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.   

   

The Coldest Warrior by Paul Vidich

This is a CIA spy genre novel which steals its plot from the Frank Olson “fell or jumped” story. 

The reader coming to this because of interest in the Olson story might be better off just reading some other account of it. But if they want a heavy dosage of a hero's journey spy story along with pieces of Olson, then maybe read this. The Coldest Warrior doesn’t really work for me because I’m no longer interested in spy novels and that is the book’s main function. The conclusion was quite dramatic in a cinema spy story sort of way. Maybe some filmmaker has already grabbed this one. It has a nice heroic male lead. Righteous story.

This is a story people like to exploit or at least hope to profit from. 

It’s the same story as the Netflix Errol Morris documentary series Wormwood. 

Wormwood was frustrating because it took 6 hours to tell a story. The story ends up getting lost in the details and the reenactments. Six episodes!?! Errol Morris probably wanted to get the word out, but probably didn’t mind the hefty paycheck for a production on that level. 

Fell or jumped?

Tossed.

It’s not a spoiler of this novel. 

Murdered and tossed out the window. Then covered up for decades. 

But the story is about one spy guy trying to find out what other spies were involved with this. 

That’s the story, the mystery plot not to be revealed here. It doesn’t really matter that the Olson character was murdered because he was upset with the USA using biological and chemical weapons in Korea. Perhaps having this as a minor detail that is overshadowed by the main plot of the novel trivializes it as just part of the set for this play story. It might have even helped if it had spelled out exactly why using these things in Korea was so bad.

LSD is a missed opportunity. It is not explored at all. At least it is not to blame for anything. Maybe it makes one more empathetic for a time. Maybe that is part of what happened with Olson. He tripped and saw the error of the path he was following. Some people have that reaction to LSD, don’t they? Well, this is not the novel to discuss all that.

At any rate the book was not my cup of cheap entertainment brewed from something once living into a rather standard manly adventure saga.