, he is beginning to see eye to eye with Nijinsky's view of the world - particularly of a world gone mad with war. The Director empathizes with a dancer who could not perform as an interlude between killings; who stood during his last performance, a private recital in a hotel, in the attitude of a cross, as his personal protest to the war. And at dead center is Kyra, regal, peculiar, quick, knowingly funny and certainly knowingly eccentric. A woman who speaks six ("and a half") languages, whose intuitions are razor keen, who describes herself perhaps only half-mockingly as the child of Diaghilev and Nijinsky and who, although the film does not touch on it, chose Diaghilev's last lover, Igor Markevitch, as her husband when she did marry. Kyra's theatricality and sense of art are arresting; look at the drawings from her notebook, but look carefully. Some of them are her father's asylum drawings; the line between father's and daughter's artwork is a thin one. "She Dances Alone" is a dream film, a Jungian dream work. A little Chagall, a touch of Matisse, exasperation and excess. True artistry, curdled affection and finally a sort of muddled peace. Not unlike Kyra's own life. "SHE DANCES ALONE" Distributed by Continental. Producers Federico De Laurentiis, Earle Mack. Director Robert Dornhelm. Executive Producer Marion Hunt. Screenplay Paul Davids. Additional Dramatic Elements But Cort. Narration Jon Bradshaw. Camera Karl Kofler. Editor Tina Frese. Dance Consultant Paul Szilard. Original Music Composed, Arranged Gustavo Santaoialla. With Kyra Nijinsky, Bud Cort, Patrick DuPond, Max Von Sydow, Walter Kent (Walter Kohner), Sauncey Le Sueur. Times Rated Parental Guidance Suggested. Running time: 87 minutes. | ||
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THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, FRIDAY. MARCH 5, 1982 She Dances Alone Produced by the late Federico De Laurentiis and Earle Mack, "She Dances Alone" should he a welcome dessert for moviegoers with a taste for unusual cinema forms, and an eye for imaginative storytelling. It also clearly exhibits once again what film magic can be conjured within a minimal budget if practiced by creative minds. "Dances." being released by Walter Reade's Continental distribution arm, also marks another step into further screen prominence for Robert Dornhelm, the Rumanian-born, Austrian based director responsible for "The Children of Theatre Street," a 1977 Oscar nominee about Russia's Kirov ballet school -- and one of the best films yet made devoted to the island of dance. In the new film, Dornhelm again uses ballet as a focal force but specifically zeroes in on one individual swirling on the outskirts of the dance, Kyra Nyinsky, the free-spirited daughter of the late Vaslav Nijinsky. the latter still considered to be the world's all-time premier danseur and certainly one of the most intriguingly tragic. Vaslav Nijinsky died in a mental institution in 1950. Daughter Kyra, now 68, lives in partial seclusion in San Francisco after an earlier career in ballet, followed by an unsuccessful marriage, an embracement of religion and -- always -- the accompaniment of fringe-celebrity status due to her lineage. Outspoken and eccentric, she is herself a fascinator. Dornhelm's inspection of Kyra Nijinsky, as well as his glimmers into the Nijinsky legend, makes for an intriguing film, offbeat to the nines and a potentially strong seller, especially in specialized theatrical situations. Adding to the impact, and sales appeal, is the prominent casting of Bud Cort, Max von Sydow and Patrick Dupond, now the leading light of the Paris Opera Ballet, in prominent roles. They not only give "Dances" additional allure, but contribute substantially to Dornhelm's thesis. The subject matter obviously posed an initial puzzler for all: how do you best inspect the persona of a Kyra Nijinsky without ultimately diluting it, or inhibiting it, once the camera rolls? The solution here, quite satisfactory, was to make a film about making a film, with Cort as a struggling director attempting to lure the subject on celluloid, this allowing Kyra Nijinsky free rein to play herself, chatter about parental ghosts, occasionally do memory trips and play her own mother as when mouthing words that once sharply rang from Romola Nijinsky to her daughter. From time to time, Von Sydow briefly appears as the older Nijinsky, reading actual passages from the great man's "Diary," which emphasize the ties between father-daughter, and Dupond occasionally appears as a younger version of Nijinsky, spectacularly flying through the air in what amounts to some of the most awesome moments in the film. Cort, carrying the major on-camera burdens, is terrific as Dornhelm's semi-fictional alter-ego, a dedicated, impassioned director attempting to momentarily cage a personality that appears quite complicated and thoroughly elusive. It's a tricky form which could easily have gone astray, if not for Dornbelm's sensitive work, all of it nicely complemented by Tina Frese's editing, Karl Kofler's cinematography and the screenplay by Paul Davids, to which Cort and Jon Bradshaw also made contributions. The music, also first-rate, is by Gustavo Santaolalla. Cort also displays a good singing voice under the credits, doing a title song with words and music by Bruce Roberts. Many movie watchers will ultimately adore Kyra Nijinsky as a bona fide original, while others will be grateful to keep her at a celluloid distance. Either way, they should find plenty to savor in "She Dances Alone," a fact that could keep the film running through projectors for an indefinite lifespan. - Robert Osborne | ||
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THE NEW YORK TIMES - FRIDAY JUNE 6, 1997 FILM REVIEW OF "TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD" TUNED OUT, TURNED OFF, DROPPING IN -- TIMOTHY LEARY'S FINAL TRIP: HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS ORBIT
By Janet Maslin When the Moody Blues sang "Timothy Leary's Dead" on an early album, they intended a 60's-style compliment: that the acid guru had attained a better vantage point and was "outside looking in." But three decades later, dead really means dead. Or at least it might for someone without Leary's love of self-promotion and gift for gamesmanship from beyond the grave. So in an authorized documentary intent on securing for "this rogue intellectual, this visionary genius" his place in history, the piece de resistance is an act of cryogenic defiance. When last seen in Paul Davids's hippie-filled, hagiographic film, Leary is a severed head in a freezer and wears a solemn, meditative expression that might have suited him in life equally well. The film's biggest accomplishment is to make this image seem a logical extension of Leary's escapades and create one last trippy frisson: he's not gone. He's waiting. That's the right final vision of Leary and his times, which are nostalgically evoked by Mr. Davids (the author of several "Star Wars" novelizations, like "The Glove of Darth Vader"). Beyond the flower-power stock scenes are glimpses of an adventurous life, tributes from Leary's admirers and a few lingering assessments that are legitimately bittersweet. While all the tuning in and turning on are being celebrated, the Los Angeles police officer Frank DiPaola speaks persuasively about less groovy aspects of the Leary legacy. Thanks to this powerful pop avatar, the 60's embraced sensuality over accountability and gave an aura of enlightenment to drug use, with lingering consequences passed down to the next generation. As an attractive role model for such escapism, the officer insists, Leary was "worse than the drug dealer on the street." ("It was not the least bit recreational," insists the middle-aged, paunchy Marty, part of a group identified as the Naked People of Berkeley, about his drug use. "It was very serious work.") Meanwhile, this documentary, which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, also listens to Leary friends recalling their halcyon days (particularly during a long idyll on a Millbrook, N.Y., estate that became a game preserve for mind-expanding adventurers). The former Dr. Richard Alpert, now Ram Dass, beams fondly while he speaks of the Leary evolution and even its final extreme. "He is carrying philosophical materialism to an exquisite, penultimate point," Ram Dass says about the Leary cryogenic scheme. The idea is to freeze his brain and thaw it during some felicitous ("not during a Republican Administration") time in the future. Leary is seen at various stages: as a rebel at Harvard, exultant over having discovered magic mushrooms; as the master of ceremonies at countless shaggy love-ins; as a wild-eyed old man whose prostate cancer has not dimmed his frenetic energy. He is also seen cavorting with John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Garcia, other free spirits who defined those vanished times. This is an epitaph for them, too. | ||
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THE BOSTON GLOBE -- FRIDAY, JUNE 27, 1987 MOVIE REVIEW "TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD" Directed by: Paul Davids Screenplay by: Davids and Todd Easton Mills At: Kendall Square Cinema Running time: 80 minutes Unrated TURNING ON, TUNING IN TO "LEARY" By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff Timothy Leary never liked the Moody Blues' lyric that gives this documentary its title. He thought it portrayed him as ineffective and passe Š qualities he wouldn't hear of, even in his final days, when he asked to have his head removed so that his brain could be cryogenically frozen for future implantation in a brain-dead body. "How you die can be the greatest decision of your life," he said shortly before cancer took him in 1996. "Timothy Leary's Dead" is filmmaker Paul Davids's affectionate look at the man who lived only to explore new frontiers, whose raison d'etre was to gather no moss, who thrived on being considered "the most dangerous man in America" by Richard Nixon. The documentary is arranged in chapters that are in mostly chronological order, and it features recent interviews with peers like doctors Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, and extensive 1990's interviews with Leary himself, his mind sharp but his body wasting away beneath his Nehru outfit. It also includes a good amount of historic media footage, with Leary being demonized in voice-overs as "the Harvard professor who became the outlaw acid king." Some of the most compelling segments revolve around Leary's years at Millbrook, a 3,000-acre estate in upstate New York, where he and a constant stream of countercultural icons raised consciousness together on LSD. The idyllic first year deteriorated once officials began to harass the rebels, led by none other than G. Gordon Liddy, who used his high-profile Leary bust to further his notoriety as a drug expert. Also fascinating are Leary's recollections of his years in prison and his escape, including a dissonant stay in Algeria with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who preferred a violent revolution. "I believe the revolution is a neurological revolution," Leary said at the time. When he was returned to jail, his punishment included a cell next to Charles Manson for a week. The film contains some analysis of the long-term impact of LSD and Leary's 1960's mantra to "turn on, tune in, drop out," noting that many who pursued the doors of perception in the 1960's went on to become the lawyers and doctors of today. But the bulk of "Timothy Leary's Dead" is homage, somewhat incomplete and random as a thorough portrait of a man and his times but nonetheless interesting right down to the last scenes, when we actually see Leary's head being removed. The movie captures the high points in the career of a searcher whose days were bound up with some of the most exciting historical adventures in 20th-century America. "It was my ambition to liberate the world," Leary is heard saying at the very beginning of the movie, and by the end you believe him. | ||
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SEDONA MAGAZINE WINTER 2001/02 PAGE 96 "FANTASYMAN" - SEDONA'S PAUL DAVIDS by James Bishop Jr. Sipping an iced coffee at Sedona's Desert Flour Cafe in Sedona, Paul Davids' eyes misted up as he recalled the moment back in the mid-1980's when an idea dawned on him like a summer sunrise. While driving through Red Rock Country from his home in California with his son, Scott, suddenly something clicked in his mind. "I felt a combination of pain, joy, anguish and, yes, vindication," said Davids. "I will bring Vincent back." What gave birth to this unique idea was news that one of Vincent van Gogh's paintings, "Sunflowers," had sold for a record $33 million. "I think I felt everything he would have felt at the news, after having considered himself a failure for selling just one painting before he died by his own hand at the age of 37." Davids always has been inspired by fantasy, having been celebrated for his creative writing at Princeton University, as a scholarship student at the American Film Institute, and then as a protege of George Pal, who produced "The Time Machine," "War of the Worlds" and "Tom Thumb." Therefore, he set out to write "Starry Night," a successful fantasy about what happened to Van Gogh when he returned from the dead to visit Los Angeles in the 1990's. It was while he was writing the script for "Starry Night" that he bought a home in Sedona for his family, composed of his wife, Hollace, a film executive; daughter Jordan; and his son, Scott. Meantime, he began to paint in earnest. While grieving for his late father, a renowned scholar who assisted President John F. Kennedy with the writing of "Profiles in Courage," Davids had an unusual experience, which sowed the seeds for the film that he is submitting to Sedona International Film Festival this year, "The Artist and the Shaman." This tale spins around a vision quest that Davids experienced with a local Indian (Rahelio) during which he says his spirit was restored, as was his artistic productivity. "It was my first introduction to the concept of the Wheel of Life," he said. "I learned that what the lord takes away, he gives back in other ways." Besides painting profusely, Davids, who co-authored "Roswell: The UFO Cover-up" and produced "Timothy Leary's Dead," now is at work dreaming of other fantasy film projects. Would you believe subjects like Mark Twain's life and times in Hawaii? But wait! Remember all the failed missions to the red planet, Mars? Well, what if they were successful after all and the government covered it up? YouÕll have to be patient for these fantasies. Or are they? | ||
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THE DESERT SUN - WEDNESDAY, OCT. 31, 2001 REVIEW: "THE ARTIST AND THE SHAMAN" U.S. 2001, 75 minutes Director: Paul Davids Cast: Documentary featuring Davids and Rahelio, a modern American Indian shaman FILM SHOWS HOW ARTIST TAPS CREATIVITY FROM SEDONA'S ROCKS By Bruce Fessier SYNOPSIS: Paul Davids, the director of another festival film screening at 10 a.m. today, "Timothy Leary's Dead," spends a summer in Sedona, Arizona, to recover from the death of his father, a famous American historian. He turns to Rahelio, a modern American Indian shaman, for spiritual rejuvenation, and he experiences a burst of creativity as a painter. THUMBS UP: This is a very intimate film that requires the patience to let the artistic experience unfold. The film almost incidentally reveals the power and beauty of Sedona's red rocks, as well as Davids' journey of self-discovery. It's almost like a home movie as Davids lays himself open psychologically and lets the camera view his pain and attempts at coping, including his wonder at whether the shaman's young son could be the reincarnation of his father. But there's a subtle, artistic organization to this scrapbook of scenes; a parallel between the layers of texture and complexity in Davids' paintings and his own character. When the paintings go on exhibition, there's a personal celebration, too.
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THE TORONTO STAR Friday, June 20, 1997 TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD... AT LEAST FOR THE TIME BEING By Peter Howell, Movie Critic Space aliens, cloned sheep and severed heads: they all come together when talking about the late acid guru Timothy Leary. The man doing the connecting is Paul Davids, the California director of TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD, a film documentary on the renegade ex-Harvard professor opening tonight at the Bloor Cinema. He's on the line from his California home, with more secrets than Fox Mulder, and more shock revelations than a National Enquirer headline writer: SPACE ALIENS REALLY DID CRASH AT ROSWELL, N.M: July 4 marks the 50th anniversary of the alleged crash landing of little gray space people in the New Mexico desert, and the subsequent coverup by the U.S. government. Two weeks from now, the word "alleged" won't apply anymore, says Davids, who will be in Roswell unveiling physical evidence turned up as a result of ROSWELL, the 1994 made-for-TV movie he co-wrote and executive produced. "On July 4, it's very likely that the tide of the argument may be turned by certain scientific announcements," Davids says. DOLLY, ME'T TIMOTHY: Timothy Leary knew before his death last year that science was on the verge of cloning the first mammal, Davids says. He didnÕt live long enough to hear about Dolly, the Scottish clone sheep unveiled this year, but he made secret plans to become the first cloned human. HE'S DEAD, BUT WHERE'S HIS HEAD? TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD purports to show the severing of the acid king's head from his body, soon after his death from prostrate cancer. But is it really Leary's head on screen, or just a mask? Davids considers this his biggest mystery. It's almost too much for one straight mind to absorb. But these bulletins from "out there," plus the fact that Davids wrote six STAR WARS novels, helped convince Leary that the first-time film director was the free-thinker needed to make his film bio. It also helped that Davids, as a Princeton University psychology student in the '60's, had worked with Canadian psychologist Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the man credited with coining the term "psychedelic," and of sending author Aldous Huxley on his first mescaline trip. "He trusted me," Davids says of Leary. Small wonder. Davids is clearly a Leary devotee, and so are most of the people he interviewed for his film. He doesn't deny that his 80-minute documentary is intended to restore some of Leary's lost mystique, as the ultimate counter-culture rebel of the 1960's. He barely takes a breath while explaining his filmÕs agenda: "It's a favorable portrait of a wonderful man who was demonized by the media, who was labeled as "the most dangerous man alive," who was jailed for what today would be a very small infraction (marijuana possession), sentenced to 30 years for this and put in a cell next to Charles Manson, primarily because his writings were viewed as a threat. He was shut up." Most of Leary's enemies of the '60's and '70's, including U.S. president Richard Nixon and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, are dead and gone. And most documentaries of the 1960's tend to paint Leary as a Technicolor iconoclast, best remember for acid mantra, "Turn on, tune in, drop out." In his declining years, Leary was known to younger people as a friendly codger who liked surfing the Internet. It would seem hard to organize a lynch mob of the senior citizens who still consider Leary a dangerous influence, but Davids, ever the conspiracy theorist, is convinced the anti-Leary forces are out there, waiting. Waiting to interrupt Leary's final "Experiment," his interesting way of describing death. It's for this reason the film fudges the shock-horror-gasp ending, which shows Leary's head being sawed off by a team of surgeons, shortly after his death. Earlier in the film, Leary talks about how he's made arrangements to have his head frozen for posterity, to be thawed at some future date and attached to the body of a willing man or woman - presumably one already headless. But the decapitation scene is immediately followed by another showing the still-alive Leary being fitted for a lifelike mask of his head, raising the suspicion that it's all a hoax. Or is it? He does confirm that Leary arranged to have seven ounces of his ashes sent on a private rocket ship ride to space, along with the ashes of STAR TREK creator Gene Roddenberry. Leary also squirreled away 50 vials of his blood, sent to secret locations around the world, waiting for the day when some JURASSIC PARK dream comes true, and the acid guru once again walks the Earth. "No one knows if, in fact, experiments might be already underway to clone Timothy Leary as the first human clone," Davids says conspiratorially. "You have to understand. His death is shrouded in mystery. The meaning of the ending of the film is in essence a warning to those who demonized him." A warning? Turn on, tune in... or we'll lop it off? | ||