An interview with Flame Schon


Shindig!: What were the origins of Dope? How did the idea arise to capture on film the drug-scene in London in the late ’60s?


Flame Schon: Dope came about because the very idea was simply "in the air." The times were so full of the awareness that something was really going on, that Sheldon and I, simply by being in the right place at the right time, and because of our unique personal journey, by being the "right people" as it were, that is, because of all that we'd done before that moment, were simply able to tap into and express all those particular fertile juicy feelings which were the essence of that time and place. For, despite the large emphasis on heroin, or perhaps alongside that "down" state, there is an underlying "up" note. At the end of Dope, remember, we see Caroline dancing alone in front of a mirror to ‘Midnight Hour’, complete, perfect, "owning" herself, and Dutch Bobby's voice saying "I don't know how it will end; it goes on forever…"


As in so much of real-life, it wasn't planned. Dope happened because of Vali Myers. The "plan" was simply to go to London from New York and to make a documentary of Vali Myers dancing onstage at a Donovan concert at The Royal Albert Hall.


meeting of mass culture and the "underground" - but we didn’t even spell that thought out to ourselves or each other.


So, Sheldon hustled some money and off we went - with no more arrangements than that. We bought two Beaulieu cameras so we'd each have one to shoot, a then newly on the market Kodak film which we could "push" to a high ASA (and this film itself had not really been used before in this way in a feature film –it was beautiful), and we bought a Nagra [portable sound recorder]. We brought an artist friend from NY to London to do sound, and we brought the man who gave us the money as well, whose only request was that he gets to meet Vali whose image he'd fallen in love with. He got to meet her, and subsequently returned to New York, vacating his nominal role as producer, as the scene in which we ultimately found ourselves was far too heavy for him.


So, Donovan or his manager/agent said no way were we going to be allowed to film (except for a great deal of money) and that was that. However, we did buy tickets for the concert, and brought Caroline, who'd been an acolyte of Vali in Positano (and who had also featured in the Vali film), and who was then living in London, to the concert. By then we knew that somehow we were making a far different movie. We all sat in the balcony, we must have smuggled the camera in, and


gaining greater awareness of what it was that we were really doing –or attempting to do –we became surer and surer, more and more confident and trusting in this totally open-ended process which was a real collaboration between us, the filmmakers and our five main characters who all had different contacts with everyone in London at that time. Between all of us, it turned out that we knew quite a lot of people. And because so many people came to be involved even marginally, people from different yet interlocking scenes, Dope does communicate the essence of those times.


SD: One gets the impression that the individuals in Dope are comfortable with the filming taking place. How did they feel having a camera present a lot of the time recording their everyday lives?


FS: I imagine that some of the time people felt more comfortable than some other times but generally we managed to blend in. The main reason everyone was comfortable is that we'd all tacitly agreed to collaborate on making a film about daily life at that time and place. In a sense we were all equal, not as in filmmakers and subjects, but as in simply friends. Nothing was said about what it was that we were really doing yet, it was, I believe, understood among us that some process was at work, that we were embarked on a filming adventure perhaps unprecedented. Not simply a documentary, which implies a certain distance, but through the gaps and tag ends and trailing off silences of all that is left hanging and unsaid, a living communication of, dare I say, "numinous" energy. And this energy, tacitly acknowledged by all our "characters" as a subtext of each one’s life, a stoner's belief in "grace" as it were, animates all the characters as well as us the film- makers.


You see, the key to understanding the ease of the characters in the presence of the camera is twofold: one is simply that they were all extraordinary people, personally developed and "stars" in their own way. The other way to understand this is also to know how we came to know each person and their various backgrounds.


Vali was a key figure in our (Sheldon's and mine) personal and professional journey. We'd collaborated less than two years before that on a movie about her, named at first simply Vali, and then bowing to silly pressures, Sheldon ultimately changed it to Vali: The Witch Of Positano, and so it remained. Anyway, there was Vali going off to dance onstage with Donovan singing and we thought it was a good idea for a documentary. What was unsaid was our sense of how odd this seemed to us then, because at that time we still believed in the separation of pop and “underground”. To us, Vali was still pretty much "the witch of Positano"- a great neo-shamanic figure and artist from Australia who had yet to be "discovered" as she subsequently was. Of course, she'd always been "discovered". George Plimpton [writer, journalist for The Paris Review] had financed the Vali film, but she was known in more underground art literati type circles then, while to us, Donovan appeared as a neo-pop folksinger. We thought this was interesting since it seemed to be a


did film Caroline watching Vali onstage. We speeded up the stage footage in post-production to avoid legal problems and no one onstage is quite recognisable.


Anyway, there we were in London with a whole lot of film, without a plan since our "documentary" had become undone, and we just decided to go from there. So, no plan, just a place to live for us and our friends because somehow by then we had convinced ourselves and everyone else that we were in fact making a movie. Sheldon's energy was so extraordinary that these kinds of things always did happen. Like a lovely large four-bedroom flat on top of Richmond Hill overlooking the river loaned to us rent- free for the duration. The flat was donated to us, I think, by someone named Andrew [King] who I believe was manager of The Pink Floyd –how Sheldon found him I'll never remember.


We simply began shooting, tentatively at first, and then,


What is important to realise is that our five characters, two couples and Caroline, were not “typical” of anything; they were simply themselves. They were bound together by the fact that for that period of time, Sheldon and I were making a movie about them. They each had separate groups of friends and acquaintances that may occasionally have overlapped. Not all of them knew each other before the making of Dope. Chris, Sharon, Casey and Diane were Americans. Casey, though, had a family home in Italy. Caroline and Casey (and perhaps Casey's girlfriend Diane) knew each other from Positano, Italy. I don't think Chris and Sharon knew any of them before. So, we assembled them all to live together with us –and yet none of it was planned.


SD: In as much as there is a central character in the film, Caroline does seem to be the main person that we follow and sympathise with. How did you come across her? What dictated her decision to come to London?


FS: Caroline had lived near Vali in a big cave in Positano during the period of our filming the movie Vali in which she appears. We see a portion of Vali in Dope when the actual movie is being screened in London at a place called Better Books [venue for the fledgling London Filmmakers Co-Op set up in ’66], which was a regular underground screening venue. Caroline is in London because her sister Prue lives there with her English boyfriend Tony who was a registered junkie. At that time, heroin in England was legal with a prescription. Junkies were not a criminal


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