Monterey Mick: LaSalle and ‘Papa John’ in 1987
I spent this weekend at the first annual Monterey Film Festival, going to the kind of parties where you stand around with a wine glass and expect to see Robin Leach.
So, Friday night, I’m standing there with John Phillips at a party at the Fairgrounds following the 20th anniversary screening of the film “Monterey Pop.” Phillips and I get to talking about his drug thing. One thing leads to another, and I ask him if he’d ever want to do a urine test for a major newspaper in order to reassure his fans that he’s drug free. “Sure, any time,” he says, laughing. I produce a plastic cup. Phillips is tall, craggy, reasonable — he looks like someone you’d call “Papa John” — and it’s hard to imagine that he was ever the desperate, addicted character he’s said he was. He decides not to take the cup. “It wouldn’t be degrading, exactly,” he says, “but it would be corny.” Class-act that I am, I drop the subject. “Monterey Pop” is the 1968 documentary about the June 1967 outdoor music festival. Seeing it today, it often seems poorly cut and amateurish, but there are times you can almost feel the sun on your skin. There’s something alive about the film.
It’s striking to look at legendary figures like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and realize these were people barely out of their teens. In the film, the Monterey Pop audience was so good-spirited and so determined to not be cynical that it almost got funny. They stood and cheered Ravi Shankar’s sitar playing, for example, when, let’s face it, they should have been throwing tomatoes.
Before the showing of “Monterey Pop” at the Regency theater in downtown Monterey on Friday night, Phillips and Scott McKenzie unexpectedly got out acoustic guitars and did a handful of their old hits for the film festival audience, including “California Dreamin’ ” and the theme song for the summer of love, “If You’re Going to San Francisco.”
McKenzie, who has a full head of gray hair and a thick gray mustache these days, looked up-todate in his sporty silver-colored jacket and baggy pants. He introduced “San Francisco” by telling the crowd, “Twenty years ago, I couldn’t understand why some people in Monterey didn’t want hippies on their property. This song was written to reassure people. But now that I own property, I wouldn’t want hippies on my property either.”
The reason behind the Monterey Film Festival, which ran for four days through yesterday, was to advertise Monterey as a good location to shoot films. The organizers hope to turn the festival into a yearly event, sort of another Cannes job.
The festival screened films made in Monterey and honored Cliff Robertson, Jane Russell and D.A. Pennebaker (the director of “Monterey Pop”) and offered seminars on screen writing and directing. The festival also premiered films like “The Immoral Minority Picture Show,” a collection of comedy skits starring Sybil Danning.
I was late getting out of the festival’s showing of “Charly,” Robertson’s Academy Award-winning movie from 1968, and missed Clint Eastwood’s lightning personal appearance at a Hyatt Regency party. People said he walked in, got crowded and walked out. Don’t worry about it, Danning was there. “I’m the female Clint Eastwood,” she told me.