Hurry Tomorrow: Errata in a Time of Digital Access

[See article in issue 17.1]

This is not an ordinary errata note. Most announcements of printing or publishing error in academic journals state only the correction, and most of them appear within a few issues of the original error. The present and past editors of Literature and Medicine learned of the following errors more than thirteen years after publication. Moreover, notification of the error came not from another literary scholar but from Richard Cohen, the individual whose work was the subject under discussion.

In Spring 1998, Literature and Medicine published a special issue on film, Moving Pictures, edited by the late Jo Banks, which contained the article “From Exploitation to Self-Reflection: Representing Persons with Psychiatric Disabilities in Documentary Film” by Peter Stastny. As Stastny traces the movement of documenting mental illness from the days of absolute, annihilating objectification of patients in films of “utter exploitation” to films that offer “familial, personal, and self-reflexive relationships,”¹ he includes a one-paragraph discussion of Hurry Tomorrow, a documentary exposing terrible treatment of mental patients in California, which filmmaker Richard Cohen filmed in the summer of 1974 at Metropolitan State Hospital in Los Angeles, California. Two errors of fact appear in Stastny’s paragraph.

Stastny dates the film’s release as 1987. The film was actually released in 1975. Stastny, in a personal correspondence with the publisher of this journal says that he intended the 1987 date to refer to the date he saw the film, not to its release date, but this is not clear in the article. The accurate date is important because California’s then-governor Jerry Brown and others, after seeing the film, made deliberate use of it in attempting to bring about significant changes in the care of mental patients in California’s state institutions, changes that came slowly, but eventually affected thousands of patients and caregivers in positive ways. The changes Brown proposed, the film’s role in them, and the film itself generated considerable controversy, both in California and nationwide.² Documents generated for or cached within the Internet report that by 1980 Hurry Tomorrow had gained critical acclaim internationally and much respect in the documentary film community. In the preface to an in-depth interview with Cohen in his 1980 book, The Documentary Conscience: A Casebook in Film Making, Alan Rosenthal states that Hurry Tomorrow “is the most important film on hospital life to emerge in the last ten years and goes way beyond Titicut Follies or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in its indictment of mental hospital conditions.”³ Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Linda Gross describes Hurry Tomorrow as “a crucifying indictment of ward conditions, drug companies and the violations of present laws. The film is an act of courage and a warning about mind control, told with compassion and rage.”⁴

Stastny goes on to state that Cohen “obtained access to a hospital ward where he once stayed as a patient, certainly a daring feat that brings a unique perspective to his undertaking.”⁵ This statement is also in error. Cohen has never been a patient in the Metropolitan State Hospital or any other mental institution.

Internet search engines in 2012 have allowed us to locate information about Hurry Tomorrow and to check the facts that Stastny inadvertently misrepresented in 1998, when those search engines were not available and fact checking was a far more arduous undertaking. Although we are not advocating internet search engines as one’s only research tools, using them to elaborate on these particular errors demonstrates how much more and how much easier access we now have to a wealth of information about this film that was being self-distributed in 1987, the year mistakenly given as the release date, and in 1998, when Literature and Medicine published the article. Nor are we arguing either that error in scholarship is less likely today than over a decade ago or that error in the pre- or early-Internet days is more excusable. Nor are we opening the door to correcting every missed page number...