The title of the blog, for anyone who follows Hair well, is based on a line in Berger's exchange with his school principal from the "Pocket Books edition." In case you haven't guessed, today's blog deals with the timeline of the film, an issue that stems back to the stage show, which has always been fluid with regards to time period.
Now, as anyone can tell you, and as is noted on one of the first pages of the 1995 script, Hair is essentially rooted in the Sixties. To quote that page of the script, "The setting indicates the fluid-abstract world of the 1960's as seen by, for, and about the 'Flower Children' of the period." However, that doesn't stop Hair from either having relevance to today's audience, or in the periods where it doesn't have currency, desperately trying to. In 1977, there was a short-lived revival of Hair which attempted to graft Seventies references onto a very Sixties script, arguing that it was in Hair's nature to live in the present, and to make reference to it in its free form. It didn't work then, and live (of late) it hasn't worked either, as seen by a poorly done Bush caricature and a second nude scene with reference to the Abu Ghraib photographs in the 2006 CanStage production. There is the rare production that succeeds in setting Hair in the present (the 1980 Richard Haase production, the 2001 Vienna revival, etc.), but I set out to do this screenplay sticking to the script. That means we're in the Sixties, but...when?
Well, the original Off-Broadway production (as heard on the cast recording) set it firmly in the present time in which it was written (i.e, 1967). To maintain currency, the references to 1967 before "I Got Life" were updated to 1968. According to Nina Machlin Dayton, curator of the Hair Archives, the show constantly changed dates and occasionally topical references to maintain currency (on closing night in 1972, for example, the spoken line was "This is 1972, dearies, not 1942"). Other productions such as the Haase version that updated the timeline would make similar changes ("This is 1980, dearies, not 1950," among others). But the film can't be so fluid, because however abstract a film may be, there is still a sense of atmosphere, of place and time, even if the atmosphere is that it's no specific time or place. We're not going to re-release a script every year, or else "This is 2030, dearies, not 2010" is going to be what we eventually see. We've got to stick with a set time-frame. So what makes the most sense?
For starters, the very first song is a reference to the Age of Aquarius, and a huge part of the show is that Claude's star sign is an Aquarius. The show is peppered with so many damn references to "Aquarius," both the epoch and the sign, that it reads at times like a half-assed psychedelic book on astrology. So with references to the moon in the seventh house, Jupiter aligning with Mars, and the dawning (or beginning) of a new age, we should probably look to that as a clue. When did the Age of Aquarius begin? Technically, astrologically, that didn't start until 1968, as far as I know. This would be an argument in favor of setting the film in the year the show opened on Broadway and changed the face of theater as we know it (i.e., 1968).
But dawning doesn't just mean a beginning. Think about what dawn means in terms of a sunrise. The sun's on the horizon. It's coming. It's not there yet. These kids are filled with hope for what's coming. They're ready to be the generation that changes the world. They are, to quote James Rado's extended lyrics, "the spirit of the Age of Aquarius [...] [their] light will lead the way." This implies not only that they believe they will have a wide impact, but that the time for that is only just beginning. It's with this in mind that I revised the timeline of the show to be slightly more specific, and to evoke several specific moments in the evolution of the hippie movement, as they began to realize that peace and love wasn't always going to save the day, and militant elements such as the Yippies and the Black Panthers began to muddy the waters and confuse the public perception.
MOMENT 1: The Summer of Love, 1967. It's plain to see that this widely remembered, much beloved hippie era could not have gone unnoticed by the creators of Hair as they followed the hippie movement while preparing a script for the show. It began October 6, 1966, the day LSD became federally illegal, with the Love Pageant Rally at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. After the release of the Beatles' seminal album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on June 1, 1967, the Summer officially began. As many as 100,000 young people flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco (or to Berkeley, or other nearby Bay Area cities) to join in a popularized version of the hippie experience -- free food, free drugs, free love, free clinic, and even a free store that gave away basic necessities to anyone who needed them. It drew together people from all walks of life: teenagers and college students drawn by their peers and the allure of a cultural utopia; middle-class vacationers; even partying military personnel from nearby bases. By October, however, the dream was over: on the 6th, the Haight district staged a symbolic mock funeral ceremony, "The Death of the Hippie," to signal the end of the played-out scene. Said Mary Kasper, one of the organizers: "We wanted to signal that this was the end of it, don't come out. Stay where you are! Bring the revolution to where you live. Don't come here because it's over and done with."
MOMENT 2: The Fall. This segment of 1967 is much less talked about, although exemplified by the attitudes of Claude's parents in "I Got Life" and the end of the paragraph above. The Summer of Love is over, and the parents that thought their kids were just going through a phase are less than thrilled with all this. When Mommy and Daddy don't send checks every month, life in the Village ain't as fun as they thought. Many hippie communities, including the Haight, were becoming shells of their former selves at this point. Overcrowding, homelessness, hunger, drug problems, crime. If their kids wanted to live in it, let them. They made their bed, now they can sleep in it. To quote Jeanie in one of Hair's many scripts: "I wired my parents for money. I told them I was pregnant. They said: 'Stay pregnant.'" (In the original Off-Broadway script, before actress Sally Eaton's pregnancy was written into the show, the point was driven home even more. Replace the word "pregnant" with "stranded" and you've got the general idea.)
MOMENT 3: The Winter. This becomes especially prevalent with lines in "Flesh Failures" like "Walking proudly in our winter coats..." that now make sense as a result of this change. As I said in the post about restructuring the ending so it's clear Claude is actually dead, I sort of alluded to this revised timeline in my description of his body coming home, what with waxing poetic about a cold, blustery winter morning. March 1968, at the earliest, would have been just enough time for Claude to have completed his training and been shipped off to Vietnam. Winter is one of the darkest and coldest seasons, and when Claude dies and the Tribe pleads with God or whatever power they believe in to put an end to man's inhumanity to man, the future doesn't look all that bright or warm.
Much like Vincente Minnelli followed the changing seasons in his film Meet Me in St. Louis, I think a similar approach would be useful for Hair. The authors of the show played with the idea that this movement was connected astrologically to the heavens, and to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, so I don't think it's a coincidence that their story follows the main events of the hippie era almost to a 't,' albeit leaving out the peak of the scene with Woodstock and the walls crashing down with another rock festival, Altamont, the shooting of innocent students at universities by the government, and the dawn of a different much darker tribe led by one Mr. Manson, but that's due mainly to the show being written before either event occurred. Claude and the Tribe are symbolic and emblematic of the changes that the hippie movement went through in its earliest days, and this film should follow that point when structuring the setting.
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