'A movie for a turned-on audience!"; "a fun movie that encompasses every other movie form - western, war film, musical, horror, science fiction. It's memorable!"; "What is Head?
Head is the most extraordinary adventure Western comedy love story mystery drama musical documentary ever filmed. And that's putting it mildly."
These were the various taglines and trailers for Head, the late 1960s movie that teen-scream pop stars The Monkees made with the help of Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson - at the time, respectively, a B-movie actor and a television producer (of The Monkees television series) with arrogant aspirations towards a career as a European-influenced auteur. As The Monkees - Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork and Mickey Dolenz - were grappling with the restrictions of being perceived as a manufactured pop group, Nicholson and Rafelson were partaking of the counter culture's laissez faire attitude to drugs and creative deconstruction.
So it came to pass that in a haze of spliff smoke and acid dreams they arrived at the questionable idea of placing The Monkees - and all they apparently stood for - in a movie that mixed some great psychedelic music with Vietnam footage and outré pop culture artefacts. Oh, it also took place in Victor Mature's hair. The Monkees? They were dandruff.
"We didn't shoot the movie on acid," Rafelson recalled, "but Jack Nicholson did structure the movie in his mind on an acid trip." When it opened in the US in November 1968 it became apparent that few movie critics, if any, understood it. Pauline Kael, the then doyenne of film critics, wrote a scathing review in New Yorker that kiboshed any chance the movie had of finding an audience outside its perplexed teenage fanbase. Columbia Pictures' investment of more than $750,000 grossed less than $17,000, effectively sealing its fate as an abject commercial failure. Yet, such is the way of things that Head is slowly but surely being re-evaluated. It started when it was released on video in the late 1980s, when Creem magazine wrote of Head's "bitter truths about rock stardom. It's anti-rock and anti-fame, and so self-mocking it borders on tragedy". Bob Rafelson - who is currently working on a DVD release of Head - reckons that through the years Head morphed into the "anthem movie of rock 'n' roll, which is shocking because The Monkees were hardly rock 'n' roll anthem bearers". Still, God loves a trier; the next movie Nicholson and Rafelson made (with Dennis Hopper) was the counter cultural, establishment-baiting Easy Rider.
Rafelson: "We wanted to bill that film as 'From The Producers Who Gave You Head'. Unfortunately, because no one actually saw Head, we couldn't use the line." You'll have your own opportunity to experience Head when it's screened on Sky Cinema on , July 12th.
Tony Clayton-Lea