Revolution & Snacks:

A Review of Joshua Brown's

Brown Acid Fable

Altamont Now

The Onion/Decider Austin's Andy Gately previews this festival favorite before its SxSW homecoming...

Recipe for an Underground Film:

1. Adapt an acclaimed independent play

2. Secure obscure rock bands to do the soundtrack

3. Assemble an excellent young cast of relative unknowns

4. Add three parts guns to every one part actor

5. Sprinkle in allusions to conspiracy theories, pop culture and revolution, shoot it inside an underground missile silo, and serve

      Altamont Now has been screening and winning awards at the Atlanta, Arizona, Boston, Denver , Minneapolis, and Melbourne Underground Film Festivals, furthering it’s chances for cult status, if not financial success.  Of course, a hit underground film practically precludes any monetary gain, as director Joshua (von) Brown can attest: 

      “I always thought it would be cool to make an underground film that was kind of a cult thing, where very few people know about it and it gets passed around by word of mouth.  But only after making the film do I now understand the implications of that.  Very few people know about my film!  Is anybody out there?  This can get a little frustrating sometimes.  But perhaps now I got mad street cred.”

      If only landlords were sympathetic to the starving filmmaker’s plight. “Sorry, I don’t have rent this month; do you take street cred?”

      A man cannot live off cred alone, which is why films like this need more exposure, in the underground press and everywhere, to gain all involved recognition and more opportunities.  Brown has made an insightful and endlessly engaging film, and it deserves to be seen.  Equal parts art house, grind house, and rock ‘n’ roll, Altamont Now takes the subject of the counterculture itself and makes it not only accessible but smart and wickedly funny. 

      The film concerns one Richard Havoc (the terrific Daniel Louis Rivas), a rock musician who, it practically goes without saying, has problems with authority and delusions of grandeur (he was expelled from second grade for calling his math teacher a “fucking sellout”).  These soon manifest into a full-blown messianic complex, as he sees his teen idol status as a ticket to be a pied piper to wayward youths and lead them in a revolt against… well, it’d be shorter to list what he’s not rebelling against.  Punk rock, he seems to be cool with.  Punk rock and large-bore firearms. 

      When we meet Havoc, he is in the middle of a self-imposed exile along with a loyal band of fellow outsiders inside a former government missile silo, where a filmmaker from straight society has ventured at his own peril to make a documentary on them.  This “Hollywood Square,” as the Cult of the Kids dub him, is soon hipped to their plan to hold the country hostage with a nuclear warhead on the thirty-year anniversary of the infamous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, where they hired Hell’s Angels to handle security (what could go wrong?) and fatal violence resulted.  The temptation to be the stars of a big budget documentary proves too much for the anarchist gang, who despite their anti-media posturing swiftly begin whoring for the camera, which they know will reach far more people than their pirate TV broadcasts.  This film-within-a-film structure works as a reversal on the Rolling Stones doc Gimme Shelter, allowing the characters to comment on their own actions after the fact from a removed perspective.  Altamont Now is full of such narrative and visual experimentation, making creative use of stock footage and various other film stocks, and David Bucci’s script – which began life as a play in Austin, Texas at the Salvage Vanguard Theater on the east side – is literate and funny without telling you when to laugh.  This tricky tone is achieved thanks in no small part to the actors, whose performances are all winningly deadpan.  The majority of the humor comes from the disconnect between the young revolutionaries’ actions and their rhetoric, calling into question the state and validity of modern American dissidence.  Worth mentioning is the memorable soundtrack, provided by The Crack Pipes, Ex Models, Enduro (featuring Bucci on guitar), Awesome Color, X27, Finally Punk, and Big Bear. 

     Despite being jam packed with references to cinema and events of the 60s, and echoing other classics of the documentary and social satire genres (Waters’ Cecil B. Demented, Shear’s Wild in the Streets, the Maysles Bros’ Gimme Shelter, Corman’s Gas-s-s-s!), Altamont Now feels like very much it’s own unique film.  And with so much arcane countercultural knowledge in the dialogue and on-screen, the writer and director betray a certain affinity for the subject matter that they so expertly lampoon, which works to suggest that it takes something of an insider to best send up a movement.  And just remember, as one character chastises another for shooting up a vending machine, “You can’t be starting a revolution, without, like, snacks.”

     Watch for a screening of Altamont Now with the director present and bands from the soundtrack coming during South By Southwest, brought to you by the Austin Underground Film Society. 

Andy Gately is a new regular columnist for www.iluvvideo.com, as well as one of the brains behind the highly successful Austin Underground Film Festival & Psych Fest.