Arthur Penn: American Director

17. Hippie Sunset

181 17 Hippie Sunset History may not exactly be bunk, as Henry Ford famously proclaimed ,1 but it is generally written, as Alex Haley noted, by the winners. Motion pictures have an unusual ability to contort history because they exist in time-present even when they are set in the past. The screen looks real, even when it lies, and filmmakers exploit this phenomenon by the cinematic equivalent of having their cake and eating it too. Alice’s Restaurant (1969) is an extrapolation of an actual incident that occurred in 1965 when then eighteen-year-old Arlo Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins helped Alice and Ray Brock clean out the garbage from the deconsecrated church where they lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It was Thanksgiving , and when Guthrie and Robbins saw that the town dump was closed for the holiday, they chucked the trash on a roadside in adjacent Stockbridge where somebody else had already done the same, figuring, “one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up, we decided to throw ours down.”2 They then returned to the Brocks’ church for “a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat”3 and went to sleep, only to get a call from Stockbridge police officer William Obanhein that an envelope bearing Guthrie’s name had been found amid the refuse, making him a suspect. When Guthrie and Robbins went to remove the garbage, they were arrested. In the end, they paid a $50 fine and hauled off the junk anyway, and that was supposed to be that. But it wasn’t. Because a short while 182 Arthur Penn later, when Guthrie took his preinduction draft physical, he was deemed unfit for military service—which in that era meant being sent to Vietnam—because of his prior conviction for (blush) littering . The sheer ludicrousness of it inspired Guthrie to adapt a song he was writing about a restaurant that Alice had opened in Great Barrington into “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” an eighteen-minute narrative ballad he debuted at the August 1967 Newport Folk Festival. At that time, Arlo was known only as “Woody’s kid,” Woody being Woody Guthrie, the politically conscious troubadour of the Depression and Dust Bowl. Over the course of the weekend, Arlo performed his song three times to increasingly large and appreciative crowds, closing the festival with a group sing-along that included every folkie from Judy Collins to Joan Baez. “The next day I started getting the phone calls from all the record companies and the execs and stuff,” Guthrie recalled, “and we recorded “Alice’s Restaurant” in a studio in New York City with a live audience. One take. Spent $6,400 to make that record. It became fairly popular.”4 Ranging from a gentle satire of small-town America to powerful criticism of a national policy that held a littering conviction to be worse than bombing civilians in an immoral war, “Alice’s Restaurant” established Guthrie as both an entertainer and a partisan who voiced the soul of his hippie generation just as his father had spoken for the disenfranchised thirty years earlier. The “Alice” of restaurant fame is Alice Brock, who met her husband, Ray, an architect and builder, when they worked at the Stockbridge School. In 1964 the Brocks took over the Trinity Church on Van Deusenville Road in Great Barrington and made it their home. Alice’s actual restaurant—one of several that she ran over the years, all of them successful—was at 40 Main Street in nearby Stockbridge and truly is, as the song says, “around the back, ’bout a half a mile from the railroad track.”5 She and Ray divorced a year later.6 The restaurant is now called Theresa’s Stockbridge Cafe. When he listened to the album in his Stockbridge home, Penn, who was already familiar with the local story, became aware that Hippie Sunset 183 he was witnessing the end of an era before the era itself was over. Excitedly, he called Hillard Elkins, with whom he had just worked on Golden Boy, and played it for him, enthusing to the energetic producer, “I’m going to make this movie.” “And I said,” recalls Elkins, continuing the story, ‘You’re right; that’ll make a great picture.’ He said, ‘Would you produce it?’ I said, ‘Arthur, I’d love to produce it...