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At the start of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, a young, determined-looking Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet) arrives in the Greenwich Village of 1961. He’s immediately thrust into an urban jumble of coffeehouses, bars, zigzagging streets, and tiny city apartments, even if New Jersey locales stood in for the Village.

If any of it looks or feels cinematically familiar, it should, since the worlds of movies and TV have been making return visits to that neighborhood and era for over a decade. You could start with Inside Llewyn Davis,...

With a new HBO documentary revisiting the infamous Woodstock ’99, a new generation is learning about one of the most calamitous festivals of all time.

Woodstock ’99 was supposed to celebrate the 30th anniversary of “peace, love and happiness.” Instead, the Rome, New York festival earned the infamous distinction of “the day the Nineties died.” There were tons of contributing factors that made the fest the anti-Woodstock: Organizers trying to wring every last dollar from festivalgoers from exorbitant ticket prices to costly water bottles, a festival site built atop hot tarmac in late-July heat,...

A new documentary, Tiny Tim: King for a Day, will examine the life story of the eccentric falsetto-voiced ukulele strummer who had an unexpected novelty hit in 1968 with his rendition of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” The film will be released to theaters on April 23rd.

One of Tiny Tim’s biggest fans, “Weird Al” Yankovic, narrates the late Dr. Demento favorite’s diary entries and letters. Tim’s widow, Miss Sue, comedian and activist Wavy Gravy, TV producer George Schlatter, and others, also contributed interviews for the doc. The film...

Theatrical premiere scheduled for late autumn in New York, Los Angeles, before national roll-out.

Juno Films has announced its second acquisition of a Fantasia selection, pouncing on all North America rights to Stockholm-based Momento Film’s documentary Tiny Tim – King For A Day.

Johan von Sydow’s film charts the career of the fortysomething vaudeville entertainer with the ukulele and falsetto voice who rose to brief fame in the late 1960s before it all came crashing down.

Inspired by Justin Martell’s biography Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life Of Tiny Tim, the film recreates Tiny Tim’s life as read...

As a 1990s teenager growing up in the wilds of suburbia, The Howard Stern Show on E! often served as an introduction to the strange, sometimes funny, occasionally disturbing fringes of celebrity. For every major star that visited the Stern Show––Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, Donald Trump (gulp)––there was a Jessica Hahn or Mark Harris, a tabloid icon who excelled at creating controversy. No one in the latter category made more of an impression on this critic’s young mind than Tiny Tim.

As a pop culture-savvy kiddo, I was aware that this odd, Oswald Cobblepot-looking gentleman was a falsetto-voiced singer who had famously married a woman live on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson. But as the Stern interview made clear, there was much more to Tiny Tim than those details. The lengthy chat included his obsessive quest for cleanliness, his love of specific products, a recent incident...

Pioneering all-female Sixties band Ace of Cups have announced the new release date and track list for their sophomore studio album, Sing Your Dreams. The 12-song set drops on September 18th, one month after it was originally scheduled, via High Moon Records.

Sing Your Dreams is the follow-up to 2018’s eponymous debut, which was a 50-years-in-the-making affair. The new LP includes singles “Jai Ma” and “Made for Love” featuring Bob Weir, Jackson Browne (who also duets on album closer “Slowest River”) and David Freiberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Airplane.

Easy Rider terrifies twenty confused studio executives because they don’t understand it. Hoping to keep their jobs, they rush to hire more longhairs to make movies ‘the kids’ will see. Ex- UCLA film student B.L. Norton parlayed his way into writing and directing on the streets of Los Angeles, with new stars Gene Hackman and Karen Black, and singer-songwriter of the year Kris Kristofferson in his first starring role as a musician forced to deal marijuana by a corrupt cop. A time travel trip back to the City of the Angels circa 1971, it’s realistic and honest, and Kristofferson turns out to have terrific camera presence.

Cisco Pike

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1972 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 95 min. / Street Date May 25, 2020 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £ 15.99

Starring: Kris Kristofferson, Karen Black, Gene Hackman, Harry Dean Stanton, Viva, Joy Bang, Roscoe Lee Browne, Severn Darden, Antonio Fargas, Doug Sahm, Allan Arbus,...

A month ago, on February 16th, a group of some of the greatest living blues musicians gathered at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York, to celebrate the music of the late, great B.B. King.

That seems like a lifetime ago now as we settle into a spring without any concerts or large gatherings — but you can go back to that all-star blues show tonight at 8 p.m. Est, when the Relix Channel will livestream the whole concert for free under the name The Thrill Is Gone: A Tribute to B.

The following article is provided by Rolling Stone.

Few people outside of his immediate family have ever been closer to Bob Dylan than Victor Maymudes. He entered Dylan's inner circle in 1961 and served (without any official title) as his road manager and all-purpose best friend/sidekick through the entire decade, and he returned in 1988 for a 12-year run as his road manager on the Never Ending Tour.

A personal spat around 2000 drove Maymudes off the road, and he soon began a book about his time with Dylan. He signed a $100,000 deal with St. Martin's Press and recorded 24 hours of his recollections on tape, but died of a sudden brain aneurysm in 2001 just as he started the book.

100 Greatest Artists of All Time

His son, Jake Maymudes, has held onto the tapes for the past 12 years, and he's now completing the project. He hopes to self-publish the book and he's raising the money on Kickstarter,...

The unreleased Grateful Dead concert film Sunshine Daydream will open in select theaters on August 1st for a special screening at 7 p.m. local time presented by Ncm Fathom Events.

The screening is a part of the "Grateful Dead Meet Up at the Movies 2013" series and tickets are available at theater box offices and at the Fathom website (where you can also check out a list of participating theaters).

Flashback: Pete Townshend Jams With the Grateful Dead

Filmed at the Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, Oregon, in 1972, the Sunshine Daydream...

This article was originally published on April 20, 2009, and has been reposted each year since. In 2012, it was updated to include, for the first time, the full identities of the men behind the coining of the term "420," as well as additional details. Carly Schwartz contributed to the reporting.

Warren Haynes, the Allman Brothers Band guitarist, routinely plays with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, touring as The Dead. It's the spring of 2009, he's just finished a Dead show in Washington, D.C., and he gets a pop quiz from The Huffington Post.

Where does "420" come from?

He pauses and thinks, hands on his sides. "I don't know the real origin. I know myths and rumors," he says. "I'm really confused about the first time I heard it. It was like a police code for smoking in progress or something. What's the real story?"

Wavy Gravy is a hippie icon with...

Happy Towel Day! I hope all of you have been spending your day in appreciation of the genius of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Discussion question for the evening: has the emergence of tablet PCs and the iPad give us actual Hitchhiker's Guides? Hell, even smart phones at this point have given us the ability to access a wealth of information and directions from virtually anywhere. Well, anywhere with cell service so depending on which carrier you're with... whenever you're near a major city or suburban area if you're lucky. The bottom line is that I really want a cover for my cell phone that says "Don't Panic" on it in large, friendly looking letters. Here's your Wednesday night TV:

8:00pm: "American Idol" on Fox. 127 minute 10th season finale. Because a two hour long season finale just wasn't enough, those extra seven minutes are life or death Crucial...

If you’re in the northern California area this weekend, be prepared—most of the state is going to smell like patchouli and Baby Boomer tears. Wavy Gravy is turning 75, and he’s celebrating with a “Birthday Boogie” on Saturday at the Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, California, just across the bridge from San Francisco. There’ll be performances by surviving members of the Grateful Dead, Country Joe and the Fish, and more aging hippies than you’ve probably seen outside of a History Channel documentary. If you can’t make it, there’s a second celebration on May 27th at New York’s Beacon Theatre, with guests like Dr. John, Jackson Browne, Steve Earle, and David Crosby. Two bicoastal all-star jams may seem a little excessive for a guy that most people remember, if they remember him at all, as a former Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor. But Gravy...

Hey-ho there, campers. Please to enjoy this delectable list of Eloquently Eloquent Comments. Please to be forgiving the lack of daily updates, as yours truly just started a new job and can't get home in time to post sometimes. But I am that committed to this noble cause that I read through comments anyway and here's the best for you right now to get you over the Sunday blues. And I think I lost my train of thought there for a second but I'm feeling slightly schizo from this heat. And as a bonus, I'm now including links to all the original threads on which each comment was posted so you can waste a few hours reading more articles and threads. I am so good to you.

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[The Easter Bunny's Jellybean-pooping antics inspired two great comments on Monday's Box-Office Round-up . PissBoy won the top spot for the day, and you get a bonus from Kballs:]

"What happens when the Easter Bunny gets the runs, anyway? You get some kind of rainbow river of sludge?"

The contents are taken and molded into fruit roll-ups.

Today's post on The Poor Man's versions of movies presented a wonderful opportunity for some impromptu singing in the comments. Unfortunately, it was that one song from Armageddon. You know the one. This prompted a couple of responses from mrcreosote. Here's the first:

"You know what I want to do? I want to study quantum physics, break new and innovative ground, perfect a method of time travel that overcomes the myriad of problems involved and use that breathtaking technology to Get Aerosmith To Break Up Right After They Stop Doing Drugs!!!!"

But that wasn't good enough. Read the rest of his projects after the jump...

"Here at the Cresosote Institute of retroactive musical criticism, we endeavor to provide you with the finest time travelling services to prevent musical atrocities. Our current list of tasks includes:

The Aerosmith project

Billy Ray Cyrus Castration station

Kevin Federline leg breaking Rube Goldberg device...

No, Michelle Esrick’s documentary is not about Ben & Jerry’s nutty ice cream; but it is about the namesake of its now defunct flavor. Wavy Gravy began his life as Hugh Nanton Romney. A beatnik poet in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Romney befriended and roomed with Bob Dylan and opened up for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. At the advice of Lenny Bruce, Romney headed west to California and was instantly immersed into the burgeoning hippie culture, becoming a Merry Prankster and Hog Farmer. Free from inhibitions and donning a court jester cap, Romney and his fellow "hog farmers" provided security (meaning: caring for and feeding 400,000 people) at Woodstock; he also functioned as the festival’s emcee. Soon thereafter, with a thirst for helping others, Romney and his friend Dr. Larry Brilliant (along with a caravan of helpers) travelled through the Middle East and Asia providing free...

As far as documentary subjects go, Wavy Gravy, the focal point of Michelle Esrick's new documentary "Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie," is as multifaceted as one could imagine. A countercultural icon of the hippie movement, Wavy Gravy is perhaps best known as the acting Mc of the Woodstock Festival. If that role didn't suffice, Ben & Jerry's ice-cream took care of immortalizing him in popular culture by naming a ...

As far as documentary subjects go, Wavy Gravy, the focal point of Michelle Esrick's new documentary "Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie," is as multifaceted as one could imagine. A countercultural icon of the hippie movement, Wavy Gravy is perhaps best known as the acting Mc of the Woodstock Festival. If that role didn't suffice, Ben & Jerry's ice-cream took care of immortalizing him in popular culture by naming a ...

irector: Michelle Esrick Featuring: Wavy Gravy, Larry Brilliant, Jackson Browne, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, The Grateful Dead, The Hog Farm, Odetta, Bonnie Raitt, Jahanara Romney, Buffy Sainte-Marie No, Michelle Esrick’s documentary is not about Ben & Jerry’s nutty ice cream; but it is about the namesake of its now defunct flavor. Wavy Gravy began his life as Hugh Nanton Romney. A beatnik poet in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Romney befriended and roomed with Bob Dylan and opened up for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. At the advice of Lenny Bruce, Romney headed west to California and was instantly immersed into the burgeoning hippie culture, becoming a Merry Prankster and Hog Farmer. Free from inhibitions and donning a court jester cap, Romney and his fellow "hog farmers" provided security (meaning: caring for and feeding 400,000 people) at Woodstock; he also functioned as the festival’s emcee. Soon thereafter, with a thirst for helping others,...

Oakland — Just in time for the holiday season, the Gravy has arrived.

Saint Misbehavin’: The Wavy Gravy Movie opens up in various theaters across America at the start of December. Wavy Gravy is an icon with an ever changing career. He’s gone from the legendary Merry Pranksters to the head of security at the original Woodstock to running a respected charity and finally achieving international greatness as a flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. The many facets of his life are covered in the documentary directed by Michelle Esrick.

We had a chance to sit down for an extensive interview with Wavy Gravy and Michelle Esrick when the movie premiered at 2009’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

This first part has him discuss getting drunk with Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and dropping acid at the Electric Acid Kool-Aid Tests. Ahhh good times.

Now we get...

"Green Day: Rock Band" hits retail outlets this week, and both video game enthusiasts and Green Day aficionados are excited about the sentiment. The game not only features the three men from Green Day but also a number of band-specific pieces of equipment, dozens of awesome songs and plenty of iconic venues from the band's long and varied career.

One venue definitely not recreated in the game is Woodstock '94, which was a huge turning point for the band. Their major-label debut Dookie had only come out a few months before and they had already picked up plenty of buzz because of their two breakout singles "Longview" and "Basket Case." But the Woodstock performance was something entirely different. They took the stage at the water-logged venue (rain had turned the entire space to mud on the first day of the three-day festival, turning the entire experience brown) and delivered a...

This week offers animation from Asia, science fiction from South Africa, horror from Europe and romance on the home continent.

Download this in audio form (MP3: 16:23 minutes, 15 Mb) Subscribe to the In Theaters podcast: [Xml] [iTunes]

"Bandslam"

Despite the odd detour to pen such fare as the unpleasant 1993 remake of "The Vanishing," actor-turned-writer/director Todd Graff has returned time and again to themes of ambitious young performers struggling for recognition. With his follow-up to 2003's "Camp," he offers up a plush, pristinely PG tale of a gaggle of Texas high school misfits who congregate under the believe-in-yourself banner to put together a fledgling rock band. "High School Musical" star Vanessa Hudgens co-stars as Sa5m (the 5 is silent), the object of affection for wannabe rock star Will (Gaelan Connell). Aly Michalka, Charlie Saxton and Ryan Donowho fill out the "Breakfast Club"-esque supporting roles.

Opens wide.

"Cloud 9"

With what's...

On the "Comedy, American Style" at his Traverse City Film Festival this morning, Michael Moore announced plans to launch a comedy festival in the waterfront town, beginning in 2010. Likely taking place the first week of March -- "the deepest, darkest part of winter" in Michigan, Moore noted -- The Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival will be a collaboration between Moore and comedian/actor Jeff Garlin, who participated in this morning's panel with Moore, Larry Charles, Tcff 2009 Lifetime Achievement honoree Paul Mazursky, Wavy Gravy, and Austin-based filmmakers Bob Byington and Ben Steinbauer, whose three features (Byin ...

To qualify for Academy Award consideration, a documentary must play in at least one theater in both Manhattan and Los Angeles for at least a week. That rule is to prevent people who made a documentary and showed it for free to a few people at the rec room of their apartment complex from hassling the Academy for attention. But it also means that some very worthy docs don't get the recognition they deserve because, as good as they may be, getting theatrical distribution for a documentary is hard.

Enter DocuWeeks, an event sponsored by the International Documentary Association that puts deserving films in theaters so they'll qualify for the Oscars and also so that, hey, whaddaya know, audiences can actually see them. The 13th annual lineup has just been announced, with 18 features and 10 shorts scheduled to play at L.A.'s ArcLight Hollywood and New York's IFC Center from July 31 to Aug.

Fox Searchlight's "(500) Days of Summer" took the audience prize for dramatic feature and its director Marc Webb claimed the audience prize for best director at the 2009 Maui Film Festival in Wailea, Ha., which just concluded.

The audience award for comedy feature went to Charlyne Yi's "Paper Heart," while Louie Psihoyos' "The Cove" took the audience award for documentary.

Other audience award winners were:

Family Friendly Feature: "More Than a Game"

Documentary Vision: "Rock Prophecies"

"Green" Documentary Feature: "Dirt! The Movie"

Spirit in Cinema Documentary Feature: "Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie"

"ChangeMaker" Documentary Feature: "Cash Crop"

Ensemble Cast: "Splinterheads"

World Cinema Drama: "Departures"

World Cinema Documentary: "One Peace at a Time"

"Fo' Real" Documentary: "Hawai'i: A Voice of Sovereignty"

World Cinema Animation: "My Date from Hell"

Documentary Short: "Rwanda Gorilla Special"

Comedy Short: "Spleenectomy"

World Cinema Short: "Mustang: A Journey of Transformation"

Animated Short: "Gerald's Last Day"

Experimental...

So I've done the scientific testing necessary - attempting to appreciate the new Taking Woodstock poster both sober and reeling from an acid trip - and I have to admit that the poster looks far more beautiful (and talks occasionally) when you are on Lsd. Alright, to be honest I didn't so much drop acid as I snorted the center out of a Cadbury Egg, but I swear to God that the poster talked to me. Now, since I don't care to dictate what you put into your body or don't put into your body, I'll leave it up to you as to what substances you'd like to alter your existence with before checking out this bad boy. Stone sober works well, too: The flick is from director Ang Lee and stars Demetri Martin as Elliot Tiber, who was the figure who helped get the concert permit to allow the biggest cultural event of the 1960s to...

The Paramount Theatre hosted several notable screenings on the last day of the 2009 SXSW film festival, including the HD Premiere of Al Reinert's 1989 documentary For All Mankind. Audience members reported being thrilled that Gene Krantz, former Nasa Flight Director, was on hand to answer questions after the screening of the film, which tells the story of the Apollo space missions.

Wavy Gravy was seen leading an anti-war march down Congress Avenue, reported Neil Miller of Film School Rejects, in advance of the final screening of Michelle Esrick's doc Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie. Director Jonathan Demme was in town for the World Premiere of his music doc, Neil Young Trunk Show. Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were expected to be in attendance for the local debut of Sundance hit 500 Days of Summer.

Volunteers Kill It! We noted well-deserved praise for SXSW Producer Janet Pierson yesterday, and that applies to...

SXSW is one of my favorite festivals of the year as it showcases some of the best and most innovative real independent films, and with this host of world premiers, it's also playing alot of Sundance material as well as genre fare from all over the world, many of which we've covered heavily in these pages.

From the Sundance lineup, we have films like Moon, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, You Won't Miss Me, Grace, and Humpday, among others.

For the world genre material we've covered, there's Lake Mungo, The Square, Zift, and Awaydays.

I think you get the point that lots of great looking film will be playing. I'll leave a bit of the exploration to you..

Lineup after the break.

Narrative Features Competition

Artois the Goat

Director: Kyle Bogart. Writer: Cliff and Kyle Bogart

Lab technician Virgil Gurdies embarks on an epic quest to craft the greatest...