FILM FEATURE: MAMMOTH LAKES FILM FESTIVAL 2015

A scene from Dying to Know: Ram Dass and Timothy Leary.

Mind over matters

By Ed Rampell

The new Mammoth Lakes Film Festival focuses on narrative movies, documentaries, shorts and animation that express a singular, personal point of view.

MLFF ran May 27-31 and this critic enjoyed every short and feature-length work he saw at the inaugural annual fest, located about 300 miles north of Los Angeles.

But my favorite film at MLFF was Gay Dillingham’s Dying to Know:Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, narrated by Robert Redford.

Gurus of the late 1960s counterculture, Dass and Leary went, as writer Aldous Huxley put it, beyond the doors of perception by experimenting with psychedelics and in doing so, not only turned the academic establishment upside down, but rocked the emerging counterculture generation.

This is a great story filled with fascinating details, such as why (space) cadet Leary was kicked out of West Point.  It is to producer-director Dillingham’s credit that she has found a visionary form that organically expresses the content of a film that is often visually stunning, conveying cosmic consciousness. For instance, she occasionally uses animation to great effect, especially in cleverly depicting “Bicycle Day” -- when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally dosed himself with LSD at his Basel lab and rode home on a bike, tripping his brains out on acid for the first time in human history, on April 16, 1943.

With its psychedelic style and sensibility, Dying to Know: Ram Dass and Timothy Leary avoids the pitfalls of many conventional documentaries filled with talking heads, archival footage and the like. Of course, in addition to those acolytes of acid and Eastern philosophy par excellence, Mssrs. Leary & Ram Dass, the interviewees are indeed fascinating, and they include Dr. Andrew Weil. Other collaborators with the iconoclastic pair, such as Ralph Metzner, are interviewed, as well as one of Leary’s five wives, Joanna Harcourt-Smith. Former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, who drew on his psychedelic experiences for his songs, also makes for a compelling eye-witness.

As for the doc’s news clips, etc., Leary’s 1960s testifying before Congress, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, is to die for, as Leary proclaims and explains his famous mantra: “Turn on, tune in, drop out!” However, there’s not enough info about Leary’s escape from a minimum security prison and his subsequent falling out with another New Left extremist, former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, also living in exile at Algiers. For instance, to the best of this reporter’s recollection, the Weatherman helped Leary bust out of the big house (so to speak), but their role in one of the most fascinating episodes in the era’s history isn’t even mentioned. On the other hand, I didn’t know (or recall) that John Lennon wrote “Come Together” for Leary’s California gubernatorial race against none other than Ronald Reagan. His sojourn to Afghanistan is also quite fascinating, although, again, briefly mentioned. But a 95-minute biopic about two icons can only cover so much.

It should be mentioned that, as its title indicates, Dying to Know: Ram Dass and Timothy Leary is also "to know" about the ultimate taboo and final frontier: Death. Ever the publicity conscious, crafty manipulator of public opinion, Leary, as many know, turned his last hurrah into a media event. Watch Dying to Know: Ram Dass and Timothy Leary to find out how he and Star Trek’s creator made history in the 1990s.

Marjorie Sturm’s The Cult of JT Leroy was the first film I saw at the new MLFF, and with its quirky, mind-blowing subject matter it set the tone for the rest of this filmfest.

Sturm’s fascinating film, which is chock full of cameos by notables, is, on the surface, about a purported son of a truck stop prostitute who followed in his mother’s footsteps, became drug addicted and HIV-infected and wrote tell-all books about his misadventures at a very tender age.

 

A scene from The Cult of JT Leroy.

In doing so, a cult of celebrity surrounding the young, troubled author mushroomed that attracted numerous high profile personalities from the music, movie, TV and literary worlds. Using the rationale that he/ she was too shy to read at his/her own public readings, a variety of stars such as celebs Jeremy Renner, Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia also wrote tattle tales about her substance abuse), Sandra Bernhard, Susan Dey, Lou Reed, the Village Voice’s Michael Musto, etc., turned out to read passages from the books and fawn over the media darling.

 

As the author’s fame spread, actress Asia Argento adapted for the big screen his/her’s short story collection, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, co-starring Argento, Peter Fonda and Renner. However, as it turns out, all of the journalists who ballyhooed the purported young writer and stars who flocked to his/her public events should have paid closer attention to the name of this book and movie. At first, having never heard of the title character, I thought The Cult of JT Leroy was going to be about a troubled artiste tormented by an unhappy childhood. Then I believed it would become a cautionary tale about how that bitch goddess fame, fortune and celebrityhood spoil an innocent artiste. (Paging Mssrs. Capote and Williams!)

 

But then, proving truth is stranger than fiction, Sturm takes us into an entirely different direction: The problem is that JT Leroy was a ruse who did not actually exist. JT was a concoction of a 39-or-so-year-old wannabe writer -- who shall deliberately remain nameless here in order not to feed her fame addiction -- who conjured up this persona in order to break on through to the other side of the rarified world of major market publishing. Celebs and the “news” media fell for it, hook(er), line and s(t)inker.

 

For these reasons and more, Marjorie Sturm’s feature-length documentary debut should definitely be widely seen and the 91-minute The Cult of JT Leroy deserves a distribution deal. In the end, it actually is a cautionary tale, a meditation upon media manipulation.

And now for the winners of the inaugural Mammath Lakes Film Festival:

Audience Award for Narrative Feature: They Look Like People, directed by Perry Blackshear;

Audience Award for Documentary Feature: Omo Child, directed by John Rowe;

 

Jury Award for Narrative Feature: Diamond Tongues, directed by Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson;

 

Jury Award for Documentary Feature: Autism in Love, directed by Matt Fuller;

Jury Bravery Award for Documentary Feature: Cartel Land, directed by Matthew Heineman;

Jury Award for Narrative Short: Una Nit, directed by Marta Bayarri;

Jury Honorable Mention for Narrative Short: Tourist Trap, directed by Alana Purcell;

Jury Award for Animation or Documentary Short: Upon the Rock, directed by James Bascara;

Jury Honorable Mention for Animation or Documentary Short: The Tide Keeper, directed by Alyx Duncan.