Seacoast History Blog #100
Deember 1, 2010  

The proliferation of TV channels has driven me almost off the boob tube. Too much of a good thing, I guess. I gave up the traditional channels years ago and moved to Turner Broadcasting and the Internet Film Channel. But lately I’ve switched almost entirely to the Documentary Channel. These are the movies that matter most, I think -- the ones that tell us how the world really runs. Where else could I find an old Canadian documentary about the Dionne Quints, or the Pentagon Papers, or a film about the bass guitarist of the New York Dolls who became a gopher in a Mormon library? You get more humanity out of one of these rarely-seen films than in a thousand Iron Mans. So I’m hooked. And I even went so far as to write a couple of reviews that I posted on Amazon.com. Here they are. (Continued below)

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CANDYMAN (2010)

Finally, a movie that proves that striking it rich can suck. In the tradition of the where-are-they-now rockumentaries from the Baby Boom era, meet David Klein. And we do meet him – intimately, painfully, honorably, and humorously. Only this former rock star is not a forgotten 70s musician, but a one-shot-wonder in the candy industry, the inventor of Jelly Belly gourmet beans. Not since Ben met Jerry has there been a bigger revolution in the junk food industry. But those two guys apparently had better lawyers. And once you have the inspiration, in the perishable novelty food biz, it’s 99% perspiration and not so much fun. David Klein didn’t exactly get screwed. He sold his company under pressure for over $4 million and got to keep half it, after taxes, spread out over 20 years. Most of us could live happily ever after on that income. But how much is the human soul worth?  Klein had invested too much of himself in his invention, and could not let go. This is not a Franken-Jelly tale. Klein survived and continued to invent wacky confections (including candy Snot in a plastic nose), but never attained the same sugar high. Worse than losing a billion dollar business, Klein was cut out of the Jelly Belly corporate history, reduced not just to a footnote, but to a cipher. Klein’s son Bert (and Bert’s wife Jennifer) wanted to set the record straight, and his daddy documentary does just that. Bert was five when the bottom fell out of his father’s jelly bean business, and he makes it clear that those were not happy times to be the Son of Candyman. The disconnect between father and son is still visible in the film. A successful animator and filmmaker in his own right, Bert Klein peels the candy coating off their side of the Jelly Belly story. We never get the corporate response, so this remains an incomplete tale. We are left only with the bitter pill – the depression, the legal hassles, and the resentment that remains coiled beneath the surface. The dark, grainy, sometimes badly-lit documentary filming drives home the point. It could be subtitled “How Not to Succeed in Business While Trying Really Hard.” But David Klein remains the best of all characters – a real live human being struggling to be a nice guy in not so nice world. The documentary may not get his name back into the official corporate history, but it should at least get him into Wikipedia. One can only hope that this great documentary brings some measure of comfort to the Candyman.  

Editor's Note: OK, this isn't exactly a dcoumentary, but an historical re-enactment, but it still moved me enough to spend an hour posting a review. -- JDR

MY DINNER WITH JIMI  (2009)

I was so pleased to "discover" this film. As a member of a high school "cover" band in the late 1960s playing Beatles, Turtles, Rascals, Trogs, etc., I've been fascinated to see how badly modern films are at capturing the real Sixties as I remember them. Dark, moody, intellectualized, star-struck recreations miss the key point - that we were young, dumb, talented and clueless. There was an enormous innocence that gets lost in translation. But not here. This time a real participant in the pop rock scene tells us what it was really like - and it rings true to me. Sure it's a low-budget film that lingers too long on scenes that may only be meaningful to nostalgic Baby Boomer garage band members. But this was a bold little film since, rather than layering on the rock legends, it throws aside the rose-colored glasses and the bull analysis of rock "historians." The point is that we were all in awe of the Beatles and, as this film points out, they and Jimi Hendrix, and Zappa, and the rest were all just young talented people who were lucky enough to hit a pop culture wave. The Turtles were among the most tuneful bands, not deep, but upbeat and well orchestrated and great on stage. They were not, however, as pretty as the fabricated Monkees or Herman's Hermitts or other B-level Beatle-imitators. They were not as hard edged as the Stones, Doors, Animals, etc. or as goofy as the Bubblegum bands to which they are often wrongly linked. They had bad management and broke up by 1970. But they were part of the powerful West Coast wave that washed back over England after the British bands influenced us (and they in turn were influenced by American 50s rock). The Turtles were a light-hearted balance to the angst of the Doors and fell apart before they turned dark. I admit I was fearful when I discovered that this was not a documentary, but a reconstruction of the young band in 1967. Those kinds of biopics are inevitably hard to watch. But somehow this film gets the casting right. The Turtles and other pop figures are truly realistic and (except for all the wigs) believable. This may be a problem for some who have canonized these pop stars into saints and have fallen for the performances they crafted onstage and in their records. But we have come to idolize their music and their public images which were, after all, performances. Underneath these were just normal kids and young adults. Howard Kaylan was there. He briefly had a seat at the table when the Summer of Love was a phenomenon and not a pop culture cliché. If he says this was the way it was - I believe him. His Jimi Hendrix, a former American paratrooper and down-right nice guy, makes more sense to me than the sainted psychedelic version handed to us in black light posters since his death. Critics (like the one here who gave the film a low rating) who think THIS is the fake version, can't tell Hollywood from reality. Films like "That Thing You Do" and "Almost Famous" tap into the essential innocence of the era. It is an innocence that will never return - except for each generation of teens in the very fragile moment in their lives. We all get one shot at being naive -and that was true for the Baby Boomer generation. But before the bitterness and cynicism took over, we really did have a moment of hope. This film is about that moment,and the end of that moment. This is about how one pop band discovered that another pop band was human. Despite its small budget and big wigs and dragged out scenes - it is a more accurate work than most of the bigger films that care more about selling tickets than capturing the times and telling the truth.  

Copyright © 2010 by J. Dennis Robinson. These reviews also appear on Amazon.com.