T
The420Guy
Guest
AUSTIN, Texas – "Look, I'll show you my pants," says Toronto filmmaker Ron Mann, demonstrating the slack waistband of his rust-coloured cords, which are made of earth-loving hemp.
"I started to do yoga and I stopped eating meat. I lost 50 pounds. It changed my life."
The new, slim, eco-minded Mann, 44, is man of the hour at Austin's South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival that kicked off over the weekend.
His new documentary Go Further, a retro-hippie road odyssey he calls "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test on tofu," received a standing ovation from Friday's opening-night crowd.
If the audience reaction is the same when Go Further goes further – a slot at this fall's Toronto International Film Festival seems likely – Mann will have the satisfaction of having made a film that actually makes a difference in the way people live. Like Michael Moore's gun-lust commentary Bowling For Columbine, Mann uses humour to make a cogent statement about how humans are turning the Earth into a desert of clear-cut forests and poisoned rivers.
Mann's 22-year reputation as a documentarian, chronicling such pop-culture fascinations as marijuana laws (Grass, 1999), dance crazes (Twist, 1992), comic books (Comic Book Confidential, 1988) and jazz (Imagine The Sound, 1981), earned him the coveted gala opener spot at SXSW for Go Further.
It won the honour even though programmers saw only a rough few minutes of the film. When it comes to Mann's work, even the maestro himself never really feels he's seen a final print. He constantly works on small refinements to the editing and the sound, tinkering away until festival officials literally yank the movie out of his hands.
"I've been up for 48 hours," he told the audience prior to the screening of Go Further, squinting into a spotlight that bounced off his wild tangle of gray hair. "I just saw the check print last night at 11 p.m."
The film stars activist/actor Woody Harrelson and a team of fellow travellers in a symbolic recreation of firebrand author Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters bus trip of the 1960s, which was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
In the summer of 2001, Harrelson and a small group of true believers – including a yoga instructor, a raw-food chef, a hemp activist and a reformed junk-food addict – travelled 1,300 miles down the Pacific Coast Highway, from Seattle to Los Angeles, visiting organic farmers and ecology activists at various stops. They cycled much of the way, accompanied by their home away from home: An ecologically friendly bus that used hemp-seed oil for fuel and solar panels for electricity.
Harrelson called the trip the Simple Organic Living (SOL) Tour, but Ken Kesey dubbed the travellers the Merry Hempsters when they stopped by to visit him, just a short while before his unexpected death.
In one of the most poignant moments of Go Further, Kesey shows the awed Hempsters the rotted shell of the original 1939 school bus used by the Merry Pranksters, which had the destination sign of "Furthur" – a deliberate hippie misspelling, and the inspiration for Mann's film title.
The trip couldn't have happened at a better time for Mann, although he didn't originally plan to make it. He read about Harrelson's planned journey in bong-boosting High Times magazine ("It's where I get all my news,") and he called up his old pal Woody to see if he could tag along, and maybe shoot some digitial video footage. Harrelson and Mann became friends after the actor agreed to do the voice-over narration for Grass.
"I just took some time off to make this," Mann says. "It was really intense making it, and we had almost no money – I finished the film on a ####ing credit card! – but it all works out. I saw it as a kind of movement, and I like the idea of personal transformation equalling planetary transformation."
Mann was fully aware that a film about hippiedom revisited, with sidetrips to worm farmers, organic food growers and hemp paper makers, wouldn't exactly challenge, say, The Matrix Reloaded at the multiplexes of the world. He was also quite aware that people might view Harrelson with a suspicious eye, yet another Hollywood type preaching but not practising, even though no one could question Harrelson's sincerity.
"You know, nobody wants to hear about the environment," Mann says. "And I didn't wanted to make a traditional environmental film, which would be kind of like preaching to the choir. You have to make it entertaining ... I call this 'environmental lite.'"
Mann lucked out by meeting Steve Clark, the unexpected and irresistible clown star of Go Further. A junk-food addict who lived on cheeseburgers, candy bars and chocolate shakes, the big-grinning 30-year-old met Harrelson on the set of the TV sitcom Will & Grace, where Clark works as a production assistant. Harrelson invited him on the Merry Hempsters to work as a general helper and to show that anybody can get involved in the Whole Earth movement, if they have the right spirit.
We meet Clark as the SOL bus picks him up in front of a Fatburger restaurant, and he quickly steals the show in Go Further. One scene shows him attempting to persuade a group of teenaged crystal meth addicts that they should drop drugs and join him in a feast of seaweed and algae; another crazed moment comes when Clark grabs a bullhorn and demands that people stop eating corn dogs immediately ("They're not food!") Yet Clark is the first to admit he's no saint himself: Mann's camera catches him sneaking illicit cigarettes and Mars bars, smiling like a kid with his hand jammed in a cookie jar.
"I hopped on the bus without a script and with Steve, I immediately realized that he was the film," Mann says. "If you followed Woody, people couldn't relate to a star talking about the environment. But they could relate to Steve and they could relate to Linda, who were really just playing themselves on the screen."
Mann is hoping Go Further will get as much attention as Bowling For Columbine, which he greatly admires. He's opening there's some way he can take the film to Cannes in May, even though he missed the deadline for submissions.
"There's just a real thirst for these kinds of films. Alternative voices are not up on the screen. They just aren't. Bowling For Columbine was the most successful documentary outside of Woodstock. And that says a lot about people out there who don't agree with what is going on."
Musicians and bands such as U2, Dave Matthews, Lenny Kravitz, Ani DiFranco and the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir, who donated songs and on-camera performances to Go Further, make for a very big soundtrack for this very low-budget documentary.
As Ken Kesey said in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, you're either on the bus or you're off the bus. Judging by the rave reception for Go Further at SXSW, which included in-person tributes from Harrelson, Clark and other members of the Merry Hempsters, there are going to be a lot of people on Mann's bus when the film heads out into the great beyond.
"This could have gone the other way," Mann says, breathing a sigh of relief at the reception his film received.
"People could have been throwing pies at me, or maybe organic apples. But I think it worked out okay. Now I just feel the need to go back to my wife and kids, get back in balance, take a breath and just let the business people do their thing and put the movie out there. And I'll go on and make another movie."
Monday, March 10, 2003
Mann's eco-doc wows festival
Peter Howell, Toronto Star
Provided by: www.globalhemp.com
"I started to do yoga and I stopped eating meat. I lost 50 pounds. It changed my life."
The new, slim, eco-minded Mann, 44, is man of the hour at Austin's South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival that kicked off over the weekend.
His new documentary Go Further, a retro-hippie road odyssey he calls "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test on tofu," received a standing ovation from Friday's opening-night crowd.
If the audience reaction is the same when Go Further goes further – a slot at this fall's Toronto International Film Festival seems likely – Mann will have the satisfaction of having made a film that actually makes a difference in the way people live. Like Michael Moore's gun-lust commentary Bowling For Columbine, Mann uses humour to make a cogent statement about how humans are turning the Earth into a desert of clear-cut forests and poisoned rivers.
Mann's 22-year reputation as a documentarian, chronicling such pop-culture fascinations as marijuana laws (Grass, 1999), dance crazes (Twist, 1992), comic books (Comic Book Confidential, 1988) and jazz (Imagine The Sound, 1981), earned him the coveted gala opener spot at SXSW for Go Further.
It won the honour even though programmers saw only a rough few minutes of the film. When it comes to Mann's work, even the maestro himself never really feels he's seen a final print. He constantly works on small refinements to the editing and the sound, tinkering away until festival officials literally yank the movie out of his hands.
"I've been up for 48 hours," he told the audience prior to the screening of Go Further, squinting into a spotlight that bounced off his wild tangle of gray hair. "I just saw the check print last night at 11 p.m."
The film stars activist/actor Woody Harrelson and a team of fellow travellers in a symbolic recreation of firebrand author Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters bus trip of the 1960s, which was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
In the summer of 2001, Harrelson and a small group of true believers – including a yoga instructor, a raw-food chef, a hemp activist and a reformed junk-food addict – travelled 1,300 miles down the Pacific Coast Highway, from Seattle to Los Angeles, visiting organic farmers and ecology activists at various stops. They cycled much of the way, accompanied by their home away from home: An ecologically friendly bus that used hemp-seed oil for fuel and solar panels for electricity.
Harrelson called the trip the Simple Organic Living (SOL) Tour, but Ken Kesey dubbed the travellers the Merry Hempsters when they stopped by to visit him, just a short while before his unexpected death.
In one of the most poignant moments of Go Further, Kesey shows the awed Hempsters the rotted shell of the original 1939 school bus used by the Merry Pranksters, which had the destination sign of "Furthur" – a deliberate hippie misspelling, and the inspiration for Mann's film title.
The trip couldn't have happened at a better time for Mann, although he didn't originally plan to make it. He read about Harrelson's planned journey in bong-boosting High Times magazine ("It's where I get all my news,") and he called up his old pal Woody to see if he could tag along, and maybe shoot some digitial video footage. Harrelson and Mann became friends after the actor agreed to do the voice-over narration for Grass.
"I just took some time off to make this," Mann says. "It was really intense making it, and we had almost no money – I finished the film on a ####ing credit card! – but it all works out. I saw it as a kind of movement, and I like the idea of personal transformation equalling planetary transformation."
Mann was fully aware that a film about hippiedom revisited, with sidetrips to worm farmers, organic food growers and hemp paper makers, wouldn't exactly challenge, say, The Matrix Reloaded at the multiplexes of the world. He was also quite aware that people might view Harrelson with a suspicious eye, yet another Hollywood type preaching but not practising, even though no one could question Harrelson's sincerity.
"You know, nobody wants to hear about the environment," Mann says. "And I didn't wanted to make a traditional environmental film, which would be kind of like preaching to the choir. You have to make it entertaining ... I call this 'environmental lite.'"
Mann lucked out by meeting Steve Clark, the unexpected and irresistible clown star of Go Further. A junk-food addict who lived on cheeseburgers, candy bars and chocolate shakes, the big-grinning 30-year-old met Harrelson on the set of the TV sitcom Will & Grace, where Clark works as a production assistant. Harrelson invited him on the Merry Hempsters to work as a general helper and to show that anybody can get involved in the Whole Earth movement, if they have the right spirit.
We meet Clark as the SOL bus picks him up in front of a Fatburger restaurant, and he quickly steals the show in Go Further. One scene shows him attempting to persuade a group of teenaged crystal meth addicts that they should drop drugs and join him in a feast of seaweed and algae; another crazed moment comes when Clark grabs a bullhorn and demands that people stop eating corn dogs immediately ("They're not food!") Yet Clark is the first to admit he's no saint himself: Mann's camera catches him sneaking illicit cigarettes and Mars bars, smiling like a kid with his hand jammed in a cookie jar.
"I hopped on the bus without a script and with Steve, I immediately realized that he was the film," Mann says. "If you followed Woody, people couldn't relate to a star talking about the environment. But they could relate to Steve and they could relate to Linda, who were really just playing themselves on the screen."
Mann is hoping Go Further will get as much attention as Bowling For Columbine, which he greatly admires. He's opening there's some way he can take the film to Cannes in May, even though he missed the deadline for submissions.
"There's just a real thirst for these kinds of films. Alternative voices are not up on the screen. They just aren't. Bowling For Columbine was the most successful documentary outside of Woodstock. And that says a lot about people out there who don't agree with what is going on."
Musicians and bands such as U2, Dave Matthews, Lenny Kravitz, Ani DiFranco and the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir, who donated songs and on-camera performances to Go Further, make for a very big soundtrack for this very low-budget documentary.
As Ken Kesey said in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, you're either on the bus or you're off the bus. Judging by the rave reception for Go Further at SXSW, which included in-person tributes from Harrelson, Clark and other members of the Merry Hempsters, there are going to be a lot of people on Mann's bus when the film heads out into the great beyond.
"This could have gone the other way," Mann says, breathing a sigh of relief at the reception his film received.
"People could have been throwing pies at me, or maybe organic apples. But I think it worked out okay. Now I just feel the need to go back to my wife and kids, get back in balance, take a breath and just let the business people do their thing and put the movie out there. And I'll go on and make another movie."
Monday, March 10, 2003
Mann's eco-doc wows festival
Peter Howell, Toronto Star
Provided by: www.globalhemp.com
