Lighting up the shroom http://www.montrealmirror.com/2009/031909/film1.html
Ron Mann discusses spacey theories, DIY distribution and his illuminating new documentary, Know Your Mushrooms 3/19/09 by MALCOLM FRASER Ron Mann, the Toronto-based documentarian who's chronicled the counterculture and its characters for over 20 years in films like Poetry in Motion, Comic Book Confidential, Grass and Tales of the Rat Fink, is a bit of a character himself. His trademark mane of hair is now entirely white, but his enthusiasm and positivity would shame many a man half his age. Sitting down with the Mirror to discuss his latest doc, Know Your Mushroomsa peculiar kind of educational film on the wide varieties of edible fungi and the good they do for the worldMann spends a third of our allotted time singing the praises of his friend and mentor, Montreal-based Hollywood screenwriter-turned-yoga instructor Len Blum before getting on topic. Like his other films, and like Mann himself, Know Your Mushrooms is full of information delivered in a fun manner, outwardly goofy but with a deeper message to deliver. Centred on the Telluride Mushroom Festival, the film follows two of the festival's keynote speakers: Larry Evans, a nomadic mushroom-picking expert known as "the Indiana Jones of mushrooms," and botanical authority Gary Lincoff. Woven through their testimonials are corny animated sequences illustrating mushroom factoids, copious footage of the festival's frolicking fungophiles, and archival clips of late left-field mushroom enthusiasts Terence McKenna (who believed that magic mushrooms played a key role in human evolution) and John Allegro (who's shown speculating to an astonished, comically stuffy British interviewer that Jesus Christ may have actually been a mushroom). FOREST FORAY The film originated from a seemingly unlikely source. "Jim Jarmusch, a filmmaker, a friend and a fungophile, told me about the Telluride Mushroom Festival," recounts Mann. "I went down there and got turned on to these mushroom freaks like Larry Evans and Gary Lincoff. I went on a mushroom foray, which is a 'Where's Waldo' hide and seek in the forest with mushrooms. And I came out of the forest a completely different person. "Jim would say things to me like 'Do you know that the DNA of mushrooms are closer to humans than they are to plants?' And I'd go 'Really?' It's kind of like you start to see mushrooms in the forest in a different context, as having a powerful attraction, very magical." Mann initially intended to make a fictional film"an Alice in Wonderland story" starring Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki and the Band keyboardist Garth Hudson. But with funding tight and Jarmusch's schedule tighter, he found himself reconsidering. "It was a week before the next Telluride Mushroom Festival. I said to myself, 'You know what, I'm gonna go down to just film what I can. If I have a film there, great. If not, then I'll do the drama.' And it turned out I went down, and that's this movie. But I wrote a drama with Jim being lost in the woods and hallucinating, which maybe I'll do one day as a parallel, the fiction version of Know Your Mushrooms." Although mushrooms of the magic variety are far from the only kind discussed in the filmthere's as much time devoted to oyster mushrooms' ability to clean up oil spillspsilocybin does play a key role. Lincoff tells a hilarious, epic anecdote about his first trip, and many of the Telluride festival's participants seem permanently addled. The far-out theories espoused by McKenna and Allegro are taken at face value, and in person, Mann doesn't seem at all skeptical. "It's all speculative, but it makes you think about what is possible," he says. "I love those kinds of theories… it even goes further out than you think, and I know a lot of people who've communicated with mushrooms. "At first, you go 'Okay…' But the truth is, why not? I just read about a toy that Mattel is producing using bio-waves, [with which] you can move objects using your brain! It's like Carrie! It's telekinesisI mean, how is that possible? It's what Allen Ginsberg said to me once: 'Everything the freaks were saying at the fringe actually came true.' So that's what it is about this film and these people. They're really onto something with mushrooms." Among his fellow converts is Flaming Lips singer (and recent Arcade Fire antagonist) Wayne Coyne, who composed a couple of original Lips songs for the Mushrooms soundtrack. "Wayne I met at South By Southwest, when we were on a panel together. He was an admirer of my film Grasssurprise, surprise. And I thought it was appropriate to ask him to write a song for the film. I actually didn't think he was gonna do it, but three months later in my inbox was this perfect song." HIPPIE HEROES From Dream Tower, his film on Toronto's Rochdale College (a downtown communal experiment gone wrong) to docs like Grass and the Woody Harrelson organic-living manifesto Go Further, Mann's films have often documented the faded but still lingering echoes of '60s social movements. Though Know Your Mushrooms risks preaching to the converted with its unabashedly hippie stance, Mann is unapologetic about staking a claim for the old-school counterculture. "When I started making movies in the '80s, Reagan was really hell-bent on rewriting the '60s, in that everything was reduced to failure," he explains. "It was all sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Anything that was positive out of that, from education to music, had to deal with a conservative backlash. We didn't have back then a pervasive documentary movement because film was expensive. Television reflected that conservative culture. "My thing, my project, was to take the artists and musicians and creative people that I'd read and experienced in the '60s and '70s, and have a record of their work… a record of art history that wouldn't exist otherwise. I see myself as a cultural historian rather than a documentary filmmakersomeone who has a responsibility to go out and give credit to a lot of artists who are heroes of mine. "There's a record by Eric Dolphy, and at the end of the record he says 'Music's in the air, and then it's gone.' That was the reason for making the films, to capture that moment before it's gone, so we have a legacy. Art history in the 20th century is audio-visual. If it wasn't recorded, it didn't happen! People are remembered by the stories they leave. And that's documentary. It's our oral histories that defy death, that make us almost immortal." BOX OFFICE DOCS As much as he may flirt with the flaky, Mann is a canny enough businessman to survive in a difficult environment for filmmakinghe runs his own distribution company, Filmswelike. "It was started because a friend of mine, Sam Green, who made The Weather Underground, couldn't find a distributor in Canada. By default, I said I would distribute the film. Over the last five years, we've released over 50 films in Canada. They're films which deserve an audience." Mann has also served as producer on other documentaries, including the recent surprise U.S. hit The Examined Life, an examination of contemporary philosophers and their ideas (which comes to Montreal in April). Despite having faced trouble financing the cerebral doc, Mann reports with delight that its opening weekend was "the best box-office gross per screen in North America. It's really a phenomenon, what's happening with that film." As for Know Your Mushrooms: "The film opened to rousing applause at the Telluride Mushroom Festival," Mann laughs, "and Bonaroo when we showed the film as a work in progress. I just assumed people were on mushrooms when I showed it! The film's world premiere was at the Whistler Film Festival, and there I assumed it was the altitude." But his self-deprecation aside, the film has opened to strong box office returns and critical acclaim. "I guess I've figured out what audiences want," he exclaims, bursting into laughter: "philosophy and mushrooms!" . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
