class; nor were they isolated. "Boots at midnight" refers to the chemist’s shop where junkies would gather at midnight to fill their prescriptions. When we all got together in London, Caroline was not an actual junkie, just an occasional user, (which may possibly explain her seemingly sloppy technique), but, during the course of the filming which lasted for two or three months, she did become hooked and we do see her definitely deteriorate over the course of the movie. That is the main thrust of Caroline's "story".
I never saw Caroline again after the time of filming but I believe Sheldon did see her, after we'd split up. She lives in the US, is an accomplished painter and we've been in email communication.
SD: There are several instances throughout the film where the viewer gets the sense of a kind of collision between the world of the drug users and the "straight" world, e.g. in cafés, diners etc. Was there any hostility towards the group?
FS: At the time, I think there was a definite collision, a cultural clash based more on miscomprehension than on outright hostility. There was awkwardness mostly, not so much hostility... for instance, we felt quite awkward going for tea and scones at a proper place there in Richmond. So, of course there was a gap between "us" and "them"... we felt it to be an unbridgeable divide between all the drug users – heroin, acid, pot –and the so-called "straight" world. But Caroline actually likes those truck drivers (in the first café sequence); what she is communicating is some kind of feeling of admiration and even, although a convoluted explanation is necessary, kinship.
SD: At one point, a voice on the commentary talks of people "becoming more aware of what life really means." Would this represent the feelings of the group? Or were they more caught up with the nature of drugs and their effects, and their lives as users (waiting for the next fix) than being philosophical about the possibilities of a new society?
FS: Because our characters who were friends from different periods of our lives all came from very different sorts of milieux, and although we were all living together because Sheldon had arranged the flat, a spectrum of ideas is represented.
Chris and Sharon (the tall thin American couple with the baby), for instance, were from San Francisco. They were friends of friends of ours in NY who'd all had some connection I think with The San Francisco Art Institute. Chris and Sharon had a house in Formentera (Balearic Islands) where I'd stayed. Sharon especially liked to take acid and dance to The Pink Floyd and their friends were into that sort of thing: tie-dye silks and macrobiotic food. There is a scene in Dope at the macrobiotic restaurant owned by someone named Greg Sams. Caroline is sitting there with Casey and Diane and we see her visibly uncomfortable whilst her voice on the soundtrack craving sugar, saying that she knows
Casey had a connection to Geno Foreman who was part of a group of musicians from which emerged Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, among others. Geno's death is described in the film almost as a centrepiece by someone named Damion. So, Casey was a good musician, Geno was a very good musician whose music was given to us to use in the film by his widow Marci. Casey wasn't really a junkie at all, although he seemed to have a liking for heroin at that time –but you see that he wasn't even capable of shooting himself up. Both Casey and Geno died in what must have been their mid-20s.
If you Google Casey Deiss, you find endless references to a song by musician Shawn Phillips who was apparently a friend of Casey and who wrote a song called ‘The Ballad Of Casey Deiss’ which was about his great mythic death by lightning in Italy when he stepped outside his door holding an axe.
“The boy of sorrowful eyes… / In his hands he held an axe blade / The Greek symbol of thunder and fire… / Chopping wood to warm his hearthside / The lightning came and my brother died.”
Scenes from the film (top and other pages); Vali Myers (above); guest stars Andrew King (co-manager of Pink Floyd), Syd Barrett in full flight and Geno Foreman.
it's not macrobiotic (and she stumbles over the pronunciation of the word “macrobiotic”) so this is obviously not her scene. But Chris and Sharon are probably far more in tune with the philosophical underpinnings of the feelings that this is the new society.
We knew Casey from New York. He had had sort of a privileged literary type background, his father was an author, his family had a home in Wellfleet on Cape Cod where we went once for a weekend and we all took acid, and a home in Positano, Italy, so he knew Caroline from Positano as well. Since Casey didn't tend to intellectualise, his feelings regarding a new society would be simply that he was part of it and that it quite obviously existed already.
So, when we consider whether our characters were more caught up in drugs or in being philosophical about the possibilities of a new society I need to say that probably the question may be irrelevant. Only Caroline of the main characters was a "real" junkie finally, (and the most direct and non-intellectual), but we all perhaps tended to believe that we were living that notion of the new society already. And, then as now, we knew simply that the forces of totalitarian repression were lined up against us. So, when we hear Casey saying as he holds up the newspaper and addresses the camera, saying "Do you think that they're doing this (drug busts) to take people's minds off the economic situation?" we can assume that his philosophical underpinnings are from the "new society" viewpoint. Caroline may well have been preoccupied finally with her next fix but not the others.
SD: The ghost of the musician Geno Foreman forms a strong part of Dope through the use of his image and songs. The extended section in which the narrator recounts in detail the circumstances of Geno's death in London is a shock to the viewer as they are confronted with the specifics of his decline and death. Was this a story that you felt was important, and why?
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