In the late 60s, director Bob Levis got his hands on some equipment and led a bunch of counterculture people into the woods for a month of sex, drugs, and to a lesser extent, improvisational filmmaking. The film that emerged from this exercise, GOLD, tells the story of a bunch of counterculture people also living in the woods who also happen to enjoy sex and drugs (and not much else), pitting them against a prudish lawman and a crooked politician. With a biography and a plot that run so parallel, it’s easy to see why the film, recently released on video for the first time, is being marketed as a hippie artifact as much as a work of cinema. And it’s a smart move: as a document of hippie culture released (as the newly-added secondary title reminds us) a year before that one other hippie thing called Woodstock, GOLD actually holds some interest. As a film, not so much.
GOLD begins with a slideshow of images capturing the era’s human rights causes, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Vietnam War, but don’t let that fool you. The film is interested in fighting the man, sure, but only enough to ensure that white dudes can keep smoking weed and that (young) women are liberated enough to flash their tits and put out to said white dudes, but not liberated enough to have even a single sentence of dialogue between them.
The local law enforcement, Captain Harold Jinks (Garry Goodrow), doesn’t approve of T&A, and makes it his mission to rid the town of it by shooting his junk-bearing friend Verbal Talkingham (Sam Ridge) and then placing all flesh-bearing hippies inside a barbed wire prison that looks almost exactly like a concentration camp. In this lazily-constructed allegory, nudity laws and mass murder are simply different branches on the same tree of oppression. Fortunately, the film’s hero/peeping Tom/hermit Hawk (Del Close), despite preferring modesty himself, gets a hold of a bulldozer and frees everyone’s junk. With captives freed, Captain Jinks realizes his cause is lost and jumps into a pond with the rest of the naked people. War is over, if you want it. It’s easy.
Improvisation is all about the ability of meandering, captivating details to stand on their own, not about any kind of message, so it makes sense that GOLD’s improvised big, important message fails. But despite starring the creator of modern improvisational comedy Del Close, the details don’t fare much better. Dialogue serves only to further the plot, not to entertain. Camerawork apes mainstream cinema. The acting’s bad, but lacking the artless charisma that can make bad acting so appealing. For an improvised film fueled by drugs, GOLD has surprisingly few inspired or even truly weird moments. It’s as if instead of harnessing the creativity of their drug-addled minds, the filmmakers simply enjoyed their highs and confined shooting to their moments of hungover sobriety.
