Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture

Film historian Lewis (American Film) delivers a spirited survey of the film industry’s responses to the culture shifts of the 1960s as major studios faltered and movie stars left the spotlight. “There was, it became quite clear, money to be made and awards to be won making movies that engaged a counterculture audience,” he writes, and traces the “emblematic and mostly unhappy encounters of young Hollywood talent... as they came into contact with a quite baffled corporate establishment.” Lewis’s tour makes stops at Boston’s Fort Hill commune, where Mark Frechette’s “impending celebrity” was left behind as he poured his resources into the community, and with former teen star Dolores Hart who retired to become a nun in 1963 as her career was on the ascent. The industry contended with the era’s changes, meanwhile, with strategies poorly executed and at times ludicrous, as when major studios “formed a counterculture production unit in house” despite their “failure to comprehend” such a culture. Though he leans a bit heavily on Hollywood mystique (it’s “a world unlike the world most of the rest of us live in”), Lewis is a solid writer, and his knowledge is impressive. The result is a study that’s as memorable as it is entertaining. Photos. (July)