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entertaining u newspaper: your weekly guide to entertainment
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by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
History is repeating itself faster than it used to. These modern times are looking more and more like the 60s everyday. As a war rages on overseas and protests rise stateside, we see younger bands turning the focus of their writing to protest music and the hippie movement is once again on the rise. With hippies comes the concept of tree-hugging and worshipping nature, which is exactly what our culture needs right now to curb the effects of climate change, a danger that is far more real and tangible now then it was forty years ago.
“Nomad filmmaker” Bill Daniel made the film Who Is Bozo Texino?, a film wherein Daniel tries to track a graffiti moniker that has existed on the rails of the Southwest for more than eighty years, has turned his attention to the turbulent times of protest, anarchy, and the search for alternative fuel. No, I’m not talking about 2007, I’m talking about 1970.
In his return to the San Marco theatre, Daniel has brought with him a presentation that is part presentation of films and part installation art. Daniel is bringing his 1965 Chevy Sailvan loaded with two nearly forgotten films from the 60s and 70s to the San Marco Theatre to make an unlikely and fantastic presentation on May Day (May 1).
“The sailvan –a 2-masted gaff-rigger schooner– functions as tour vehicle, as well as projection screen. The video program is a 2-projector documentary-essay on low-down survival strategies in a world of ecologic and economic collapse.”
In addition to the film being projected onto the sails of the van, the theatre will be presenting two movies Daniel has brought with him as part of this touring show. Come see the lost documentary Last Free Ride about a group of anarchist hippies that left the Haight-Ashbury district as the 60s wore down and moved to an abandoned waterfront across the San Francisco Bay. Here several hundred hippies thrived in a ramshackle community that floated on the water in homemade vessels and floatation devices.
Inevitably, developers came to the area in Sausalito, known as Waldo Point, and demanded that police remove the aquatic squatters. This film depicts the life and culture of these anarchists as well as the struggle against police as they try to protect their idealistic way of life.
Director Saul Rouda lived in that society and, fortunately for us, captured this forgotten world on film as a young man. In college Rouda pieced together some of his footage to make a short film about the era and met a young, accomplished filmmaker named Ray Nolan. Together they pieced together the raw footage to tell this lost tale and presented it at the Marin Veteran’s Memorial Theatre in San Francisco in 1975.
Following Joe Tate, leader of a “crunch rock ’n’ roll band” called RedLegs, we watch as these anarchists wage guerilla war against the establishment. Meanwhile the communities patriarch, Piro Caro, tries to address the establishment on their terms in county meetings, urging leaders to allow their community, which had by then been at Waldo Point for twenty years, to continue to exist.
In addition to the presentation of this compelling and dramatic true story, Daniel also brings his own video about a protest film called Selective Service System by Warren Haack and Dan Lovejoy. This film, which also originated in San Francisco in 1970, made “…a bold, graphic statement against the Vietnam War and secured [Dan Lovejoy’s] own physical deferment from the military draft.” In this short film Bill Daniel presents the original protest film and interviews with Lovejoy and Haack.
The first film starts at 9:30 pm on May 1st, but get there early to check out Daniel’s Sunset Scavenger Sailvan presentation before the show. This one-time screening is certain to be the sort of event that you will never have a chance to see again. And this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity only costs five dollars, so there is no reason not to attend.
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