Screen:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
support, they have also been anxious to see the Coalition ingly popular as Hair was. Hair was made on the novel succeed. Ed Mann...
...And as these closings make headsity...
...Youngstown's last chapter may also be its first...
...The only revelation to us ofourselves, ~specially showsthat are surpris- important character not in the car is Claude Bukowsky (John 25 May 1979:305 Savage), whom the movie turns into a cowboy from Ok- to "What a Piece of Work Is Man," with lyrics by William lahoma...
...On the other would come out of retirement to help start a community-owned hand,Hair made freedom safe...
...The very best schools, on the both produced and consumed at those Commonweal: 306...
...The car is, however, on its way to rescue Bukowsky Shakespeare...
...way of making them all more representative, like Congress...
...Or perhaps these are scenes from an American Pomfinally seems, like the trite plot that the film manufactures peii that was cataclysmically suspended in time ten years ago around the original characters, only a way to keep us and is only now being unearthed again by Forman's movie...
...They were an expression of it...
...He has seen and elaborated only thoseaspects of financial security, a job with which they can identify--that the Broadway original which made it widely popular...
...Since then, the grim demographics and universities of the middle rank must Each of these is changing, and the have become common knowledge, absorb a 60 percent loss...
...might seem less threatened by these A painful further dimension is that the changes than textbook publishers...
...In the originalHair the thing that all the street people had in common was their rootlessness...
...MOBILIZING AROUND THE IDEA OF RESEARCH The university press & the American mind JACK MILES versity establishment would have to one hand, and the presently least preshrink by one-third...
...ity rates could soften the impact of lower which exist largely to facilitate comThat class, he pointed out, was smaller birth rates...
...Increasingly they see whose perception of America is too weak and superficial to be that the old systems no longer deliver...
...The government's de- years later as it might seem...
...Lower infant mortal- At first blush, university presses, demographics to a general audience...
...He flies across the Atlantic in jumbo'conservative.' The Coalition is the defenderofYoungstown's jet style, without paying any attention to the storm-tossed seas traditional working class culture...
...between culture and change,social innovationis born...
...We've been taught over the last thirty years that America...
...Therein During the Depression, when the movie musical was being lies the immense potential of Youngstown's Ecumenical Co-alition...
...this is home...
...In a sense,this role is a hard truths...
...Everybody was free-floating-- acondition epitomized by the song "Frank Mills" in which a girl had tragically lost her boyfriend's address...
...it is built into the of America, except that what we're all in now is a Lincoln...
...We visit each of these characters from the Five-Zero-Zero" becomes a couple of minutes of cut-aways original Hair in the different economic and regional from a slapstick review of the troops at Bukowsky's boot background the movie has created for him...
...It makes the dancing paradoxically static, as if done in Central Park is almost strong enough by itself to carry we were seeing a series of quickly glimpsed tableaux or freeze the rest of the film on its flying coat tails...
...In the movie Shakespeare...
...This is the movie's camp...
...Between 1974 and 1992, suppos- 25 percent by 1994...
...Forman's editing of the dance sequences-lots of medium The greatest innovation the movie has is its choreography by shots very rapidly spliced together-obstructs our view of the Twyla Tharp...
...twilight's last gleaming for certain American dreams still widely cherished...
...In such confrontations eliminated the negative, andnot messed with Mr...
...Obviously, then, if the overall destitutions: the American university of 2,000 enrollment...
...Popular shows usually do this...
...No onehad abackground or Screen a home...
...Hair was made on the novel succeed...
...words of another, what is necessary is "a company we can The show recognized in the dawn of its own new age the trust...
...That could make a itself...
...But "Frank Mills" is one ofthe songs dropped from the movie version, where family backgrounds HAIR TODAY and off-stage homes are created for the major characters...
...pain and promise ofsocial changes which will be with us for a Continental...
...with the model...
...NIO ONE lives in the Age of Aquarius today...
...This is a complicated task, for in order to sustain the dowedthe stageversion ofHair, Forman hasn't respondedto it values that area workers hold dear--a sense of community, in the movie...
...Yet the choreography frames...
...If there was any wildness or maintain that culture in the face of far-reaching economic vexation with which the immediacy of the Vietnam war enchange...
...Still, even on the more op- munication among experts-the indisby one-third than the freshman class of timistic estimates, enrollment will drop pensable first step-rather than com1974...
...They'll come back in a minute," says one andthe crash pad and the demonstration in the streets became a worker, "you see, their family is here...
...They are a drop-out from a lower-middle-class home in Queens...
...Many, including those only marginally ticut to see the show because they also yearned to be FREE, aware ofthe Coalition's work, tell stories of old-timers who somehow, and Hair assuaged those yearnings...
...The college freshman class of 104 of Harvard's Center for Population lines, a judgment will seem to be passed 1992 was in the bassinets in 1974 when Studies), 48 percent of current under- on the worth of the bachelor's degree John Silber of Boston University wrote graduates are over 22...
...my knowledge, first brought educational make a difference...
...This intention is of using his camera to break the original Hair into pieces, so especially apparent in the movie's brief reprise of the song it will fit into the Melting Pot once again...
...Galt MacDermot's music with its fast, changing dancing itself...
...Still,Hair remains chetypes of the new black bourgeoisie in the post- Hair era} pertinent...
...Americans to make Hair enormously successful...
...It's MORE THINNED THAN THINNED AGAINST as if Forman were trying to make more explicit the connection ofthesehippies with America at large--as ifhe were afraid the rest of us Americans might miss the point...
...It made it into entertainment...
...in to drive and sing their way cross-country...
...Or in the new kind of togetherness, a renewed and ideal Melting Pot...
...On the one Thus, what might be termed the''passive support" ofthese hand, people came into New York from Connecticut, Connecmen has been high...
...body counts...
...In Hair, the commune would return...
...The opening performance of "Aquarius" lights at a disco...
...Private schools changes have consequences for the uni- though there has been a little tinkering with modest endowments will fail...
...It gives the choreography the maddening qualtempos meshes beautifully with the jerky, dislocated dancing ity of a dance seen under one of those bright, blipping strobe that Tharp creates...
...It must open itself to new true tradition of musicals, he has accentuated the positive, ideas, new practices, new institutions...
...Silber translated this stigious vocational and junior colleges, THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY press is shrinkage into the failure of 200 univer- on the other, will retain their full enrollflanked by two much larger in- sities of 5,000 enrollment or 500 colleges ment...
...Its "dawn- The Lincoln contains every race, creed and social ing," celebrated ten years ago in the musical Hair, persuasion-- a very straight black lady and her little boy (arturned out to be its twilight as well...
...He is an immigrant Magoo, avc~iding most harm This context sets the boundaries for both the accomplish- andconfusion in American culture by being oblivious to them...
...is cut, and "Threefrom the military...
...Surely JACK MILES is a California-based editor and drop is not likely to occur in all schools a disproportionate amount of research is writer...
...Like the unemployed steelworkers of the Mahoning invented, what kept America going was the feeling that we were all in the same boat...
...It mill, of young workers moved on to mills in Indiana who made hippies appealing and familiar...
...Or distracted-a way to keep any unpleasant associations in maybe the editing in the dance sequences is just Forman's way Ragni and Rado's lyrics at arm's length...
...equally...
...It continues to tell us something about ourcollective along with a newly liberated debutante from Westchester and a life as Americans...
...That's what all the principals in Hair finally get long time...
...It searches for a means to and swirling clouds beneath him...
...In the Broadway version this song was a lead-in COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The thing to do was get Milos cision only fuels their anxiety and their discontent.These men Forman to direct the film...
...Forman is one ofthose Europeans know that their needs are not being met...
...In the local culture itself must change...
...ments and the dilemmas of the Ecumenical Coalition of the Since Forman didn't feel any ofthe rougherbarbs and burrs in Mahoning Valley...
...Whetherthis was true movements aren't clean...
...Maybe this movie is "Three-Five-Zero-Zero," which makes music out of military just our way of scrapping the hippies once and for all...
...in consequence, enrollments may an article in Atlantic that, to the best of difference...
...Because Youngstown's crisis is in so many Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he could ways a crisis of traditional values, the community's churches certainly be trusted withHair, which had far less potential for have been drawn into the central role...
...cline is 30 percent, the four-year colleges and American commercial publishing...
...Innocentadaptations ofmodern classics is becom'conserving' one but its political implications are far from ing Forman's specialty...
...In-Between...
...dangerous...
...According to Nathan schools with disappearing enrollments Keyfitz in "The Graduate Schools Lose will be closed as superfluous by legislaThe university press and the univer- Their Economic Base," (Working Paper tures...
...Ed Mann explains: "Workers aren't aggressively premise that the hippies weren't really alienated from activists...
...Forman's Hair has a similar vision Valley, this potential will notjust fade away...
...You can't expect dramatic changes in for hippies themselves or not, it was true enough for other that attitude over the course of one year...
...Today, Youngstown's workers find it hard to trustanybody.One by one, the traditional markers of their social world-- Hair was therefore not as hard to adapt to the screen ten mill, job, union--have proven unsure...
...State versity press...
...More foreign students could drop even faster...
...Keyfitz himself sees munication between experts and laymen-, ing current rates of enrollment, the uni- a 30 percent drop...
...It's a real ethnic Ark...
Vol. 106 • May 1979 • No. 10
