EAT THE DOCUMENT Bob Dylan, H. Aik, D. A. Pennebaker (Unreleased)

EAT THE DOCUMENT was meant to be a television show. It has spaces for insertion of commercials and is exactly the required length, but is was rejected out of hand by the network.

Whitney Museum (N.Y.C.) Program for a two week showing of the film, November 30 — December 13, 1972

Eat the Document is the often promised, little seen semi-sequel to Don't Look Back. It has at least as much in common with the earlier movie as Freewheelin' does with Blonde On Blonde, but both movies have more to do with their musical equivalents than they do with each other.

In other words, I don't think Eat the Document is much of a follow-up. On its own, it stands strong, spooky as "Visions of Johanna" at 5 a.m., but is doesn't really match the promise of Don't Look Back.

Still, that's a little bit like wanting Blonde On Blonde to be as good as Highway 61. We are dealing with a mortal, after all.

The film was shot in 1966, but until a few months ago, no prints were made, and the track is still unmixed.

The footage was shot in Europe, during the first electric tour of Bob Dylan and the Band, by D.A. Pennebaker and H. Aik. Pennebaker, who edited DON'T LOOK BACK, made a first cut, but some felt this "documentary" version was of potential interest primarily to A.M.A. conventions.

While you're trying to figure out who wrote that last sentence, let's try to describe what goes on. It's not easy; when Dylan said he cut Eat the Document "fast on the eye .. . It's too fast for me," he meant it. It's a tough movie to look at, because a lot of the images are designed to threaten with barely restrained violence. It's the sort of violence British kids might have felt like inflicting on Dylan — if the scenes where they are interviewed are any indication — or that Dylan might have felt like inflicting on the world, if we are to read what is most obvious into his general demeanor.

And it is Dylan's general demeanor

that makes Eat the Document great to look at. If the original version of the movie presented Dylan as a doped-out genius, or something, it's just as well it's rarely seen (and only in private?). Dylan was .beyond that, even when he was immersed in it, and we'd rather see him swagger and glide around railroad cars, hotel rooms and stages. Rather see him sing. Rather watch the barbed-wire mouth take on victim after victim and rather watch him shut up, too.

That's what Eat the Document does; it brings live "66 music, and maniac Bob Dylan, to life. Surreal but true, maybe.

Instead of trying to recreate the ureal" event with a verite documentary approach, the editors looked for what each shot itself wanted to be. Conversations unheld, events untranspired. Some real music, some not. Murder, villainy, travel, slavery, and lust.

We hope a real movie. Perhaps even a comedy.

But Eat the Document isn't a real movie. It isn't even a real television show. It s better if you were picking up on Dylan as a champ, a cat who could teach you how to walk and talk it by example, in 1966, rather than seeing him as some other kind of enigma. It might even be a failure; lots of it is boring, even, but maybe, I think, the events were boring.

I just like seeing him jounce around, walking on the balls of his feet and talking out of the side of his mouth, and verbally abusing the world. Seeing the Band, with Robbie unlikely pinstriped and Danko beautiful, unreal in his handsomeness, and Garth Hudson looking like a renegade Rock Hudson, shorthaired and long-sideburned, no chin whiskers. Finding out Micky Johns was fat. Seeing that Richard Manuel hasn't changed, and neither's Albert Grossman.

Eat the Document ain't no feast, but it's a nice little midafternoon snack. If you feel ambivalent after you get the chance to see it, you'll probably be feeling just about what you were supposed to feel. Don't hold your breath for it to be released, but if it comes stumbling your way, don't hesitate.

Dave Marsh

PLEASE STAND BY Jack and Joanna Milton

I suppose many of us have had kind of a love-hate thing with David Peel over the last few years. Here's a guy with no apparent talent, a methed-up hustler kid from Queens who one day decided to be a hippie rock'n"roll star, and before you could say "The Pope Smokes Dope," he became one. He convinced two record companies, the yippie left, and John and Yoko that he's part of somebody's "counter-culture" elite, which says more than too much about record companies, John and Yoko and "the revolution."

You couldn't really condemn Peel though. What he had going for him was energy, street smarts, and an absolute tastelessness which made him something of a child of the times — like, "Psychedelic Baby Eats Thalidomide," which might have been a better title for his first feature film. You see, Peel's outrageousness has given him an access to media that many people could use better, and as the star of Please Stand By, he's the media freaks" media freak. The ads call him "The Robin Hood of Guerilla Television," and if that's the case, I'll stick with "My Little Margie."

Before the film started, the audience began making animal noises in the dark. Hoots, oinks, squeals, screeches, stomps and farts filled New York's crusty Elgin Theatre, turning the place into a spon-

taneous urban barnyard. It wasn't until I saw Peel in the lobby between reels that I realized who probably started the hog-calling event.

The opening shot is a visual collage of stills, from scenes like the conventions, Lester Maddox, network TV crews, cops, presidential limousines. David Peel is singing about "Amerika" on the soundtrack.

The fantasy that never really develops is how these heavy! dynamite! stoned! people take over a worldwide TV communications system to broadcast true messages of advanced consciousness to the world and elsewhere. Peel is wearing John Lennon dark glasses, a skull and crossbones t-shirt, and is playing with a slinky at one of their meetings. He says many groovy things, I'm sure, but I can't understand Peel's accent since I don't live on the lower east side.

So what we have is a movie about guerilla television. And like all TV shows, this one has commercials, visual anecdotes under the catchall ""The Airwaves Belong to the People" (pretty catchy, no?) whose symbol is a red fist imposed over a lightning bolt. These commercials were animated bits of zippie propaganda, full of orte-dimensional mantras like "To live the way you think — to become an outlaw," and "We Are What We Think Tomorrow Will Be."

Then there's a meeting of our social revolutionaries. A familiar looking young man with garbage-stains on his

fingers is saying "There are artistic criteria and political criteria for judging art. Good art is a blend of the two." That was A. J. Weberman speaking, and he should know. Right on, A. J.

It was an expensive movie to make,

A film-maker friend estimates a budget of about $50,000, considering its length ^ (very long) full-color, use of helicopter shots and all the rest. Of course, they saved money on the editing, since there couldn't have been any. There was no continuity to the story at all. There wasn't even the merest thread of a story for our friends to hang their egos'on, and I guess there didn't have to be. Peel knows he's always on stage, and since he and his friends are so outrageous, that makes interesting viewing in itself, right?

Well, it ain't. That's where Peel and his gang have been out-hipped, and that's why watching Please Stand By isn't only boring but insulting. It is a "stoned" movie, made by stoned people, and it comes out as forced and rigid as the Voice of America trying to explain the Watts riots.

What comes across to me is that these people are hung up on technology, dope and their own boredom.»They are, in fact, some of the squarest looking people I've ever seen cavort on a screen. They haven't learned what may well be one of the first youth culture lessons of the seventies, which is "everybody's in show biz," or its correlate, known as "so what." What a horny sluice of porn! This is one skin flick that really lives up to its hype. It's got graphic fucking, blowjobs, hand-jobs, dripping cunts, spurting dicks, big tits with erect nipples, every wank fantasy you ever entertained.

Wayne Robins

DEEP THROAT (Aquarius)

But will it give you the hots if you shell out the four or five bucks they're charging to view this schlocksterpiece? That's the question. And not me nor anybody else but you can answer that, because porn is a very personal experience. Most porn is corn; like when did you stop jerking off to Henry Miller and start laughing at him? Both for the effects he intended and the bozo he didn't realize he was?

Deep Throat resembles such prior hotcha classics as Tropic of Cancer in that it's very funny, while its sexiness, not to even mention sensuality, is entirely questionable. It didn't turn me on, not a bit; when it was over I wanted a hamburger more than anything else. I didn't see it with anybody I wanted to fuck, but what if I had? Would it have been aphrodisiacal? Would I have gobbled her right there in the third row? Or would I have just wanted to sit there and bong my wong, watching her for awhile, then the screen, then etc.?

When I was in high school, I used to take my girl to see Paul Newman movies, because I knew she had the hots for Paul Newman, and I was in hopes that I could cop some of Paul's riffs and that the movie would get her distracted enough that I could use "em later. She used to tell me about how he would put his hand on a girl's neck, just.below the earlobe with his thumb on her cheek and how sexy she thought that was; so when we went parking after the show I tried it out, as well as that arrogantly distant expression and little smile that were his trademarks. It didn't get me all

the way to where I wanted to go, but it helped.

There were no movies like Deep Throat showing on Main Street then, and if there had been my honey and I wouldn't have been old enough to get in anyway. But I really wonder if it would have made a difference. Because it was Paul Newman's style that turned her on and gave me my riffs, not some nine inch wong protracting in Cinerama. It's, people, in the subtleties of their own individual motions, that give you notions and get your rocks off, and maybe, the absence of people in Deep Throat is one reason it didn't jolt my volts. There was one groovy blonde nurse who hardly took off any . clothes, but she was only in a couple of scenes and she got to me more than anybody else in the

movie; I remember her better than the heroine, who is Candy gone beserk and the constant focus of attention. Must have been something about her (the nurse's) face.

On the other hand, part of the pleasure of porn and wank is that you don't have to deal with people, you can kick back and let your fantasies roll on. Was it the population count? If I had been all alone in the theatre with the film rolling, would I have whacked off? I don't think so, and I whack off every chance I get, I CREEM in my jeanz every time I see the new Oui on the stands.

But even when I got home I still didn't carry my memories of Deep Throat nor the also-ran called Snow Job that preceded it, to bed with me. I didn't whack a whit, I snoozed right out. Maybe it was a question of exposure: all porn is by definition heading or somebody is trying too hard and if pom's an effort for Chrissake then sex as a national pastime is doomed. Socio-

for the overload, and when you see 987 orgasms in a row in living color you gotta get a bit jaded. Also this movie showcased a weird convention I've noticed in other skin flicks: nobody ever comes in the cunt or mouth, no male that is, they always get handjobbed, blowjobbed, fucked and sucked and then fust when they're ready to come, sloop, out comes the dick.

They seem to feel they gotta show you that the guy's actually coming, film every last spurt. So you'll be reassured? What the fuck? It don't make sense to me, and it ain't no generation gap thing becuz after Deep Throat I asked the randy old geezer who functions in family as my uncle, and he was baffled too. It's pretty weird and enough to put you off because you can see that they psychoanalytic bluenoses said that porn would lead to a decrease in fucking and consequent deterioration of our status as a world power when the Commies outbred us. That's bullshit, porn is just nice to have arouhd for when you can't get fucked, but WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PORN LOSES ITS PUISSANCE? Assuming it ever had any in the first place, that is (bringing up the interesting and still unanswered question of how far porn would flourish if it was all free and legal and nobody gave a shit).

Which may be where we are right now. Maybe, too, you only get vicariously turned on by accident. Can you imagine the first porno TV talk shows, with stooges standing off-camera at the side of the stage flashing idiot Cards at the audience which read GET HORNY? Right. But at least they maybe won't have to flash the ones that say LAUGH anymore. Because Deep Throat, story of a girl who thinks she's frigid until her doctor discovers that her clit's actually in her throat, is a load of laffs and should be seen not only by every reader of Cosmopolitan Magazine, but the citizenry at large. It don't have much of a plot, and the box-office fee is outrageous, but I haven't seen a funnier flick this year and that includes Straw Dogs. Even if my uncle still sez Lili St. Cyr was better.

Lester Bangs

The King of Marvin Gardens — Bob Rafelson: A pretentious, heavy-handed follow-up to Rafelson's brilliant Five Easy Pieces, also starring Jack Nicholson, off for a reunion with what family he has left, a con-man brother holed up in Atlantic City. Overflowing with set pieces for their own sake, it's one of those films that lets detail pile up so relentlessly you really don't care what's behind it all. Yet there's something about the film that nags at my mind enough to make me consider going to see it again. How's that for an ambivalent reaction?