August
6Getting High on Woodstock
The sudden blast of noise about Woodstock yesterday was amusing and amazing to those who recall that, 40 years ago, Woodstock was surrounded by total silence.
As far as the media was concerned, the Festival was a non-event. No one covered it – no critics, reporters, TV crews. It was not until several days after the fact that news seeped out about this seminal counterculture event – that 400,000 people had braved the rains and mud to listen to the great pop artists of the day.
The Woodstock experience had a tremendous impact not only on the (mostly young) folks who attended but also on the media. Important phenomena were overtaking our pop culture, editors realized, and the major newspapers, magazines and TV shows were ignorant of them.
Now Woodstock is being immortalized yet again in a Focus Features movie, “Taking Woodstock,” to be directed by Ang Lee and written by and co-produced by his Focus guru, James Schamus. And Warner Bros. plans to release an expanded four-hour doc about the event complete with previously unseen numbers by the Who, Joe Cocker and Joan Baez.
Other groups who turned up at Woodstock included the likes of Crosby, Stills & Nash, Santana, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival and just about anybody who was part of the rock-and-roll world.
This amazing ingathering dramatized the fact that society in that moment had essentially split into two distinct nations. Everyone in the counterculture was talking about Woodstock. It was the place you had to be. Yet no one in the “straight” world knew a damn thing about it.
To be fair, the New York Times by the mid- 60’s had begun to get uneasy about this Great Divide. Its editors dispatched me from New York to Los Angeles with the admonition that I was to keep a wary eye on the “new” pop culture that was emerging. My news editor had told me, “Times are changing and the changes are blowing from west to east. Tell us what’s going on.”
And they cautiously added: “Just don’t start smoking the stuff.”
Of course, just about everyone was “smoking the stuff” at Woodstock – the cast of “Pineapple Express” would have felt right at home. The Schamus-Ang Lee feature will focus on the experiences of a man named Elliot Tiber, who ran a motel that he impulsively volunteered to be the home base for the Woodstock concert organizers. The cast will include Emile Hirsch, Liev Schreiber and Imelda Staunton. The film will start shooting later this month despite industry concerns about a SAG showdown.
And it’s definitely a passion project for Schamus, who himself straddles several worlds – production chief, screen writer and academic.
For starters, Schamus is eager that he and Ang Lee emerge from their cycle of tragedies into a setting that is at once comical and moving. “This was a period,” he notes, “that closely mirrors today.
“The mood was one of protest and change,” he observes, “and in some ways the young people of that time were smarter than they are today.” And according to Schamus “The films of the ‘60s also were starting to get smarter.”
The Woodstock film they intend to make will hopefully be rich in both humor and pathos. And one would think the four hours of Warner Bros. Woodstock footage would forcefully set the stage.
Final irony James Schamus will get the Trailblazer Award at the Woodstock Film Festival in October.
As far as the media was concerned, the Festival was a non-event. No one covered it – no critics, reporters, TV crews. It was not until several days after the fact that news seeped out about this seminal counterculture event – that 400,000 people had braved the rains and mud to listen to the great pop artists of the day.
The Woodstock experience had a tremendous impact not only on the (mostly young) folks who attended but also on the media. Important phenomena were overtaking our pop culture, editors realized, and the major newspapers, magazines and TV shows were ignorant of them.
Now Woodstock is being immortalized yet again in a Focus Features movie, “Taking Woodstock,” to be directed by Ang Lee and written by and co-produced by his Focus guru, James Schamus. And Warner Bros. plans to release an expanded four-hour doc about the event complete with previously unseen numbers by the Who, Joe Cocker and Joan Baez.
Other groups who turned up at Woodstock included the likes of Crosby, Stills & Nash, Santana, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival and just about anybody who was part of the rock-and-roll world.
This amazing ingathering dramatized the fact that society in that moment had essentially split into two distinct nations. Everyone in the counterculture was talking about Woodstock. It was the place you had to be. Yet no one in the “straight” world knew a damn thing about it.
To be fair, the New York Times by the mid- 60’s had begun to get uneasy about this Great Divide. Its editors dispatched me from New York to Los Angeles with the admonition that I was to keep a wary eye on the “new” pop culture that was emerging. My news editor had told me, “Times are changing and the changes are blowing from west to east. Tell us what’s going on.”
And they cautiously added: “Just don’t start smoking the stuff.”
Of course, just about everyone was “smoking the stuff” at Woodstock – the cast of “Pineapple Express” would have felt right at home. The Schamus-Ang Lee feature will focus on the experiences of a man named Elliot Tiber, who ran a motel that he impulsively volunteered to be the home base for the Woodstock concert organizers. The cast will include Emile Hirsch, Liev Schreiber and Imelda Staunton. The film will start shooting later this month despite industry concerns about a SAG showdown.
And it’s definitely a passion project for Schamus, who himself straddles several worlds – production chief, screen writer and academic.
For starters, Schamus is eager that he and Ang Lee emerge from their cycle of tragedies into a setting that is at once comical and moving. “This was a period,” he notes, “that closely mirrors today.
“The mood was one of protest and change,” he observes, “and in some ways the young people of that time were smarter than they are today.” And according to Schamus “The films of the ‘60s also were starting to get smarter.” The Woodstock film they intend to make will hopefully be rich in both humor and pathos. And one would think the four hours of Warner Bros. Woodstock footage would forcefully set the stage.
Final irony James Schamus will get the Trailblazer Award at the Woodstock Film Festival in October.
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The cone of silence over Woodstock recalls the more recent one over the Edwards love child. The differemce is one was due to ignorance and the other to protecting the franchise.
Posted by: Banjo | 8/10/2008 6:41:25 AM
"for every socially concious hippie, there were 500 who couldn't care less." - a sad but true statement that is reflected in today's culture - and weren't many of these folks responsible for the "culture of greed"?
I didn't attend, but thse I know who did are still cool.
Posted by: DOUGLAS KONDZIOLKA | 8/8/2008 6:08:53 PM
I went to the War protests just to pick up chicks.
Posted by: jack | 8/8/2008 6:29:32 AM
Neither of these posters was alive when Woodstock happened. You can just tell from their vitriolic take on hippiedom. Woodstock was cool, still is cool, will always be cool. I wasn't there, but went to my share, and dreamed of what it was a hint of; a world that wasn't run by the idiots who were running it. Sure, time has passed, we're all older and grayer, but once upon a time there was a feeling of hope instead of hopelessness.. and enjoyment of life and music.
Posted by: richmartini | 8/8/2008 1:56:48 AM
bummer. i'm 40 years too late
Posted by: spurg | 8/7/2008 4:46:07 PM
Well, the dark side of Woodstock is that it was a poorly planned concert, where about 450,000 non-paying people crashed through the fencing, took illegal drugs, had indiscriminate s*x, endured miserable conditions, sloshed through the mud, could barely hear the music, and left the place a mess. The nostalgia seemed to come from the people who missed Woodstock and somehow created a fantasy about it based on the award-winning documentary. The reaction to Woodstock from most of America was to vote Richard Nixon into office to deal with the lawlessness.
Posted by: Dan Petitpas | 8/7/2008 1:58:31 PM
“and in some ways the young people of that time were smarter than they are today.†-- This self-aggrandizing myth of the hippie generation being socially conscious protestors needs to be killed off. Truth is, only a very small fraction of the counter-culture was concerned with protesting the war and such. The vast majority were just showing up for drug parties. Anyone who cares to get a better sense of what the 60s were really about, as opposed to the baby-boomers'' ridiculous self-serving fantast of themselves, should read Tom Wolfe''s Electric-Kool-Aid-Acid-Test. That book tells it like it was.... for every socially conscious hippie, there were 500 who couldn''t care less. It seemed weird to a lot of people when the "socially conscious" hippies morphed in the vapid, greedy, soulless yuppies... but it only seemed weird to those who bought the hype. To those who knew better, the hippies never changed at all. They were always vapid and selfish.
Posted by: dan | 8/7/2008 1:13:34 PM