Today on the Scroll: Know Your Mushrooms opens at the Royal Cinema this weekend — an excuse to call Ron Mann for a ramble about everything he filmed before.
The ninth feature documentary realized by Ron Mann focuses on the world of fungi and a few of the personalities consumed by it. The reverential treatment of eccentrics, psychedelic animated sequences, and warped jukebox soundtrack featuring The Flaming Lips follow in a style its producer-slash-director has been perfecting for three decades, though, even as his subjects shifted from avant-garde jazz and poetry to comic books and dance crazes to pot prohibition and organic living.
When the takeaway from last week’s Sundance Film Festival in The Economist is that the eco-documentary represents a next wave for the medium, Mann’s own priority shift seems prescient, if not profitable.
“The initial reaction to topics like bio-diesel in 2003 was like that line from Field of Dreams,” explains Mann, only it’s not the line you might think: “‘Back to the ‘60s! Back! No place for you here in the future! Get back while you still can!’” Three years later, after the success of An Inconvenient Truth, the filmed document of Woody Harrelson — previously the narrator of Mann’s historical romp Grass — riding a bus down the Pacific Coast Highway in search of environmental alternatives didn’t seem that far out after all.
“There were indications of a shift around the turn of the century,” recalls Mann. “Things like the anti-globalization rallies, the slow-food movement, and protests over genetically modified foods. Then, after 9/11, organizations like the Ruckus Society were considered terrorists — and, for a while, it all just kind of stopped.”
Go Further was even promoted during the Toronto International Film Festival with a thousand-person yoga class —filmmaker and star among the participants — on the lawn of King’s College Circle at the University of Toronto. But, even for all the emerging commercialization of yoga, it was generally covered as some kind of freak show.
“Things really changed because of the Al Gore movie,” says Mann. “How exactly that happened is still mind-blowing to me.”
However, the transition from being best recognized for his dedication to the sinister side of popular culture to a broader eco-consciousness felt inevitable to Mann.
“When you smoke pot all the time the biggest problem is you gain a lot of weight,” he says. “I started to clean myself up and, in the process of that detox, started to look all around me. In the transition from your 40s to your 50s, you go from looking for meaning to a pursuit of social justice.”
With a half-century of life behind him — slated for a retrospective commemoration at the Hot Docs festival this spring — going over Mann’s filmography on the phone with him involves a thousand points of reference, something he’s not unconscious of. (“I just spoke at a university where I had to explain to the students who JFK was.”) Then again, the fact that he picked up a camera to make these movies in the first place was motivated by a preservation instinct.
“Eric Dolphy once said that when you hear music through the air it’s gone and you can never capture it again,” Mann says of the late jazz saxophonist whose influence played a role in his first full-fledged feature, Imagine the Sound. “So, if all this culture in the air was ephemeral, I started to think that if I didn’t document it then it would be like it never happened, and it would just disappear.”
The relationship with jazz started while Mann was working in 1975 at Sam the Record Man — whose main-floor turntable was spinning Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon one too many times for one teenage employee’s taste. Mann yanked off the needle and flung the record across the store — nearly decapitating a customer — and was fired from his $3/hour job on the spot, only to be called back in. “They had me chill out in the jazz department — where no one ever went — so I was able to spend time cracking open the music.”
Around the same time, he was making a documentary about slightly older friends rallying against pollution from an insulation factory, Flak. Funding came from $2,000 saved up from the Sam’s job. “The film shows how a desire to do something can just devolve into talking,” says Mann. “It’s really about the ‘70s.”
Previously, those pre-teen jaunts from his North York home to the record stores along Yonge Street’s pedestrian mall inspired Mann to make a movie at age 12, called The Strip. “I was always the freak in my peer group,” he says. “I wasn’t playing road hockey — I was the kid in his bedroom reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, I was the kid making pilgrimages to the Roxy Theatre to see Fellini films.”
But film school wasn’t part of the plan. No less than director Elia Kazan gave Mann advice to study everything but, so he went to Bennington College in Vermont instead. Mann succumbed to a one-day class wrestling with a not-yet-antique Moviola at the Toronto Film Co-Op on Portland Street. The instructor beseeched him to never become an editor.
When it came time to apply those talents to a feature film, his failure to secure sufficient permission document the 1980 new-wave Heatwave festival — the closest opportunity Toronto might have ever had to be the setting for its own answer to Woodstock — the publisher of local jazz digest Coda, Bill Smith, helped facilitate filming the likes of Paul Bley, Archie Shepp and Cecil Taylor for Imagine the Sound. Released in 1981, it received a full restoration treatment a couple years ago.
Poetry in Motion, the de facto follow-up, applied a similar approach to progenitors of spoken-verse, at the time when William S. Burroughs was touring through rock clubs along with Dial-A-Poem founder John Giorno. “The effect on me was like coffee and cigarettes,” says Mann. Allen Ginsberg was also sent a request to be filmed, and responded favourably with a phone call, at 4 am.
“There was a right-wing revisionism of the counterculture taking shape in the ‘80s,” says Mann. “People were being led to believe that it was only about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and therefore all just an abject failure.
“I felt some responsibility to reclaim it.”
An opportunity to direct a feature starring Ginsberg’s profane rock ‘n’ roll contemporaries, The Fugs — whose leader Tuli Kupferberg was referenced in Howl – somehow became Mann’s one fictional effort in 1984, Listen to the City. “The idea transformed into this Rip Van Winkle story about a city undergoing — surprise! — a recession,” says Mann. “My memories of it are pretty drug-addled.”
The cast was certainly the closest Toronto ever came to a John Waters all-star epic: P.J. Soles, Sandy Horne of the Spoons (whose “Romantic Traffic” was on the soundtrack), Jim Carroll, Barry Callaghan and Sky Gilbert, plus supporting roles including radio hosts Pete & Geets, guitarist Lenny Kaye, poet bpNichol — and then-city councillor Jack Layton.
Afterward, a 26-year-old Mann was $75,000 in debt, and couldn’t resist an offer to write comedy for Ivan Reitman — freshly flush with money from Ghostbusters. A completed script was a vehicle for Bill Murray, about a group of juvenile delinquents on an Outward Bound trip: Hoods in the Woods.
“I admired the aesthetic of John Sayles who would write a horror movie in order to fund his own projects,” explains Mann. “But I didn’t want to make films by committee just to help a company’s share price go up.”
So, it was back to Toronto, and an ambitious attempt to preserve another segment of the counterculture in Comic Book Confidential. The results debuted at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival and its celebration of artists often shunted to the margins received a proper theatrical release across Canada, giving Cineplex exposure for a bunch of Mann’s boyhood heroes: “Will Eisner came up to me after watching it and he said, ‘We won’t have to defend comics any longer.’”
A subsequent high-profile feature doc, Twist, played well with the boomer oldies crowd who were in charge of things in 1993 — then-Prime Minister Kim Campbell displayed her Chubby Checker moves with Mann during the TIFF premiere party — but the filmmaker had a point to make besides nostalgia.
“The idea was to treat rock ‘n’ roll dance as a metaphor for how we evolved culturally,” he says. “I wanted to show how this Hank Ballard flipside led to the cross-fertilization of African-American history with pop culture.”
Dream Tower, produced for the NFB in 1994, was spawned by a book about Rochdale College between 1968 and 1975 — which a curious Mann never actually entered beyond its ground-floor vegetarian café: “I’d pick up their underground newspaper called The Gorilla,” he says. “And it was exciting to pour over their, well… their blogging.
“What I wanted was re-focus the story on different models of education,” says Mann, himself an alternative high-school graduate. “You had kind of a dream that turned into a nightmare. The story was wistful in a way. Then it came crumbling down over drugs.” The tower at the corner of St. George and Bloor has been primarily a seniors’ residence since shortly after the last hippie was carted out: “The irony is that there are more drugs in that building today than there ever was before.”
Grass, widely released around the start of this century, became Mann’s highest-profile project partly due to the celebrity voice of Harrelson attached to a film about the United States government’s war on drugs. Motivation for its making came from words spoken by Mann’s most cited influence, agitprop director Emile de Antonio: “The best documentaries are either about something you really like — or something you really dislike.” And, in this case, product and the prohibition offered a bit of both.
Harrelson, whose protest antics included scaling the Golden Gate Bridge and winning a case in Kentucky where he was charged for planting four hemp seeds, was hanging out with his Toronto filmmaker friend enough for the pair to be featured in a photo album’s worth of paparazzi shots. “Was he standing next to me or just hanging off the wall?” wonders Mann. “The fact is this guy would walk the talk, and wants to use his celebrity to draw attention to any cause he believes in.”
Go Further put Harrelson at the forefront — as Mann has generally kept his physical self out of the pictures. But the success of his documentaries on broad topics clearly provided the opportunity to focus on even more idiosyncratic long-tail subjects: Tales of the Rat Fink, the 2006 film about hot-rod designer Ed “Big Daddy” Roth even transcended the death of its subject by getting a John Goodman-voiced vehicle to tell the story instead.
“I wanted to show how these grotesque characters were poking at authority,” says Mann, whose parents wouldn’t let him wear a t-shirt of a Rat Fink illustration. “I also thought, by now, we’d all be driving cars that looked like the ones he designed.”
Next on Mann’s agenda is a film about how the counterculture influenced personal computing: Peace, Love and Microchips. (And another in development about yokel rock critic Chuck Klosterman.)
The retrospective at Hot Docs this May is especially notable because Mann has never attended his hometown documentary festival in its 15-year existence — which is possibly the most anti-establishment thing a 50-year-old maker of these kind of movies can claim.
“I wouldn’t go into a bookstore that carried just fiction or non-fiction,” he says. “I’ve tended to look at documentary festivals the same way.
“Yet, for me, nothing beats the opportunity to tell the real story behind the real event.”
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