TIMOTHY LEARY'S DEAD (PG-13).
Director: Paul Davids
Stars:DOCUMENTARY
Running Time:80 minutes.
The Moody Blues were rather prescient with their
lyric "Timothy Leary's dead", from the song Legend
Of A Mind.
Timothy Leary was the counter culture hero, who in
the heady '60's, urged a generation to "turn on, tune
in and drop out." Through this fascinating but
unconventional documentary director Paul Davids
(co-writer of the tv movie Roswell) paints a warts and
all portrait of Leary, widely acknowledged as one of
the central figures of the '60's. Leary heartily
embraced new philosophies and technologies, and
even planned to commit suicide on the net, before he
eventually succumbed to inoperable prostate cancer in
1996. It was the way in which Leary faced his
imminent death, with a sense of optimism, that finally
gave Davids the opportunity to get this film made.
In intimate detail Davids explores Leary's influence
on a generation, and puts his life into perspective by
tracing the last year of his life as he prepared himself
for the inevitable. Davids uses in-depth interviews
with both associates and Leary himself, as well as
archival newsreel footage, to illustrate the life of this
pop culture guru who rose to prominence as an anti-
establishment figure in the era of drugs, hippies,
protest movements and Woodstock.
Davids follows Leary's controversial life and career,
from his early years at Harvard, through his
imprisonment for possession of marijuana, through to
his Millbrook estate commune, and on to the
Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco. This
informative and well-researched documentary
explores how Leary's ideas threatened the
establishment, and suggests that he was persecuted
for daring to express his ideas. In an ironic
counterpoint Davids points out the fate of many of
his detractors, such as Richard Nixon, who called him
"the most dangerous man alive", and G Gordon
Liddy, who all fell victim to scandals largely of their
own making.
There is even a rather graphic and shocking sequence
in which Leary is surgically decapitated so that his
brain can be cryogenically frozen and stored.
However, there are hints that this sequence was
merely staged for the cameras as a final cosmic joke
from one of the more controversial figures of the beat
era.