When is film art? The question might be better phrased as "When is

ANYTHING art"? But I've specifically pondered this film-as-art

quandary. It's kept me up at nights, leaving me wide awake at

daybreak, munching Xanax and counting sheep, masturbating furiously,

draining sour mash whiskey bottles, red-eyed and sleep-deprived.

It's a damnable question that has served to ruin my life and forced

me to become a cross-addicted, cirrhotic, obsessed aesthete with skid

marks on my dick. Perhaps writing about it here will allow me a nod-

off and a handful of deep winks.

When I was a budding teenaged bohemian back in the 1960s (cue Jimi's

"Star Spangled Banner" here), film was -- along with music and drugs --

one of my primary forms of consciousness expansion. We'd ceased to

even utter the phrase "go to the movies" because it demeaned the

experience. We loved FILM. F-I-L-M! "Movies" meant Irwin Allen

disaster flicks and Julie Andrews musicals. We were into Performance

and Walkabout and Don't Look Now (the latter three by my hero,

director Nicolas Roeg) or any cinema in a language other than English

or underground shorts by Kenneth Anger and underground epics by

Jodorowsky. We wanted messages and complexity and contradiction and,

most importantly, originality. We didn't care who the stars were.

We learned through the jungle drums of the underground press what the

heavy ones were, the must-sees whose power was not reflected in the

Variety box office charts, but by the number of fellow hippies

smoking dope in the theater. Grass and psychedelics were synergistic

with the thinking-freak's cinematic adventure. Virtually every

friend of mine had seen Kubrick's 2001 on acid. It was a rite-of-

passage, like toilet training or crossing the street without the hand

of one's mother.

As chronicled in Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the

lunatics were running the Hollywood asylum of the '60s and early

'70s. The noun "auteur" was actually bestowed on American filmmakers

like Robert Downey Sr. (the father of Junior), Hal Ashby, Arthur

Penn, Jerry Schatzberg, Paul Mazursky, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin

Scorsese and the great Kubrick. For my taste, the finest film of the

era was 1969's Midnight Cowboy, directed by John Schlesinger, a Brit

working in the U.S. The buddy story of male hustler Joe Buck and

street grifter Ratso Rizzo was the ultimate example of anti-heroicism

and we were all anti-heroes. We recognized that life is not a

Hollywood movie in which the leading man gets the dame and all is

wrapped up neatly with a bow on top. We saw that "decent" men gave

us Vietnam and war crimes and that those in the lower rungs of the

class system often embodied real decency, potentially more so than

the clean stereotypes Hollywood had previously foisted on the marks.

These epiphanies were not the result of mere agit-prop by the

filmmakers. They experimented, engaged in flashbacks and dreams,

broke the fourth wall. THEY DID NOT FOLLOW THE RULES. All great art

is created by artists who break the rules and allow their imagination

free reign.

Then one day we woke up: Reagan was president and films were movies

again. There are exceptions (the fab Coen Brothers), but even most

of the exceptions lack the ferocity and vision of a Roeg. Spielberg

and Lucas spewed out childish and manipulative crap for a dumbed-down

and subdued nation. What had been a B-movie in terms of story was

now the blockbuster. It was morning in America again and we were in

mourning. As for Hollywood, there are many reasons for this descent

into mediocrity. Beyond the country turning hard-right, accountants

and agents had replaced eccentric, dope-addled businessmen who, while

not exactly Abbie Hoffmans, were nonetheless willing to take risks.

Again, all great artists take risks.

Jean-Luc Godard once said, "The politics of a film is the budget of a

film." I worked on-set as a music supervisor for Hollywood movies

and saw the obscene millions spent on screenplays written by dullards

and vetted by committees of accountants whose bottom line was the

bottom line of profit. Experimentation, playfulness, risk-taking,

all got in the way of appealing to the largest possible audience.

I've also wasted much of my life writing screenplays, only to be told

"flashbacks are so '60s" and asked "why do we care about the leading

man?" because I'd crafted my characters to have layers and to live in

the real world of ambivalence and shades of morality.

Where the lunatics once ran the asylum, the bureaucrats were now back

in control.

To paraphrase something Coppola noted years ago, the great hope of

film-as-art remains with a fourteen-year old girl holding a cheap

digital video camera. She won't have to answer to accountants and

her personal vision will be available for download on the Internet.

The artist will prevail.

When is film art? When artists -- not compromised and spineless

yuppies -- make films. They're out there, but chances are you won't

find them if you're sitting through twenty-three coming attractions

and eleven commercials.

I think the skid marks are starting to heal.

A truncated version of this essay ran in the April issue of Artillery magazine.