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The film eventually found a [[cult following]], although even fans tend to disagree whether the film is a landmark of surreal, innovative filmmaking or simply a fascinating mess. Today, it receives mainly positive reviews from fans and film critics alike. [[Leonard Maltin]] describes it in his comprehensive [[Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide|Movie Guide]] as “delightfully plotless” and “well worth seeing,” giving the film 3 out of 4 stars, while [[Rotten Tomatoes]] gives the film a 74% rating. ''Head'' premiered on television [[Late night television in the United States|across-the-board]] as a ''[[CBS Late Movie]]'' on December 30, [[1974 in television|1974]] ([[Michael Nesmith]]'s 32nd birthday, and [[Davy Jones (actor)|David Jones]]' 29th), at 11:30pm (EST); the network rebroadcast the film on July 7, [[1975 in television|1975]] (the 35th birthday of ex-Beatle [[Ringo Starr]], who's mentioned in the movie), and once again in January 1981. [[Cable TV]] took hold in 1984, when ''Head'' began periodical showings on [[Cinemax]]. In the UK, [[Channel 4]] also aired the movie on British TV for the first time in 1986, and then again in 1991. It was later shown regularly on [[Starz (TV channel)|Starz Cinema]], and in 2007, [[Turner Classic Movies]] featured the film as part of ''[[TCM Underground]]'', showing the film unedited and in its original aspect ratio. It was released on video and Laserdisc by RCA/[[Columbia Pictures]] Home Video in September 1986 (taking advantage of the group's 20th Anniversary), again on VHS and DVD by [[Rhino Entertainment]] in January [[1995 in film|1995]], and a third time on Blu-ray and DVD in November and December 2010, respectively, by [[The Criterion Collection]], in a box set with other films from Rafelson.
The film eventually found a [[cult following]], although even fans tend to disagree whether the film is a landmark of surreal, innovative filmmaking or simply a fascinating mess. Today, it receives mainly positive reviews from fans and film critics alike. [[Leonard Maltin]] describes it in his comprehensive [[Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide|Movie Guide]] as “delightfully plotless” and “well worth seeing,” giving the film 3 out of 4 stars, while [[Rotten Tomatoes]] gives the film a 74% rating. ''Head'' premiered on television [[Late night television in the United States|across-the-board]] as a ''[[CBS Late Movie]]'' on December 30, [[1974 in television|1974]] ([[Michael Nesmith]]'s 32nd birthday, and [[Davy Jones (actor)|David Jones]]' 29th), at 11:30pm (EST); the network rebroadcast the film on July 7, [[1975 in television|1975]] (the 35th birthday of ex-Beatle [[Ringo Starr]], who's mentioned in the movie), and once again in January 1981. [[Cable TV]] took hold in 1984, when ''Head'' began periodical showings on [[Cinemax]]. In the UK, [[Channel 4]] also aired the movie on British TV for the first time in 1986, and then again in 1991. It was later shown regularly on [[Starz (TV channel)|Starz Cinema]], and in 2007, [[Turner Classic Movies]] featured the film as part of ''[[TCM Underground]]'', showing the film unedited and in its original aspect ratio. It was released on video and Laserdisc by RCA/[[Columbia Pictures]] Home Video in September 1986 (taking advantage of the group's 20th Anniversary), again on VHS and DVD by [[Rhino Entertainment]] in January [[1995 in film|1995]], and a third time on Blu-ray and DVD in November and December 2010, respectively, by [[The Criterion Collection]], in a box set with other films from Rafelson.

When asked by ''[[Rolling Stone]]'' magazine in March 20122 if he believe making ''Head'' was a mistake, Nesmith responded by saying that "by the time ''Head'' came out the Monkees were a pariah. There was no confusion about this. We were on the cosine of the line of approbation, from acceptance to rejection—the cause for this is another discussion not for here—and it was basically over. ''Head'' was a swan song. We wrote it with Jack and Bob—another story not for here—and we liked it. It was an authentic representation of a phenomenon we were a part of that was winding down. It was very far from suicide—even though it may have looked like that. There were some people in power, and not a few critics, who thought there was another decision that could have been made. But I believe the movie was an inevitability—there was no other movie to be made that would not have been ghastly under the circumstances."ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/exclusive-michael-nesmith-remembers-davy-jones-20120308 |title=Exclusive: Michael Nesmith Remembers Davy Jones |date=8 March 2012|work=Rolling Stone |accessdate=9 March 2012}}</ref>


==Music==
==Music==

Revision as of 16:28, 9 March 2012

Head
Movie poster for Head
Directed byBob Rafelson
Written byBob Rafelson
Jack Nicholson
Produced byBert Schneider (executive)
Bob Rafelson
Jack Nicholson
StarringThe Monkees
(Peter Tork,
David Jones,
Micky Dolenz,
Michael Nesmith)
CinematographyMichel Hugo
Edited byMike Pozen
Music byKen Thorne
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release date
November 6, 1968
Running time
85 min. (theatrical)
110 min. (extended cut)
LanguageEnglish
Budget$750,000 USD

Head is a 1968 psychedelic comedy-adventure major motion picture, starring TV group The Monkees (in credit order: Peter Tork, Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz and Michael Nesmith), and distributed by Columbia Pictures. It was written and produced by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson, and directed by Rafelson.

During production, the working title for the film was "Changes", which was later the name of an unrelated album by the Monkees. A rough cut of the film was previewed for audiences in Los Angeles in the summer of '68 under the name of "Movee Untitled".

The film featured Victor Mature as "The Big Victor" and other cameo appearances by Nicholson, Teri Garr, Carol Doda, Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Sonny Liston, Timothy Carey and Ray Nitschke. Also appearing on screen in brief non-speaking parts are Dennis Hopper and Toni Basil.

Plot

The film is about the nature of free will, conceived and edited in a stream of consciousness style.

Head begins at the dedication of a bridge. As a local politician struggles with his microphone during the dedication speech, the "wacky, fun-loving" Monkees suddenly interrupt the ceremony by running through the assembled officials, to the sound of various horns and sirens.

The rest of the film shows what happened that led up to that. The four have just all kissed the same groupie, who tells them that they were indistinguishable. Throughout the film, they make their way through a series of unrelated vignettes, each being a different type of movie (a mystery, a war movie, a western, a desert adventure, etc...). In each one, they try to deal with the fact that they're four real people in a real band that makes records for real people, but are also scripted characters in a fake TV band doing nothing except exactly what the director wants them to.

They continually try to prove to themselves that they're free and can make any choice they want. But no matter what they try—deliberately flubbing their lines, pointing out to other characters that they're really just actors making a movie, complaining to Nicholson and Rafelson who are on the set but not part of the film, smashing through the painted paper walls, walking off the set and into the street, physically attacking other actors for no reason, and making everyone they encounter mad at them—they discover that their every word and deed was predetermined to the finest detail by the script of the movie they're in and the director directing it.

For example, they forget their worries at a party where girls are go-go dancing. But a mirror on the wall reveals the movie camera shooting directly into it, recording the scene we are watching while Rafelson sits next to the camera in the mirror.

At one point, Peter actually discovers the answer to the free will contradiction in their reality. The four frequently find themselves inside a large black box from which they cannot escape. The box represents the constraints of being fictional characters unable to make any real choices. Peter announces that he will talk about the nature of conceptual reality, then informs the others that "it doesn't matter if we're in the box". He realizes that the difference between free will and pre-scripted action is illusory. As long as you can do anything you want, 'it doesn't matter' if your choices were known in advance by some powerful entity in a higher level of context outside the universe, because the situation in which you find yourself is identical to one in which there is no outer context and you really are free.

Unfortunately, the other three pay no attention to Pete's liberating revelation, which they characterize as navel-contemplating nonsense, and soon, even Pete forgets about it.

While being chased by everyone they've encountered (and disrupted) in the various vignettes, they run onto a bridge, shoving people out of the way. We see that they weren't being "wacky" at the beginning of the film; they were desperately trying to escape being mere scripted puppets. Finally, we see that they went to the bridge to make the ultimate assertion of free will. They jump off the edge and commit suicide, falling a very long way and slamming into the water far below.

However in the final scene, we see that this, too, was scripted. The film's director hauls their soaked bodies away in a huge aquarium while the four stare blankly through the glass, struggling under the water. Laughing, he rolls the aquarium into a slot at the studio warehouse, to be taken out when he wants to use them again in another movie.[1][2][3][4]

Promos

Trailers for the film summarized it as a "most extraordinary adventure, western, comedy, love story, mystery, drama, musical, documentary satire ever made (And that's putting it mildly)." There were no pictures of the Monkees on the original movie poster, just a scruffy-looking man who is not in the film.

Origins and aftermath

The storylines and peak moments of the movie came from a weekend visit to a resort in Ojai, California, where the Monkees, Rafelson and Nicholson brainstormed into a tape recorder,[5] reportedly with the aid of a quantity of marijuana. Jack Nicholson then took the tapes away and used them as the basis for his screenplay which (according to Rafelson) he structured while under the influence of LSD.[6] When the band learned that they would not be allowed to direct themselves or to receive screenwriting credit (since they didn't write the actual shooting script), Dolenz, Jones, and Nesmith staged a one-day walkout, leaving Tork the only Monkee on the set the first day.[citation needed] The strike ended after the first day when, to mollify the Monkees, the studio agreed to a larger percentage share of the film's net for the group. But the incident damaged[citation needed] the Monkees' relationship with Rafelson and Bert Schneider, and would effectively draw a curtain on their professional relationship together.[citation needed]

Filmed at Columbia Pictures/Screen Gems Studios in Culver City and at the Columbia Ranch in Burbank, as well as on various locations in California (the ribbon cutting ceremony at the Gerald Desmond Bridge, Long Beach; the "WAR!" chant cheerleader sequence at Pasadena Rose Bowl, Pasadena; the factory sequence at the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant, Playa Del Rey; the war sequence at Bronson Canyon; some sequences at San Francisco; the desert sequence at Palm Springs), Utah (the concert sequence at Valley Music Hall, Salt Lake City) and The Bahamas (Micky's underwater sequence) between February 15 and May 17, 1968, the movie makes fun of the band's image and the bandmembers' personae. The song "Ditty Diego – War Chant" was written by Jack Nicholson and is a parody of the band's original Boyce and Hart written TV theme song; its lyrics illustrate the tone of self-parody evident in parts of the film:

He, hey, we are The Monkees
You know we love to please
A manufactured image
With no philosophies.
[...]
You say we're manufactured.
To that we all agree.
So make your choice and we'll rejoice
in never being free!

Hey, hey, we are The Monkees
We've said it all before
The money's in, we're made of tin
We're here to give you more!
The money's in, we're made of tin
We're here to give you...

The final "We're here to give you..." is interrupted by a gunshot, with footage of the execution of Viet Cong operative (q.v.) Nguyễn Văn Lém, by Brigadier General & then Chief of National Police Nguyễn Ngọc Loan.

Elements of the movie were based in fact, including the stampede leaving the studio canteen when the Monkees break for lunch, and the "big black box"* the band repeatedly becomes trapped in. (*During the first season, veteran performers would regularly complain about the Monkees' presence – and walk out of the cafeteria whenever they came in – while members would sometimes wander off-set when they weren't needed on camera. The studio responded by building a break area on-set for the Monkees, with a meat-locker door and the walls painted black.)

A poor audience response at an August 1968 screening in Los Angeles eventually forced the producers to edit the picture down from its original 110-minute length. The 86-minute Head premiered in New York City on November 6, 1968. (The film later debuted in Hollywood on November 20.) It was not a commercial success.[5] This was in part because Head, being an antithesis of The Monkees TV show, comprehensively demolished the group's carefully groomed public image, while the older, hipper audience they'd been reaching for rejected the Monkees' efforts out of hand.[5]

The movie was also delayed in its release (owing partly to the use of solarisation, a then-new technique both laborious and expensive), and badly under-promoted. The sole television commercial was a confusing, minimalist close-up shot of a man's head (John Brockman); after thirty seconds, the man smiled and the name HEAD appeared on his forehead. This ad was a parody of Andy Warhol's 1963 film Blow Job, which only showed a close-up of a man's face for an extended period, supposedly receiving 'head'.

Another part of the promotional campaign was placing "Head" stickers in random places. An urban legend has circulated for years that Jack Nicholson was arrested for trying to place one of these stickers onto the helmet of a New York City police officer while he was mounting his horse.

Receiving mixed critical reviews and virtually non-existent box office receipts, the movie only succeeded in alienating the band's teenaged fanbase, while also failing to attract the more adult audience they had been striving for.[5] Head's abysmal reception instantly halted studio plans for any further films with the Monkees. It also corresponded with a steep drop in the group's popularity as recording artists; the film's soundtrack album only peaked at #45 on the American chart, the first time any LP by the Monkees had not risen to the Top 5. The single released from the album, Porpoise Song, was the first 45 RPM record by the band to fail to crack the Top 40 as well.

The film eventually found a cult following, although even fans tend to disagree whether the film is a landmark of surreal, innovative filmmaking or simply a fascinating mess. Today, it receives mainly positive reviews from fans and film critics alike. Leonard Maltin describes it in his comprehensive Movie Guide as “delightfully plotless” and “well worth seeing,” giving the film 3 out of 4 stars, while Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 74% rating. Head premiered on television across-the-board as a CBS Late Movie on December 30, 1974 (Michael Nesmith's 32nd birthday, and David Jones' 29th), at 11:30pm (EST); the network rebroadcast the film on July 7, 1975 (the 35th birthday of ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, who's mentioned in the movie), and once again in January 1981. Cable TV took hold in 1984, when Head began periodical showings on Cinemax. In the UK, Channel 4 also aired the movie on British TV for the first time in 1986, and then again in 1991. It was later shown regularly on Starz Cinema, and in 2007, Turner Classic Movies featured the film as part of TCM Underground, showing the film unedited and in its original aspect ratio. It was released on video and Laserdisc by RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video in September 1986 (taking advantage of the group's 20th Anniversary), again on VHS and DVD by Rhino Entertainment in January 1995, and a third time on Blu-ray and DVD in November and December 2010, respectively, by The Criterion Collection, in a box set with other films from Rafelson.

When asked by Rolling Stone magazine in March 20122 if he believe making Head was a mistake, Nesmith responded by saying that "by the time Head came out the Monkees were a pariah. There was no confusion about this. We were on the cosine of the line of approbation, from acceptance to rejection—the cause for this is another discussion not for here—and it was basically over. Head was a swan song. We wrote it with Jack and Bob—another story not for here—and we liked it. It was an authentic representation of a phenomenon we were a part of that was winding down. It was very far from suicide—even though it may have looked like that. There were some people in power, and not a few critics, who thought there was another decision that could have been made. But I believe the movie was an inevitability—there was no other movie to be made that would not have been ghastly under the circumstances."ref>"Exclusive: Michael Nesmith Remembers Davy Jones". Rolling Stone. 8 March 2012. Retrieved 9 March 2012.</ref>

Music

Main article: Head (The Monkees album)
File:Headfour.jpg
The Monkees during the filming of Head. A black and white version of this picture was used on the backside of the LP.

While the film's music disappointed fans of the band's more traditional pop sound, it features what some critics considered to be some of the best recorded work by The Monkees, including songs contributed by Carole King and Harry Nilsson. Jack Nicholson compiled the soundtrack album, which approximates the flow of the movie and includes large portions of the dialogue.[7] The film's incidental music was composed and conducted by Ken Thorne, who also composed and conducted the incidental music to the Beatles' second film, Help!

Andrew Sandoval, Rhino Entertainment's archivist who co-produced the company's reissue of the film, commented on the songs in a 1995 article published when the film was first reissued: "It has some of their best songs on it and, as you know, the movie's musical performances are some of the most cohesive moments in the film."

The music of the Monkees often featured rather dark subject matter beneath a superficially bright, happy sound (the song "Last Train to Clarksville", for instance, is actually about a young man who has been drafted, and is trying to arrange one last date with his girlfriend before he ships out); the music of the film takes the darkness and occasional satirical elements of the Monkees' earlier tunes and makes it far more overt, as in "Ditty Diego-War Chant", or "Daddy's Song," which has Jones singing an upbeat, Broadway-style number about a boy abandoned by his father. (Jones' own father, Harry, died just prior to Head's release.)

The soundtrack includes:

Cast

"Reversed" cast

  • Srebmahc Yrret as Oreh (Terry Chambers as Hero)
  • Snrub Ekim as Gnihton (Mike Burns as Nothing)
  • Drapehs Rehtse as Rehtom (Esther Shepard as Mother)
  • Iksotsleh Enitsirk as Dneirf Lrig (Kristine Helstoski as Girl Friend)
  • Namffoh Nhoj as Dneifxes Eht (John Hoffman as The Sexfiend)
  • Revaew Adnil as Yraterces Revol (Linda Weaver as Lover Secretary)
  • Yelnah Mij as Frodis (Jim Hanley as 'Frodis' – a slang term for marijuana coined by Micky Dolenz)

On screen these credits actually appeared backwards.

Crew

Home video release history

The Rhino VHS release included a short commercial after the credits for Rhino Entertainment and their catalog, featuring two bare-chested men.

References

  1. ^ The Monkees Tale by Eric Lefcowitz (1989)
  2. ^ Monkeemania: The True Story of the Monkees by Glenn A. Baker (1994)
  3. ^ The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story of the 60s TV Pop Sensation by Andrew Sandoval (2005)
  4. ^ The film "Head"
  5. ^ a b c d King, Susan (2008-11-12). "A Monkees 'Head' trip". Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles. Retrieved 2010-04-30. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
  6. ^ Dorian Lynksey, "The Monkees' Head: 'Our fans couldn't even see it', The Guardian, 28 April 2011
  7. ^ Baker, Glenn A. (1986). Monkeemania: The True Story of the Monkees. New York, New York: Plexus Publishing. pp. 91–102. ISBN 0-312-00003-0. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  8. ^ a b http://www.criterion.com/boxsets/769-america-lost-and-found-the-bbs-story
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