A Movable Scene, Distant Drummer Series

Duration: 12:00

Year Published: 1969

Creator: National Audio-Visual Center (NAVC)

Complete Record: Considers the use of hallucinogenic drugs by some of today's young people. Narrated by Robert Mitchum. Includes visits with hippies in San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York. Explores the drug scene in London, Europe, the Middle East, and the High Himalayas. After the film, a man talks about the film and interviews a employee of the Haight and Ashbury Clinic. Actor Robert Mitchum narrates a tale of the underbelly of the counterculture in 1968. Happy and hippie kids do a lot of drugs, from smoking weed to shooting speed and heroin. They're having a rousing and incoherently good time in the interviews. Not really meant to be a scare 'em straight film, this documentary travels the world of the late 1960's, this film is more a slice-of-life insight chronicling the hippie burnout lifestyle in depth from San Francisco to London to Rome, and beyond. There's also a lot of psychedelic music and light shows meant to set a mood. The point of the film? To promote the "orderly Protestant way of life", the part that the narrator explains, "This is what makes America great." To exemplify what life would be like without these Protestant values, they travel the world stating their case about the burn-out, anti-establishment slacker hippies of their generation.