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Why so little interest/nostalgia in the Hippie era?

posted 5 years ago by hotjam2 (60)
31 replies | jump to latest

unless indirectly shown at it's worst with the Manson murders in this film, there's been almost no major movies made on the Hippie era/the 50th anniversary of Woodstock(August 69) came & went with little fanfare. You would think it be a fascinating subject with other big concerts like Monterey Pop & Altamont festivals as well as Height Ashbury/Greenwood Village lifestyles to go along with the mass anti war protests/counter cultural. Yet so few films have been made about them or just swept under the rug.

I was a teen growing in up more in the 1970's and you could see some aspects like the long hair & late 60's born, rock bands still prevalent. But then entertainment wise, all of a sudden we were seeing hit movies & Tv shows like American Graffiti & Happy Days(both pre Beattles days) take over in popularity/nostalgia
And too this day, almost no interest(or big hits) on the late 60's era other than indirectly like Forrest Gump or the Vietnam movies or this current film

[–] President4Life (282) 5 years ago

There's a lot of documentaries about the '60s, etc . . and some miniseries on NBC about the era, but I kind of agree with you that there's not a ton of mainstream Hollywood movies about that time period being made, even though it's kind of ground zero for where American culture has gone the past 50 years..

I'd love to see it, personally. I was born in the '80s, but I love a lot of the music from that era and the "New Hollywood" movies are amongst my favorite.

I'm still mad Hollywood hasn't given my man Hendrix a decent bio yet. Jim Morrison got one.

[–] Redsfan001 (6158) 5 years ago

Two words...business sense

'Happy Days'was shown in the 1970s, young people unfamiliar with the time the 50's would watch it...along with the older generations who were! You get two demographics watching the show! A huge TV hit!

It is same reason the 1980s are hot today..Gen xers and their kids will watch it.

There is something called a 'nostalgia window'.. once a parents kids are grown and left the house...the window to that age (parents teen years) is closed.

'The Lone Ranger' was a flop partly because it passed the window.

The success of "American Grifitti" in the early 1970s however, woke up the studios to the idea of getting two age groups for the price of one.

[–] hotjam2 (60) 5 years ago

don't think an "nostalgia window" ever came for the hippie era. At first, the 60's were swept under the rug as perhaps to painfull of an era to try & remember, but then late 70's & on, plenty of Vietnam & Civil Rights movies came out.

One of the biggest counterpoints. Joan Baez & her band played an anti Reagen song called Truck Driving Man(wil lyrics like "he's head of the Klu Kax Klan"), yet Reagen went on to win his elections by big landslides. It's like everything the hippie generation stood for' love, peace anti-corporation went down the drain

[–] Redsfan001 (6158) 5 years ago

[deleted]

[–] Satan2016 (25572) 5 years ago

Had to look that up! The song was about a DJ, not Reagan. Wikipedia: Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde

Another composition recorded during the October 1968 sessions was the McGuinn and Gram Parsons penned "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man".[4][16] The song had been written by the pair in London in May 1968, before Parsons' departure from the band, and was inspired by the hostility shown towards the Byrds by legendary Nashville DJ Ralph Emery when they appeared on his WSM radio program.[4][8] The song's barbed lyric contains a volley of Redneck stereotypes, set to a classic country 3/4 time signature and begins with the couplet, "He's a drug store truck drivin' man/He's the head of the Ku Klux Klan."[26][27] It should be noted, however, that Emery was not, in fact, a Klansman.[4] The song was subsequently performed by Joan Baez at the Woodstock Festival in 1969 and dedicated to the then-governor of California, Ronald Reagan.[8] Baez's performance of the song also appeared on the Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More album.[28]

[–] Redsfan001 (6158) 5 years ago

Sorry I misread your post. Yes it is odd that the nostalgia window for the 1960s was passed up. 1980s would be prime time for it...

I blame the success of Miami Vice! That seems to have set the trend for the decade.

Or maybe all attempts of Hollywood to captialise on the 1960s in the 1980s would seem like 'selling out'...which would go against what the hippie movement was all about.

Also...Joan Biaz? I'm a Gen xer and I have never met a person my age that was a fan. Her sound was such a product of her era. If there ever was a decade that had a anti Biaz vibe...it would be the 80's.

[–] MovieManCin2 (26342) 5 years ago

That's simple. They didn't want to concentrate on those "damn dirty hippies"!

😎

[–] PrimeMinisterX (8757) 5 years ago

Just speaking for myself (born in '81), the hippie era is just not that interesting. It actually comes across as a grungy, somewhat distasteful era in American history.

Whereas earlier time periods, like the turn of the century or the roaring 20s, can easily capture my imagination and make me want to jump in a time machine, the hippie era is incapable of romanticization. I am simply not interested.

[–] BuckSwope (3511) 5 years ago

The 20s was just as if not more sleazy than the hippie era, people just like to romanticize it.

[–] Darren (1345) 5 years ago

Exactly (though I was actually born in the hippie era -- 1968). Right now, and for the last several years, the nostalgia seems to be for the early 1960s rather than the late; for the Kennedy era. "Mad Men" picked up on this. It's a lot more cool and stylish-looking an era to people today, I think. People looked better; clothing and hairstyles looked sharper; the mid-century art and furniture style look better.

Yeah, I think the hippie era is rather distasteful, and I think it comes across that way in this film. I grant you, Tarantino is showing you the Manson family who weren't exactly typical of hippies, but still had a lot of behaviors in common with them -- the drugs, the 1960s counterculture, and a grungy, dingy, frankly grubby lifestyle. We see hippie girls looting garbage, and living on the Spahn ranch, but letting it turn into a run-down, disgusting, filthy, rat-infested shithole. Throughout my whole life, even when I was a little kid, and there were still some hippies around, I never once saw the appeal of the hippie lifestyle, and I feel no nostalgia whatever for the 1960s counterculture (though I do love a lot of the music that came out of that era).

[–] PrimeMinisterX (8757) 5 years ago

Yeah, I'm with that 100%.

I think that when a lot of people think of the early 60s, they think of a time that was stylish and culturally interesting, but that also was still holding onto a lot of the moral fortitude that a lot of people associate with the 1950s. This was the "Right Stuff" era that laid the groundwork for getting us to the moon and strikes many people as a version of America that is to be lauded and looked back on with pride.

The late 60s and basically the entire 70s, on the other hand, seems like a bad dream -- dirty, crime-ridden, economically-depressed and morally on a downward slide.

[–] Knish (1721) 5 years ago

Because most people hate hippies.

[–] BuckSwope (3511) 5 years ago

Because hippies grew up to be Gordan Gecko wannabe assholes. They would rather forget the hippie error.

[–] necramonium (224) 5 years ago

The Altamont Free Concert incidents left a big nasty stain on the hippie culture, it showed the drugged insanity of the movement. From the Altamont Free Concert wiki: While Woodstock represented "peace and love", Altamont came to be viewed as the end of the hippie era and the de facto conclusion of late-1960s American youth culture: "Altamont became, whether fairly or not, a symbol for the death of the Woodstock Nation."

[–] BuckSwope (3511) 5 years ago

Was that when the Angels did security?

[–] necramonium (224) 5 years ago

Yes, 4 people died at that concert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Free_Concert

[–] BuckSwope (3511) 5 years ago

Doesn't take a genius to know hiring the Hell's Angel to do security was a bad idea.

[–] necramonium (224) 5 years ago

Oddly enough they had been used many times as security in the music world back than, even still in the 70's, it's ironic how they were hired to prevent rape and murder but caused half it it them self eventually

[–] BuckSwope (3511) 5 years ago

There were a lot of mistakes made. The guy that was stabbed deserved it. The stage was too low. The Angels were piss drunk. The Dead were smart to get the hell out of there.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I was alive and young in 68-69 and I recall a lot of us hanging out and wondering if the hippies would be the way those years were perceived decades from then. If so, we said, it would be a real narrow and shallow view of the period. SOME people dressed and talked like them, but not everybody. For instance, young Hispanic youths of the time that I knew wore white crew neck tee-shirts(that looked like undershirts) and buzz haircuts. Long hair did kick in for young people, the hippies did drive that trend, but not the hippie lifestyle and vernacular.

In some ways, the TV of that time -- Laugh-In, the Smothers Brothers, etc -- "pushed" a hippie look that was more on TV than in real life. Nehru jackets were popular for about two months thanks to Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis wearing them, then ...over.

[–] BuckSwope (3511) 5 years ago

Same as it ever was. I tell people I'm from N.C. and they assume I'm a stupid redneck shit-kicker with 4 teeth, all in the back, lol.

The media plays a very big role in this. Good to hear from someone from the era.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Thank you

[–] BuckSwope (3511) 5 years ago

You are very welcome.

[–] bohemianroxie (2478) 5 years ago

I've always been fascinated with the 60's and a little sad I wasn't born a little earlier so I could participate in it.

People seem to want to concentrate on the negative things like Manson or Altamont or Kent State but it was a real game changer in so many ways..Things like sexism, racism and homophobia really did exist in those days and there was a major upheaval both culturally and politically in turning these things around ..
Everything that had been tradition was reexamined and redefined in sometimes extreme ways (something to consider in our current polarized environment is that some of it didn't work and was eventually rejected)..

And all the attention to youth and teenagers angst, interest and taste really never existed until the 60's..Their elevation evolved from the 60's...as did everything and everyone that had been suppressed or just background noise..The 60's were an important time in our history.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

There was indeed a major upheaval..

Here's an example I remember.

The local newspaper had a "Women's Section" devoted to photographs and stories about married women at various charity events, always identified by their HUSBANDS names, i.e. "Pictured: Mrs. John Smith, Mrs. Henry Jones, Mrs. Sam Brown." That had to go.

"Black power" was asserting itself in a "dangerous, threatening way"(the Black Panthers) after years of a certain expected subservience.

The gay community had their "Stonewall" event in NYC.

But I would also contend that a big change in America in the sixties came with: the movies. It took the entire decade for movies to "slowly push the envelope" on sex and violence and profanity, but in late 1968 came the new MPAA code with "X" and "R" ratings to allow American movies to be marketed to adults, without kids. En route: Psycho and The Apartment(1960); Breakfast at Tiffany's(1961); The Manchurian Candidate(1962) Dr. Strangelove(1964), Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate (1967); Rosemary's Baby(1968.)

The hippies got their own movie in 1969, and it was a blockbuster on the cheap(Easy Rider) which reached a wider audience because its musical soundtrack sold out to all youth, it seemed.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

Funny thing though: with both the big changes and the horrors of the sixties(1968 was a big year for assassinations and riots) a lot of the 60's was quite fun, as pictured in those scenes in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood when Brad Pitt drives around LA listening to rock and roll on 93 KHJ. If you were young enough -- or smart enough -- to miss service in Vietnam as a young man, it was a very vibrant time to be alive. And women didn't have to worry about the draft at all. Change was in the air...and the sexual revolution took over, too.

But as I note a couple of posts above, the hippies were not everywhere present. A lot of people looked and dressed a lot like they do now. Blue jeans. Men in business suits elected to grow their hair longer(sideburns if possible) and to wear their lapels and ties wider, but that was about it.