I remember a friend of mine, a drug counselor at a high school in Southern Idaho, telling a kid who was circling the drain with drug abuse, that she was a recovering addict. She stunned the kid with her personal story of how, every waking minute of every day for the rest of her life, she would want to get high. Use drugs long enough, and you get rewired. Instead of food or air or love or shelter or sex being the most important thing to be acquired, it was getting high.
I had never heard that before, and that was 25 years ago. All of a sudden, if I thought of Go Ask Alice, a 1973 TV-movie based on the ersatz anonymous diaries of a girl, also circling the drain, it made sense. I just thought she was weak.
Like my dad, with respect to bourbon and painkillers.
Weak.
Within the boundaries of what the ABC "standards and practices" people would allow in this movie, Go Ask Alice is painful to watch. It looks authentic because the producers were pushing the network as hard as possible.
It's 72 minutes long, and you can see where the story gets cut to fit in the 90 minute running time. My only complaint is that fragmentation. Would it have killed the network to throw in an extra 26 minutes of running time in a 2-hour slot.
But that's 49 year's worth of water under the bridge. Jaime Smith Jackson portrays Alice. When the film was shot, she was 24 years old, but she nails a 9th grade vibe. What makes the movie work is that, as she spirals, runs away, eats out of garbage cans, and winds up in a shelter run by Father Andy Griffith, her hair gets filthy, with puke and twigs snarled in the mess. Her face is bruised and dirty, and they took off the makeup that allowed a 24 year old to look 10 years younger.
Jackson grows old right in front of our eyes.
Let's be honest. I watched this on TV in the fall of 1973 because I was taking a health class in 9th grade, and the teacher said to watch it.
Two things happened. I got the point, and I fell in love with Jaime Smith Jackson.
As for the book, I heard it was actually a novel, sold as an anonymous set of diaries. I'd like to pretend the book, and the movie, were real.
I had never heard that before, and that was 25 years ago. All of a sudden, if I thought of Go Ask Alice, a 1973 TV-movie based on the ersatz anonymous diaries of a girl, also circling the drain, it made sense. I just thought she was weak.
Like my dad, with respect to bourbon and painkillers.
Weak.
Within the boundaries of what the ABC "standards and practices" people would allow in this movie, Go Ask Alice is painful to watch. It looks authentic because the producers were pushing the network as hard as possible.
It's 72 minutes long, and you can see where the story gets cut to fit in the 90 minute running time. My only complaint is that fragmentation. Would it have killed the network to throw in an extra 26 minutes of running time in a 2-hour slot.
But that's 49 year's worth of water under the bridge. Jaime Smith Jackson portrays Alice. When the film was shot, she was 24 years old, but she nails a 9th grade vibe. What makes the movie work is that, as she spirals, runs away, eats out of garbage cans, and winds up in a shelter run by Father Andy Griffith, her hair gets filthy, with puke and twigs snarled in the mess. Her face is bruised and dirty, and they took off the makeup that allowed a 24 year old to look 10 years younger.
Jackson grows old right in front of our eyes.
Let's be honest. I watched this on TV in the fall of 1973 because I was taking a health class in 9th grade, and the teacher said to watch it.
Two things happened. I got the point, and I fell in love with Jaime Smith Jackson.
As for the book, I heard it was actually a novel, sold as an anonymous set of diaries. I'd like to pretend the book, and the movie, were real.