Eons ago, in college, in the heyday of the most-updated version of CFY,K, I was obsessed with Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me. Obsessed. I wrote short stories based on Thomas Pynchon’s prologue. I started my own college novel based on its structure.1 I designed and sold a skateboard deck featuring cover art from the first edition.2 I read other books about the people involved. I became convinced that Bob Dylan basically copped his moving-target intellectual personality from Fariña.3 I was fascinated with the author’s biography. He published a debut novel to great reviews, and then died on the way home from the publishing party. By falling off a motorcycle! What could be cooler? Nothing!
At some point, I became aware of a movie4 adaptation. Which was important, because I kind of wanted to option the rights myself, and write a screenplay for it.5The movie, starring Barry Primus, was released in 1971, and, even then, it barely existed.
Later on, in another life, I spent a couple of years working at Vulcan Video, which specialized in cult, foreign, and classic films. If a movie existed, we almost certainly had it. But we didn’t have Been Down So Long, because it was never released on any sort of home video format. It wasn’t ever shown on late night TV. It wasn’t anywhere.
Every few years, I’d do a halfhearted search for the movie. Because while I wasn’t obsessed with it anymore, I still really like Been Down So Long. A group of us all read it back in the day.6 I have only good memories of it. It’s the kind of egotistical self aggrandizing, look how cool and young and attractive we are thing that young men read and try to write. But, like with Kerouac, if you grow out of the narcissism part, develop empathy, but retain the exuberance, then you’ve got something. So, somewhere in the back of my mind, I still wanted to see it.
I randomly searched for it the other day. And, holy shit, the whole thing’s on YouTube. Here it is:
Right off the bat, so many of my questions were answered. Why has this movie been unavailable forever? Because it is bad.
Out hero, Gnossos Pappadopoulis, is supposed to be, like, 21 or 22, I think. Maybe a little older. Maybe he’s a grad student. But he’s a college kid. In the movie, he’s played by Barry Primus, who was 33 or 34 at the time of filming, I think. That would be crazy to try today! But a 1971 33 is like a 2021 60. What might have been acceptable then7, even then would only have worked if the protagonist was a hilarious young maniac. In this movie, he’s a twisted old lecher pretending to be a hilarious young maniac, and the unknown supporting cast has a pretty tough time playing along.
So why post it here? Well, out of a sense of obligation to my Past Self, for one.8 But also because for maybe the first time in history, a YouTube comment has something interesting to offer!
The top comment, above, is from a producer on the movie. And he goes on, in further replies, to talk about filming locations, and what it was like dealing with Mimi Fariña.
Also I love that an 84 year-old man is out here on YouTube looking up the 50 year-old movie he made.
- Thankfully, I never finished it.
- I still have a few of these somewhere, in case anybody wants one.
- Bob Dylan was involved with Joan Baez, see. Richard married Joan’s younger sister Mimi. So they were in contact.
- I won’t say film
- That never happened either, because how does anybody go about securing the rights to anything? I was only ever half serious, anyway. Just another in a long line of hare-brained schemes.
- A micro-cult, like the one Pynchon describes being in with Fariña, centered around Oakley Hall’s Warlock.
- But certainly not now
- Much like that Greco post from the other day.