Skidoo - Poster of the Week

Poster of the Week!-- Timothy Leary: "I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He was much hipper than I was." I haven't seen Otto Preminger's Skidoo, but I certainly want to. It undoubtedly belongs in that small circle of films that's more talked about than seen (movies like Salo, Singapore Sling, Myra Breckinridge, and The Cremaster Cycle). I first heard about Skidoo years and years ago in the Medved Brothers' Golden Turkey Awards (a book, I must admit, that became a core of my film education when I was a teenager because of it's concentration on little known genre films and obscurities, but which holds little value today because of its snarky condescension and middlebrow elitism, which is much more value than I hold for brother Michael's role as moral arbiter nowadays). Of course, the Medveds trashed it, but the film intrigued me then, and it intrigues me now. In case you don't know about it, Skidoo was Preminger's paean to LSD. Preminger had experimented with LSD under the supervision of Timothy Leary in the mid 1960s, and came away thinking the world of it. Now, he wanted to make a film about it. But instead of some overly serious investigation of the lysergic experience (which was the norm back then, especially in rock music), he made his acid movie a wacky comedy which featured the talents of Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Mickey Rooney, Frankie Avalon, and Groucho Marx as a mob boss named "God". It's this odd melange of old school gin-soaked Hollywood hipsterism and 1968 psychedelia that gives Skidoo it's unique place in movie history, or, at least, in the history of drug cinema. Will it ever be released on DVD? Chances are, sadly enough, not anytime soon.

Some more Skidoo stuff: The Smoking Gun has some FBI memoranda about Skidoo, mainly concerning how the FBI was portrayed in the film (not very well, apparently); Kempa has an mp3 of Harry Nilsson singing the end credits from the film; here's the cover and liner notes by Laugh-In announcer Gary Owens of the soundtrack album; also, a piece by Paul Krassner about tripping with Groucho Marx. Groucho, an intensely curious man, wanted to see what was the big deal about acid. One of his revelations that afternoon involved his role as "God" in Skidoo: "I'm really getting quite a kick out of this notion of playing God like a dirty old man in Skidoo. You wanna know why? Do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?"

"Always?"

"If they're not, then it's a misuse of your power to make people laugh"

Then, after that exchange, Krassner reports, Groucho's eyes began to tear.

As always, click on the image on the left for a larger version (550K). And if anyone knows where I can get a decent looking copy of Skidoo cheap, let me know.