My Psychedelic Love Story (2020)

 

Directed by Errol Morris

Written by Joanna Harcourt-Smith

In this documentary an old woman tells a rambling, not altogether coherent story of her time as Timothy Leary's hot young rich babe during his rapid decline to eventually becoming a FBI stool pigeon. 

Along the way there are still images from back in the day with standard “psychedelic” filters over them.

There are some sound film clips of Joanna Harcourt-Smith speaking back then. Oddly her Euro speech accent seems noticeably less than it was last year whenever the interviews for this movie were shot.

She tells how she becomes aware of who Leary is rather late in his celebrity career. She says she was pregnant in the bathtub and heard the song Legend of a Mind, one of the less good songs by Moody Blues, the one that goes “Timothy Leary’s dead, No No No No he’s outside, looking in”. It’s about all the swell stuff that Timothy Leary can do for “you”. It is idiotic celebrity deification, something Leary exploited to his own glory. In the song LSD is not mentioned at all but there are descriptions of its effects, all attributed to what Timothy Leary, what he can do for “you”. The song might as well say that the local acid dealer down the street can do these things for “you”.  
At any rate she says in the movie that at that moment she knew it was her destiny to be with Timothy Leary. Since she was a rich young attractive “socialite” she was in the position to make this happen.

In her story she name-drops her way to Timothy Leary. She tells us of hanging out with Keith Richards in some European rich people sun spot and helping to arrange an idea in which the Rolling Stones were going to tour the USA in support of George McGovern in his 1972 presidential campaign. Then they go to DC but the campaign was so defeatist that they couldn’t take up the offer, or something like that. It’s kind of a murky story as are all the rest of her stories of her drugged out life 50 years ago.

So she meets Leary who is then on the lam in Switzerland zooming around in a canary yellow Porsche. She seems quite impressed with this cool daddy sports car.
Being at the idiotic height of his career he decides almost instantly, according to her, that they are in fact destined to be together. He flashes tarot cards which verify this.
They run around Europe eventually coming back to the USA. Leary goes back to prison and she wants to help him to get out. Enter here a guy who is one of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, despite this lofty name, they are the amoral LA surfer drug dealer gangster sector of the LSD distribution scene. (More of their story is in the more lucid documentary Orange Sunshine. By the way there is another documentary on the more wholesome and helpful characters involved with LSD, The Sunshine Makers <2015> about Tim Scully and Nickolas Sand, good guys who made damn good LSD for us.)

Anyway there are more murky stories about ripping off some guy for $10,000 in a phoney(?) drug deal in order to get money to spring Leary. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love guy also arranges for Joanna to help get out of jail by becoming an FBI informant which eventually happens.

The documentary is a reminder of what a narcissistic jerk Leary was or became in the course of acquiring celebrity power, interrupted by USA extreme drugs laws which were partly as result of Leary’s lust for attention and grandstanding. 
All this is recounted through Joanna Harcourt-Smith’s rambling storytelling in this messy documentary.

The Sunshine Makers is a much better movie about more intelligent people on a more wholesome mission to bring the general public the wondrous gift of LSD and the psychedelic experience. They actually helped rather them screwing up the whole thing like celebrity Leary did.   

   

Orange Sunshine (2016)

Orange Sunshine (2016)
Director/writer: William A. Kirkley

I guess 2016 was the year of the late 1960’s wave of psychedelics, LSD, documentaries as the participants are now in their 70s and coming to the end of their lives.
Actually one of the two main people in the better of the documentaries I have seen, The Sunshine Makers, died on April 24, 2017, four days ago as I write this.
So they are in the mood to talk about their unique lives and what they set out to do back then.

Unfortunately Orange Sunshine is not very good and where The Sunshine Makers talks to the men who actually made the LSD, this one focuses on “The Brotherhood of Eternal Love” who were more or less the smugglers and distributors and they are simply not as smart or nearly as interesting while also being somewhat pretentious. Where The Sunshine Makers feel more heroic, The Brotherhood gets off on the wrong foot from the outset and continue to make mistakes that help bring down the whole thing by their insistence and continued association with cannabis..

The movie is really rather breezy and frustrating. It mentions big events but doesn’t bother with details. Like at the very beginning. These guys, “John (Griggs) and some friends” want to try some LSD, but the LSD is expensive, “$35 to $50” a dose. They know some unnamed Hollywood producer who has some.  So they drive over with guns and rob the house. It doesn’t mention who’s house, if the people were home, or how they felt about having their acid stolen by these young thugs. We are simplifying presented with reenactment footage of a couple young guys riding in a car to somewhere and told that they get the acid and suddenly “had deep spiritual revelations”. OK, if you say so. I kind of think that is rather bad “Karma” to begin with. Although this event is glanced over in this movie, I think it is basically indicative of the type of people we are dealing with in this picture. At least this John Griggs guy who died some years ago and is therefore unavailable to be interviewed in the movie.  

John Griggs death is also something the movie did a terrible job in presenting. He took some other psychedelic drug with his wife Carol who is one of the main talking heads in the movie. But then something happened and he died. Why, of what? This movie doesn’t say. They just got him to the hospital and he died. Heart failure, attacked by spiritual beings from another dimension? They don’t say. His friend Michael (the other main talking head in the movie) says he took the same stuff later and didn’t die. Then he later takes 5 hits of orange sunshine and hangs out for the day with dead John’s spirit, OK if you say so. They decide to go forward with the brotherhood’s work.

Well, they get into trouble of course, partly because they are not so bright hippies and insist on international smuggling of cannabis product hashish. Cannabis is not a psychedelic. They should have stuck exclusively to the LSD which is not bulky and smelly as cannabis is and therefore a lot easier to move around.

There is a certain one sided pretension about these people with their hippie spirituality. As presented I just didn’t much like them. Wouldn’t want to have a beer, joint,  or trip with them. As that “regular guy” cliche goes.

I watched The Sunshine Makers before Orange Sunshine. Old hippie couple Michael and Carol the main “Brotherhood” interviewees are interviewed together in that movie as well. It was the first time I saw them as they sat there being interviewed and smoking a joint. I think that was to impress me with how cool they are. It had the opposite effect.
They also had children together. I would have liked to hear what the children had to say about their early lives with these Hippie parents often on the run with changed names and identities underground. But not a peep from the children, now adults of course, of their experience with their parents in “The Brotherhood”. (You can probably tell that I don’t think much of their pretensions name.)  

Anyway, the Brotherhood get all involved with Tim Leary and assist and finance his escape from prison with the aid of the Weather Underground. They claim they gave the Weather Underground $17.000 for this job. We don’t hear from former Weather Underground members, nothing. I think that it is important to note that Leary was never arrested for LSD. But a couple times for cannabis. Again this other substance, not a psychedelic but fellow traveler in the scene, gets people arrested, not much more useful and beneficial LSD.  

I have little doubt that I personally benefited from their LSD distributing operation. I had some very fine LSD the very first time (in April 1970 in southern Ohio) and into the early 1970s. Most likely the stuff Nick Sand and Tim Scully made that was distributed by networks like “The Brotherhood”.  Michael in the movie talks about the LSD The Brotherhood made. Well they didn’t. Chemists like Sand and Scully made it. And The Brotherhood's diversification into cannabis smuggling helped bring down the whole thing.    

Throughout the film is loaded with reenactment footage. It is all made to look “vintage” but we and not told during the movie that we are watching re-enactments, unless I missed that. They are well done but still unnecessary.

It’s an incomplete thrown together project without enough detail. Simply not good enough.