THE MONKEES - HEAD (FILM) @ 55

 

It was 55 years ago today when the one and only feature film by The Monkees, HEAD, officially hit theatre screens with its New York City premier on November 6th, 1968. While the film systematically dismantled the band's carefully cultivated pre-teen "manufactured image" in the hopes of appealing to a more mature, progressive counterculture audience, it ended up only alienating existing fans while the hipsters never even gave it a chance due to the band's reputation. And while it was initially a staggering commercial flop, ravaged by critics of the time, something strange happened in the decades following its release. Since then, it has become a deeply treasured cult film, inspiring in-depth analysis and speculation and, in retrospect, is seen as one of the very few films of the psychedelic era to actually capture the true experience of the trip, rather than portray it within the context of a "cautionary tale".

At the time the idea began floating about for doing a Monkees movie, the TV series was wrapping up its second and final season. Both the band and the show's producers were looking to break out of the format of the TV show. While it had been an innovation in TV structures at the time, it still had its own very rigid internal formula, one designed to mostly appeal to a younger audience and was only mildly concerned with making any kind of philosophical or political statements. Everyone essentially knew they simply weren't interested in creating a feature length version of a Monkees TV show episode. In order to help redefine their position and plot a course forward, Bob Rafelson, the show's creator and producer, hired friend and then an unknown young actor by the name of Jack Nicholson to help with the script. As his first foray into the world of feature films, Rafelson was entirely expecting that this might be his only chance to make a movie, so he set the basic premise that he wanted HEAD to be a collection of vignettes, each with a different reference to a Hollywood trope or style. If this was the only movie he'd ever get the chance to make, he wanted to make every kind of movie he's ever loved.

In order to flesh out the details of this conception, Bob, Jack and the band ensconced themselves at an Ojai, California, resort, where, with tape recorder constantly rolling, they got high and brainstormed their little hearts out, spewing forth a barrage of disparate ideas and scenarios, allowing nothing to limit their imagination. At one point, someone asked Bob what the blackest thing in the universe could be and, thinking for a moment, he concluded it was Victor Mature's hair, thus concocting the premise that the entire movie takes place in his hair. After the weekend brainstorming session was completed, Jack took the tapes and began the impossible task of trying to stitch all these crazy notions together into a script that could make some sort of thematic sense. He had to craft ways to get from one scene to another with no apparent connection between them. In the end, he came up with an approach that took the viewer on a journey as if they were watching the TV, flipping through channels and landing on random programs, with a continuity of themes that would keep surfacing again and again with each change of the channel. Ideas of media control, packaging, pandering to expectations, confinement, interpretation and escape all wove themselves together through this madcap journey, dissecting the band's image and intent, and rebuilding it into a commentary on popular culture and the nature of reality itself. Ambitious stuff for something that looked like a hodgepodge mess from the outside.

The music for the film was obviously still an integral component and the band made every effort to ensure that its maturity and sophistication went well beyond anything they'd done before. With two original songs from Peter, one from Mike, one from Harry Nilsson and two more from Carole King, they had a half dozen solid compositions to work with. As well as the band's own performances, session musicians included such luminaries as Neil Young, Leon Russell, Ry Cooder and Stephen Stills. For Mike's Circle Sky, the band were filmed performing the song live, with absolutely zero augmentation or post production overdubs. It's a roaring proto-punk raver that shows the group off as the tight, intense garage band they had become in the real world. Carole King's Porpoise Song became the visual highlight of the film as they utilized the then unknown technique of solarization, a process which was expensive and difficult to achieve and which ultimately caused delays in the post production phase, pushing back the release date. For the accompanying soundtrack album, Jack Nicholson was put in charge of editing the LP together, taking the half dozen songs and interspersing them with a cut-up assemblage of audio and score music cues from the film. The end result is something akin to the likes of Nurse With Wound or Negativland, with bizarre juxtapositions of dialogue and sound effects creating bridges between the album's core musical elements.

Production on the film got off to a rocky start, with the band discovering that only Jack would get scripting credits, something that was necessitated by industry union rules at the time requiring a single name to be associated with the screenplay. There were also disputes over the wages being paid to the band, which resulted in the group going on strike the first day of shooting, with only Peter showing up to the set. It was pretty tense and the friction between Rafelson and the band afterwards never really resolved itself, leaving a permanent rift between the producer and the band.

Promotion of the film was approached with the same sense of experimentation which had driven the creation of the movie. Inspired by Andy Warhol's film, Blowjob, which shows nothing but a man's head and expressions as he receives oral copulation, the poster for the film and the TV ad showed the head of John Brockman, who did the PR for the film. As a gag, the title, HEAD, was chosen because the producers were looking forward to their next film project, where their promotions could proudly proclaim, "from the people who gave you HEAD". The ad taglines summarized it as a "most extraordinary adventure, western, comedy, love story, mystery, drama, musical, documentary satire ever made (And that's putting it mildly)." The band themselves were conspicuously absent.

The evening of the NYC premier, Rafelson commented that he and Nicholson were arrested "for trying to put a sticker on a police officer's helmet as he mounted his horse." With the film deliberately destroying the mythology of the band, young Monkees fans were completely turned off by the product and the critics took it as an opportunity to destroy the band in print. With nearly nonexistent box-office receipts, the film vanished from theatres with little notice and it began its journey through the cultural underworld, waiting to be reappraised by the public.

My first exposure to the movie came on December 30, 1974, when CBS aired it as their Late Movie after the 11 o'clock news. I happened to be out with my parents at their friends place, where I stumbled on the film on TV and got a chance to see roughly half of it before I was yanked away from the screen so we could go home. I desperately tried to find it when we did get home, but it seemed to have vanished from the airwaves. I was a fan of the TV series and had no idea what this was, but I knew I LOVED IT! I was only 11 years old at the time, but something about it mesmerized me. Yet I had no opportunity to see the complete film again until about 1989, when I was loaned a VHS tape with a dub of the film on it, accompanied by John Water's Desperate Living. I watched the two movies while out of my mind on mescaline and had a religious experience with both of them. At that point, I became an evangelist for HEAD, insisting on showing it to everyone and anyone who I could get to sit down in front of my TV for 90 minutes, preferably under the influence of a suitably potent psychedelic substance. There wasn't a single case where the film didn't make an impact, and there are a number of converts who were created by my efforts. I eventually got VHS, then DVD editions of the movie and, once the internet came into common use, discovered that there were many others out there who had come to appreciate the movie the way I do. I still consider it in my top three favourite films of all time, which includes the aforementioned Desperate Living, and The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

In recent years, there have been many people who have done in-depth explorations of the film's themes and structure. It has spawned actual university courses! The book The Monkees, Head, and the 60s, written by Peter Mills, who taught the university course, offers an excruciatingly detailed exploration of every element of the film, including the threads that lead to its creation and the aftermath of its release. For many, myself included, it is a critical document of 1960s counterculture. Director, Bob Rafelson, went on to produce groundbreaking films like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. For fans of the band, who have long since embraced the film in all its eccentric glory, it has become an indispensable chapter in the band's legacy, one which proves beyond any doubt that they were artistically and creatively valid beyond any criticism for their "manufactured" origin.