The Monkees' 'Head' trip
The made-for-TV musical group's surrealistic 1968 film, penned by Jack Nicholson, got no love at the box office, but American Cinematheque has resurrected it.
Forty years ago, the Monkees' only feature film, "Head," hit theaters -- and people have been scratching their heads ever since.
Though far from a masterpiece like the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" from 1964, the film, starring Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and Michael Nesmith, is a surreal time capsule -- a psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness blast from the past. It's as if Jean Cocteau had consumed lots of LSD and decided to make a rock movie. Only its true history is a lot trippier, considering that Jack Nicholson wrote the script and a motley crew of the era's icons appears in the film.
On Wednesday, the American Cinematheque's '60s-centric "Mods and Rockers" series will present a 40th anniversary screening of "Head," featuring Tork and Jones, plus other cast and crew members, in person.
When "Head" was released theatrically in November 1968, the Monkees could not have been less hip, admits Martin Lewis, the "Mods and Rockers" producer who's hosting the event.
"With the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the riots in Chicago, Paris and London, everything was very serious," Lewis says of the time. "Suddenly, though it had only been two years since the Monkees were created, it seemed like 20 years."
The Emmy Award-winning NBC sitcom "The Monkees," which followed the zany adventures of a struggling band in Los Angeles, had been canceled earlier that year.
Though the group had scored numerous hits, including "Last Train to Clarksville," "Daydream Believer" and "I'm a Believer," their teeny-bopper fans were no longer buying their records. The counterculture was thriving. People were turning on and tuning in. Hendrix, Joplin and the Who were zooming up the charts.
So "Head" was a major bomb. The film had critics perplexed. Teeny-boppers didn't understand it, and those who considered themselves remotely hip wouldn't have been caught dead going to a movie with the "Prefab Four," as the Monkees were mockingly called
Tork doesn't necessarily think the film failed because the Monkees were passé.
"The TV show had this huge ad campaign, and everybody went for all the hype," says Tork. "The 'Head' campaign was designed to be Postmodernist, and the commercials were off-putting. The hip thought it was going to be another bubble-gum movie, and they didn't want to see it. And the bubble-gum kids thought it was going to be a freak-out movie, and they didn't want to see it. I think if the movie had been thoroughly promoted in an appropriate way, it would have done much better."
