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FILM COMMENT DOUBLE FEATURE Wednesday, September 1 Dusty and Sweets McGee Screening at 6:30 American Hot Wax Screening at 9:15 Floyd Mutrux in conversation with filmmaker and critic Thom Andersen! Film Comment presents two key films by an unsung hero of the New American Cinema of the Seventies. Dusty and Sweets McGee (1971) is an ensemble depiction of heroin addicts on the streets of Los Angeles. American Hot Wax (1978) recounts the career of controversial 1950s D.J. Alan Freed, who introduced “the Devil’s music” to the airwaves. With Jerry Lee Lewis and Jay Leno in supporting roles. After the 6:30pm screening of Dusty and Sweets McGee, Mutrux will discuss his use of the landscape and locales of Los Angeles and the place pop music occupies in his work with Andersen, director of the acclaimed essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself. Read Happy Daze, by Thom Andersen, from the March/April 2010 issue of Film Comment. Happy Daze: Dusty and Sweets McGee’s lyrical portrait of junkie culture remains unmatched By Thom Andersen, from Film Comment, March/April 2010. Of all the anomalous movies released by the major Hollywood studios during the Seventies, the strangest is Dusty and Sweets McGee. The directorial debut of Floyd Mutrux, it was released by Warner Bros. in July 1971 and then quickly withdrawn. It has screened very seldom since. So it’s more a legend than a cult film. Now a DVD of it has been released by Warner Archive without any fanfare, and finally it can be seen and appreciated. The film is a partly fictional, partly documentary portrait of some young people living in Los Angeles who have tuned out, turned out, and dropped out of the society around them. Most of them are junkies playing themselves, but there are also some dealers (played by actors, among them the cinematographer William A. Fraker and Billy Gray as a street dealer named City Life), and a male hustler. Dusty and Sweets McGee is the least histrionic movie about heroin addicts ever made in the U.S. Nothing dramatic happens until the last few minutes of the film, then quickly there’s a heist, a bust, and a death by overdose. For the first 80 minutes, there are monologues (some humorous and some horrific), languorous scenes of shooting up, scenes of everyday life (mostly petty arguments, buying and selling, spinning yarns), and the most beautiful and economical montages of driving in Los Angeles ever filmed. Fortunately, the radio is on, tuned to Russ Knight, aka “The Weird Beard,” at KLIS, AM 1190. There’s some great music, and a commercial jingle for the Ford Falcon Futura that would have been annoying then but now just sounds quaint. There’s also some music I’m not crazy about, but that was the fun of radio. We hear enough of the Weird Beard to be reminded that back then radio sold insanity—or used an elaborately staged insanity to sell itself. Thomas Pynchon must have been listening carefully. The smog is in full force, and the boulevard is as ugly as the San Fernando Valley street Boris Karloff complains about in Targets, but I’d take it back anytime. Karloff watched this passing cityscape from the backseat of a limo crawling along at 20 mph, but this architecture requires a speed of 40 to be appreciated. In a few minutes, the whole argument of Learning from Las Vegas is implied and illustrated. If you’ve seen this movie, you don’t have to read the book. Somehow the “real people,” as the introductory titles designate them, seem to end up in a fiction, and the actors in a documentary. Gray, a brilliant actor who never overcame his teenage stardom as Bud on the long-running sitcom Father Knows Best, delivers a monologue about his earlier life in Texas that may be a well-crafted actorly tour de force, but he allows Bobby Graham, a non-actor who appears as his sidekick, to steal most of their scenes, and his monologue is overshadowed by the free-form reminiscences of Clifton “Tip” Fredell, a vato from East Los, the oldest of the junkies and the only one blessed with self-awareness and a wealth of memories. These memories and the sites that reawaken them are precious to him: the schoolyard, the streets and alleys of his old neighborhood, even the lock-up in the old Hall of Justice at Broadway and Temple St. where “a good L.A. dope fiend spends half his life,” where he wished he could flush himself down the toilet and “end up in Long Beach.” The male street hustler Kit Ryder, also a non-actor, comes pretty close to bad acting. His speeches seem scripted in his head beforehand. He addresses himself directly to the audience behind the camera, self-consciously trying to shock us with a frank account of his sex life. “You probably wouldn’t like it at all,” he assures us, and then he adds, “It’s not all of what I’m about, and that doesn’t matter because it’s none of your business.” But he has his moments, and his presence helps to hold the film together. In the end, he sets up the dealer played by Fraker to be robbed by Tip and his buddy Arnie; City Life sets up Dusty and Sweets McGee (called Mitch and Beverly until the end titles) for a bust by the LAPD; and a teenage addict named Larry dies of an overdose with his 15-year-old girlfriend, Pam, by his side. Dusty and Sweets are no more important than any of the other people in the film. After just one viewing, I remembered them all vividly. They are all so young and beautiful it breaks your heart. They are stuck in the daily ruts we all face, only more so. Tip must fake an epileptic seizure so that his partner can steal groceries. Beverly and Mitch must race around town to score their drugs, then return to their modest room at the Studio City Motel to shoot up and bicker. Beverly gets her fix, sprawls on the bed, and asks Mitch, “Do you know where my crossword book is?” Another addict, Nancy Wheeler, finds herself both horrified and exhilarated by the ruthlessness she discovers in herself when she turns to street dealing—a feeling I shared when I was driving a taxicab in the early Seventies. As an elegy to wasted youth, Dusty and Sweets McGee is irresistible. We weren’t all heroin addicts, but we all more or less wasted our youth—and I know it’s not any easier for young people today. It’s a cliché, but American movies really were better then. Movies about junkies and drug dealers have gotten a lot flashier in the years since, but they haven’t been able to recapture Dusty and Sweets McGee’s lyricism, its sense of wonder, or its humor. Recent movies about junkies and tweakers are just standard thrillers with bizarre plot twists that can be justified by the irrationality of the drug-addled characters. Is Dusty and Sweets McGee a great film? I don’t know. But it’s a film that compels you to love it or hate it. I love it, and I love the people who open a bit of their lives to us. It’s the film everyone has been trying to make ever since: free, fragmentary, bursting with life. A lot of people hated it when it came out briefly in 1971, and they had their reasons. It romanticized drug use, and it made it boring. These critics didn’t want a movie about “everyday dope fiends,” as Tip calls them, that renders a stickup of a big-time drug dealer with the same dramatic intensity as a trip to Pink’s hot-dog stand but portrays shooting up as a passage “into the mystic,” thanks to the Van Morrison song that closes with the line “too late to stop now.” What happened to Floyd Mutrux? Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was able to realize more than one good film, although he did fall victim to changing Hollywood fashions. He directed two more near-great films in the Seventies: Aloha, Bobby and Rose (75), which applies the innovations of Dusty and Sweets McGee to a couple-on-the-run film, a contemporary take on They Live by Night; and American Hot Wax (78), an unconventional biopic that condenses the career of Alan Freed into a few frantic days and portrays him as a genial animateur nurturing rock ’n’ roll as a democratic, communitarian folk art. There followed two films about young people in Los Angeles during the summer of 1965, a time he regards as the end of an era: The Hollywood Knights (80) and There Goes My Baby (94), which got dumped when Orion went bankrupt. He sold a few scripts that would have been better movies if he’d directed them, although they secured his place as the premier film historian of Los Angeles. He is working today with undiminished vigor, but in the theater. He directed and co-wrote, with Colin Escott, another utopian vision of rock ’n’ roll, Baby, It’s You!, the story of the Shirelles and Florence Greenberg, the New Jersey housewife who founded Scepter Records to promote their music. It’s the best rock musical, on stage or screen, that I’ve seen. It premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse in November 2009. With luck, it will be in New York soon. Thom Andersen teaches film and video composition at the California Institute of the Arts.

SEE BOTH AND SAVE! Double Feature Package only $20! $14 Seniors/Students $12 Members Buy now >> Single Screening Tickets $12 General Public $9 Students $8 Seniors $7 Members Dusty and Sweets McGee Wed Sep 1: 6:30 Buy now >> American Hot Wax Wed Sep 1: 9:15 Buy now >> Tickets and packages are also on sale at the Walter Reade Theater's box office. VISITOR INFO >> Subscribe to Film Comment Magazine