Preface: How I start
a “bridge” with movie reviews
The 2012 DVD package
Evans as a key
producer for RB, and Polanski
revealed as a masterful director
Mia Farrow adds 2012
light
Odds and ends
Levin’s outlines of Guy and Rosemary
Elderly side-players
The 2012 DVD’s picture and sound
Comments on some script details
Director’s dossier
[Edits 7/30/13.]
Recently I viewed a 2012 DVD release of Rosemary’s Baby, an older DVD of which I did a short treatment of in my February 10, 2012, look at a set of films (under the subhead “The education of Rosemary Woodhouse”). There’re a few good new points to make.
Recently I viewed a 2012 DVD release of Rosemary’s Baby, an older DVD of which I did a short treatment of in my February 10, 2012, look at a set of films (under the subhead “The education of Rosemary Woodhouse”). There’re a few good new points to make.
Preface: How I start
a “bridge” with movie reviews
Background: Generally, when I write these blog entries, I
try to write so that intelligent, inquisitive 25-year-olds can understand me,
though I hardly expect them to agree with all my points or value orientations. These
days, with the Internet changing business and ways of conducting “discussions”
and being citizens, and posing legal challenges, I think one good approach to
take for someone with my career history is to offer a means to bridge differences. Kids can be so
sharp, if lacking in “wisdom from life” and a lot of cultural references you ordinarily
gather with time. Building the beginnings of a bridge is a way to try to
overcome alienation, ignorance, etc. The rest is up to others’ good graces.
Meanwhile, inevitably, new cultural artifacts and values
become more “current” and embraced by the young (vampire love stories and
Taylor Swift, YES! 1970s-style dark-realism stories, NO!), while they thumb
their noses at the old baby boomers (just as the latter had done with their parents 40-odd years ago). Whatever
the relative amount of culture I am indoctrinated in or familiarized with,
whether in movies, books, or music, I hardly expect everyone to agree with me;
but in this massive, oddball card game called Internet communication that’s
going on willy-nilly, I figure I’ll put my ideas and views out there, and you
either like them (or agree), or not. (And of course, to be fair, I try to pick up
on what today’s “cool kids” are so wise about. If I still sound like I’m much
about my own perspective and background, well, that’s what we older people
do—it’s sort of like smelling old.) Then when I and my peers are dying and
dead, the young can take stock of their own set of Weltanschauung-making education and views, and may say, “You know,
those loudmouth old boomers had some good ideas sometimes. We should preserve
some of their pet cultural anchors. (And what did we see in Bella, Jacob, and
Edward, anyway?)”
The 2012 DVD package
Though it looks old-fashioned in numerous ways, I still
think Rosemary’s Baby is a good
education in how to make an intelligent film—even of what is largely a pulpy
genre story. (As it said on the 2012 DVD, it’s taught in film schools—which
seems quite likely, given how well crafted it is.) Even if many people wouldn’t
even pick up DVDs (at a store or library) as much as they used to, if this film
in its 2012 incarnation isn’t available for streaming off the Internet, it’s
worth a look off its DVD (which also contains an interesting little booklet). In
this package, there is a second DVD with various extras, including interviews
with some of the major principals behind this film, conducted in spring 2012.
The interviews on the “extra” DVD, of producer Robert Evans, director Roman Polanski, and actress Mia Farrow, are definitely worth a
look. Other extras include an item of an interview with author of the source
novel, Ira Levin, which I did not view, and a TV special (much of which I
viewed), prepared in Poland, on composer Krzysztof Komeda, who did the
sensitive music for the film, and who is credited in Rosemary’s Baby’s titles in anglicized form as “Christopher
Komeda”; he was used by Polanski in, I believe, more than one early film of
his.
Evans as a key
producer for RB, and Polanski
revealed as a masterful director
This may be one of the last times you can hear from Evans,
who now, though he may strike young viewers as an “old codger”—he must be
around 80 by now—is priceless as a representative of Hollywood as it entered
its “Second Golden Age,” which was from about 1968 to about 1979 (roughly
encompassing the stretch from Rosemary’s
Baby and The Graduate [1967] to
the release of Apocalypse Now
[1979]), after its first “Golden Age” was the studio/talkie years from about
1930 or 1935 to about 1955 (some other critic would be better boned-up on this earlier
period than I). (The earlier Golden Age could be said, in retrospect, to be
when Hollywood was not yet in competition with, or influenced by, television.)
The book by Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex,
Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1998), is gossipy with anecdotes of drug use and sex antics,
but more broadly it is interesting as a history of the ferment of moviemaking
of the “Second Golden Age,” through many movies and sets of filmmakers and
their associates. This story includes a sense of the overall community within
which baby boomer directors and producers did innovative things when taking the
reins of Hollywood, and in the decade-plus, incidentally shaping entertainment
history (and the language of future filmmaking).
As a rough sketch: Robert Evans
was made head of production of the Paramount studio, which was in a big slump
by the later 1960s. Charles Bludhorn was the chief of the corporation—Gulf +
Western—that owned Paramount in those days. He allowed Evans to do what he
could to get Paramount higher in the ranks, and hauling in more revenue. (One
of the first films Evans worked on was The
Odd Couple [1968], and the most illustrious phase of his career started to
end about when he worked on The Cotton
Club [1984], which he produced and which at first he was going to direct,
but whose direction was taken over, allegedly at Evans’ request, by Francis
Ford Coppola. The Wikipedia article on this film gives more suggestions
of the story; my account here is meant to be placeholding sketch.)
In the best part of his career, Evans
not only proved good for business, but was good for the movies as art. He was a
good “director’s producer,” being sensitive to directors’ artistic aspirations.
The structure of his position was unusual, in that he was both a producing
executive for the whole of Paramount—which ordinarily, by more modern
standards, would be a revenue-centered “suit” antithetical to doing genuine
art—and yet his position allowed him to be a producer directly involved in one
or more specific films during a given year. He also, by such accounts as
Biskind’s, was a sort of larger-than-life personality; he was a handsome, apparently
classy sort who seemed just the fount of energy and good taste to protect the
artistic prerogatives of directors and yet somehow be a good businessman. And
as it happened, he aimed to tap into baby boomer audiences’ rebellious,
skeptical, yet “worldly wise” viewpoint, with the result that films he helmed,
like Rosemary’s Baby, the first (or
first two) Godfather film(s) (1972
and 1974), and Chinatown (1974),
among others, could both be “genre entertainments” and yet say something incisive
(or close to it) about the dark state of affairs American society seemed to be
in, rather as would ambitious literature, at least to young eyes.
Evans was also a good element in
the making of Rosemary’s Baby,
because the titular producer—and apparently the man initially quite bent on
making it—was William Castle, who was a producer and director of schlock
horror films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which featured gimmicks like
“Emergo,” a skeleton creature that emerged out of the shadows in a movie
theater, as well as (whatever gimmicky name they might have had) vibrating
seats—all elements that added to cheesy fun during moviegoing, but were for
middlebrow audiences at best. Castle wanted to direct RB, but effectively was overruled on this by Evans, with his
aspiring eye; Castle would remain the immediate producer on RB.
Evans wanted Roman Polanski
to direct RB; Polanski was until then
a European director who might loosely be said to have been among the “new wave”
European directors, including Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard (the
latter of Breathless [1960] fame).
These directors made such a splash among critics and the artistically inclined
within Hollywood that even Hitchcock, already elderly in the 1960s, took strong
interest in them, wanting his original conception of the film Frenzy to echo their style, according to
Patrick McGilligan, in Alfred Hitchcock:
A Life in Darkness and Light (ReganBooks, 2003, pp. 677-82). Meanwhile, as the 2012 DVD of RB (I believe) makes note of, Hitchcock
passed on making RB (apparently when
the book was circulated in galley form in Hollywood), which I think was one of
those fortuitous historical moments; Polanski possessed the youthful vision
that RB needed. (Castle, by the way,
makes a cameo in RB, as the old man
with the cigar outside the phone booth about 80 percent of the way through the
film.)
Evans and Polanski, in both the
2006 and 2012 DVDs, relate the story that Polanski was enticed into doing RB when he first voiced interest in
doing Downhill Racer, now a barely
remembered film (actually, I seem to recall having seen the latter film in the
theater with my parents when I was about seven, but aside from that, I remember
next to nothing about it), but Polanski was given the galleys of the RB novel along with material for Downhill Racer. After a long night of
engrossed reading of RB, Polanski was
won over to doing RB. He would write
the script for it.
Polanski, of course, was different
from Antonioni and Godard, not simply in formal respects (the latter were
innovative in certain cinematic techniques and an associated “attitude/world-view”
that went with them, embracing the ennui-encrusted man on the street), but in
having a sort of European “skepticism”—what I wouldn’t call pessimism but a
sort of adult realism about the presence of evil in the world and in society, which
American movies in particular didn’t typically embrace in 1967. (And even when
they did, such as in the American films of Hitchcock, this philosophic angle
was regarded as part of a genre technician’s posturing—Hitchcock was looked at
as a suspense maven with the dark view of things that “unthinkingly” went with
that, while people were slow to pick up on Hitchcock’s skeptical [some would
say cynical] if intelligent view of Man and his potential for sin, or however
you want to put it, as academics and probing authors would look at this later.)
When you understand Polanski’s family history as involved in the Holocaust, and
remember that he did a film later in his career on that historical mess (The Pianist [2002]), you can see he
takes a serious “reading of Man” as an important staple in his work, and his
directorial perfectionism is about supporting this, not so much coming up with
ways to be flashy or shallowly titillating.
When we hear Evans speak in 2012,
we see a man clear in his ideas of what a film can and should be, and who
exhibits a sense of taste. Today he might seem like “everyone’s ancient
grandfather, pining for the old days,” but when in the later 1960s and early
1970s Hollywood was trying to key in the baby boomers’ tastes, Evans’ wanting
to do good work in addressing them paid off in the likes of his committing to
Polanski, keeping Castle respectfully in the modest producer’s chair, and
allowing RB to become a very
well-crafted film that, to me, is a fine way, if not the best, to do fantasy.
You don’t have to believe in the Devil (I don’t). You can see RB either as a schlock story about the
Devil having impregnated an innocent young woman, or as a story that treads a
careful line between that and a realistic depiction of a woman becoming
almost-psychotic because of the hormonal changes of pregnancy affecting her
psychological state (the film handles the medical interpretation of the topic
in a bedside scene near its end rudimentarily, with a clumsy reference to
“prepartum”—the adjective first used without a noun; meanwhile, for real-life
purposes, consider modern medicine’s having long addressed the issue of
postpartum depression—and prepartum issues—and the like; for information on
this, without it being the last word or a substitute for true medical advice, you
can start looking here).
Add to this how Mia Farrow’s depiction, as closely molded by Polanski, of Rosemary Woodhouse is so well done
that, dated features aside, she is still the huge key to keeping our interest
in this film, and you see how a dark fantasy is best handled by making it
happen in the most ordinary-seeming domestic environment—with towels in the
closet, and ordinary cups and knives in the kitchen…and a weird old couple apt
to serve their “vodka blush” drinks in the next apartment.
Evans can be hard to listen to—he
had a stroke some years ago, so when he is depicted in DVD interviews, he is
shown from one side. An earlier DVD of this film, released in about 2006 and
with interviews done in 2000, featured him, Polanski, and set designer Richard Sylbert, the latter of whom Polanski pointedly got involved in the
project—with many of the same points made by Polanski and Evans there as here
in the 2012 DVD. But Evans is a little easier to follow in the 2012 interview;
in the older DVD, he could rapidly mumble his words, and it takes the viewer
some doing to glean what he says; he is more deliberate today, if still a
little tricky to follow. Mind you, he’s intellectually sound; his disability is
in getting his words out. Pay careful attention, and you can hear him being
eloquent.
He is quite articulate on the
basic metes and bounds of how and why he did RB. He considers the film one of the high points of his career,
even if it came relatively early in his producing career. Simple belief in what
a gripping story, and what good directorial and designing work, can be, show in
his discussion; and this film proves how far those can go. No CGI, crazy
dragons, avatars, whatever else. You’re kept watching for two-hours plus by the
psychological reality being addressed, and how well it is portrayed in the most
everyday of circumstances. After all, that’s so often how horrors of various
sorts in American society unfold anyway: the abusing priest, the white-collar
criminal, the fraudster in the back room: all of them do their insidious stuff
without stock fantasy elements.
Polanski, now about 80, seems like an old man when he speaks
in the 2012 interview, but is still clear in his ideas. He speaks English as if
it was a second language to him (the extra on Komeda includes him speaking in
Polish, where he seems much more fluent), but his understanding of what he was
doing with RB is still clear.
Mia Farrow adds 2012
light
One of the biggest treats of the interviews is Mia Farrow,
who didn’t appear in a modern interview in the 2006 DVD (though that DVD
included a 1968 TV special on the film, directed by someone solely named
Hatami, and 23 minutes long; it includes depictions of Mia and Roman [and other
players] behind the scenes; it was a sort of making-of doc done at a time when
that was almost never done, and looks quite muddy for being so old). In 2012,
Farrow, now no longer with the “posh,” Australian-and-whatever-other accent she
has in RB, speaks frankly and
appreciatively of RB, now with a New
York City tinge to her accent. She considers it the best film to have been in,
for the precision Polanski drew out of her, and for the overall challenge of
the role.
It could be said that Farrow’s longer film career now seems
almost forgotten; she was in a rendition of The
Great Gatsby (early 1970s) with Robert Redford, and more memorably she spent
time with Woody Allen through a series of his films, from 1982 through 1993;
the high point there for her may have been Hannah
and Her Sisters (1986). RB may be
the film that contains her greatest work, and she was all of 22 when she did
it. She was such a naïf at the time that she was married to Frank Sinatra (one
of the more puzzling May-December Hollywood marriages I’ve ever pondered), and during
the production of RB, he served her
with divorce papers because of how long she was staying in the production while
Sinatra wanted her in a film he would be starring in. She speaks today as if
having forgiven Sinatra (who died in 1998)—they stayed friends after the
divorce; but the wallop of that divorce, plus her later “truth-seeking” effort (I’m
not quoting her) in going to Rishikesh, India, in early 1968 while The Beatles,
Donovan, Mike Love, and others were there makes her seem to have been a bit of
vapid flower child at the time. (See End
note.)
Further, Polanski—in his 2012 comments he may strike some as
male chauvinist with how he says it is easier for a male director to work with
a female actor, because the relationship is like dancing, where the male
leads—probably put her through paces and otherwise may have “breathed close” in
a way in which one of today’s young women might have irritably claimed he was
“crossing boundaries,” and gotten some attorney come flapping in like a
homing-in bat. But the result is a fine portrayal, and in 2012 Farrow has an
elder woman’s appreciation for how he led her to deliver her greatest
performance.
I think women viewers would have to be rather tendentious in
being turned off by a naïf like Rosemary not
to appreciate Farrow’s performance in RB.
I think what really makes Rosemary click in the story isn’t her
blind-to-perfidy waif’s being sold down the river but how she slowly gets a backbone and shows indignation, getting wiser
about her situation (if she’s still under an illusion about what the
witches’ coven intends regarding her baby), even while in pain from her
pregnancy and genuinely desperate to protect her unborn child. The European
“dark vision” thing comes in where we don’t know whether Rosemary is really
being wiser in her indignation, or having wisdom be dangerously mixed with
pathological paranoia.
Then (arguably) the American hack-genre-ism comes in with
the last scene, where the coven of witches surrounds the child Adrian, and
Rosemary approaches with wary curiosity with knife in hand. This scene is crucial
to rounding out the story in the terms in which the film had to be made at the
time; that is, the fact that she had given birth to the Devil’s son had to be
confirmed (if without a visual representation of the baby itself). But even if
we are agnostic or unbelieving about the Devil and take this particular story
“fact” with a grain of salt, the 95 percent of the film that led up to it is a loving
study of a young woman’s getting wise to the nefarious ways of the American
cornucopia around her. It’s a sort of existential tale of a wising-up waif-like
mother.
John Cassavetes—clearly a better choice to play the
quietly wily Guy Woodhouse (who may be a real hack of an actor for all we can
see) than would have been Robert Redford (who was also considered, Evans
reveals)—helps clinch the story.
The extra on Komeda—called Komeda Komeda—is for if you have the patience. Made for Polish TV, its
voices speak in Polish, while English subtitles are provided. There is a slight
flavor to some of this as of Claude Lanzmann’s massive documentary Shoah, when we hear earnest but
not-theatrical Eastern European voices talk with seriousness about things from
the war-deprivation years, and see scenes of a Polish train station. This is
not a tinselly Hollywood production. Komeda—whose surname isn’t his original—was
very roughly of the generation of The Beatles, and like them he emerged from
the smoke of World War II to have a love affair with American music—in Komeda’s
case, jazz. He suffered being crippled in a leg from polio. His music includes
a pop touch that reminds us of 1967-68, hinting a bit at such music as from The
Beatles’ fall 1967 period (Magical
Mystery Tour, “Hello Goodbye”) and the 1968 “White Album.” The lullaby-like
“theme song” at the start of RB features
acoustic guitar with a “flanged” effect and a harpsichord; and later music in
the film, including orchestral strings and other genres of music (a weird
saxophone or synthesizer effect now and then), is very tasteful. He died in
1969, too early.
Odds and ends
Levin’s outlines of Guy and Rosemary
The 2012 DVD includes representations of typed outlines of
the two main characters by novelist Ira Levin. It’s interesting how there is
about a 10-year age difference between them. I appreciate this aspect more as I
see the film repeatedly. Generally, for me—and of course we could easily differ
in these views—age differences in heterosexual marriages (have we really gotten
to where we have to make that distinction now?) piece out this way: up to about
a five-year difference seems OK; when you start getting to about a 10-year
difference, it’s looking a little weird, rather like the wife wants to have a
daughter-father sort of relationship mixed in with the marriage (never mind,
for now, the intricacies of what this means). If you get well beyond 10 years,
you’re talking pretty weird, or at least novel…all the way up to the near-farce
of a late-life Hugh Hefner–type marriage, where it becomes like
grandfather/granddaughter. Then we’re all a little uncomfortable.
Anyway, Rosemary, as shown in the film, does seem rather
daughterly in some slight ways in her relationship with Guy, which of course
may make some modern women cringe a bit. But it helps establish how Rosemary
can be such a naïf at first; what we really admire in her is her growing
maturity—amid dire circumstances—as the film progresses.
Also, the outline on Guy notes that he would have had a
couple homosexual flings after he got to New York (following a stint in the
Army). It’s amusing (or not) that, today, a film could mine that sort of detail
for some conspicuous humor (tastefully done or not; probably not) in the
script.
Elderly side-players
Look at the Wikipedia article for RB and click on the links for some of the actors, such as
Sidney Blackmer playing Roman Castavet, Ruth Gordon as Minnie Castevet (she won
an Oscar for her role as supporting actress), Ralph Bellamy (an old hand in
screwball comedy from years before) as Dr. Sapirstein, Maurice Evans as
Rosemary’s friend Edward Hutchins (“Hutch”), and Patsy Kelly as the slight
batty Laura-Louise. For young viewers today, this may be the only 1960s film
they would enjoy that features some actors who were born in the late 1800s (e.g.,
Blackmer and Gordon).
The 2012 DVD’s picture and sound
This 2012 version of the film was restored from the original
negative, with flaws removed. I found that the picture generally seemed
sharper, though in places I found the lighting/tone to be different in a way that
was not entirely an improvement over the 2006 version I have seen several
times. Generally, one thing I can never figure out is how remastered films on
DVD can (sometimes) look more high-contrast—somewhat chiaroscuro—when viewed,
and this can vary between viewings too, as if the DVD is being read differently
(on the same player!) at different times. Why would that be? Is it a function
of temporary ambient conditions (heat, humidity)? In any event, I think that in
the reconditioning of a film print on which a new DVD release is based, if the
color was adjusted in the 2012 version, it wasn’t always for the best. For
instance, the scene in which Rosemary first announces to Guy she is pregnant,
just inside or outside their kitchen, seems a bit too dark.
I do notice that the black parts of a few scenes look
blacker, which I think may tend to be a desideratum for remastered films, where
Technicolor had been the original film format, and the transfer to DVD allows
heightening of this sort of thing. One film that benefits from this sort of
thing is Apocalypse Now, which has
typically had cinematographer Vittorio Storaro supervising visual remastering.
That film is meant to be both chiaroscuro-oriented and yet with color
saturation. Rosemary’s Baby doesn’t
need to be this way, and I don’t know if this was consciously decided on in its
remastering. In any version, the film does play usefully with shadows and such,
but it doesn’t need to be as operatic with lighting and colors as does Apocalypse. Not to say that the 2012
print looks especially tampered-with; I’m fussing over subtleties. Maybe
someone else has background info (such as on the ins and outs of BluRay, if
that’s what the 2012 DVD is in), or other opinions, on all of this.
As for sound, there are certain little touches on the 2012
DVD I don’t think are an improvement. For instance, when Guy seems suspiciously
subdued when he says “What do you mean?” when Ro comments on the Castevets’
pictures being removed from their walls, this sounds lower in the 2012 than in
the 2006 DVD.
On the other hand, there is a noticeably sloppy edit in all
versions of the film, which has been cleaned up a bit in the 2012. When the
picture fades quickly to black at the dinner scene at Hutch’s apartment, there
is a noticeable lag in moving on to the next scene, with the picture staying black
and some clunking in the background. This noise is cleaned up a bit, I think,
in the 2012 version.
Comments on some script details
Overall, for a film of its time, I think the script is
pretty fastidiously done. One line that might strike modern viewers as odd, but
which I think fits, is Roman’s line “We have more peace than we can say!” in
response to Rosemary’s news about the coming baby, when he is walking down the
apartment hall with a bottle of wine. You may wonder, is he trying to sound
like an old hippie? But I think this is meant, seeming on the surface as a
throwaway remark, as reflecting the deep significance (to the story’s witches) of
Ro’s pregnancy, as Ro can’t fully know—because the “coming of a deity,” even if
it is the Devil’s son, would inspire “peace” in a believer in such.
Another thing is the presence of Maurice Evans, with his
British accent. In the 1960s, it seems, even an American film still would put
its lot in with having a Brit present to lend some credibility, gravitas, “eminent
good sense,” or whatever to the proceedings, unless the film was a Western or
something else with dramatic circumstances that were uninviting to Brits. Here,
“Hutch” has to be the one who would be apt to look up “tannis root” in the encyclopedia.
(Today, any fool would Google it, and many do.) In the 1960s, the likes of an
American favorite like John Wayne, still lumbering around on screen, would be
apt to pick up nothing heftier than a metallic instrument about which he would reasonably
warn, “Careful with that thing—it’s loaded and can be dangerous.” (Would that
be said about Wayne [if tipsy] or about his gun?) If an encyclopedia is to be
lifted, get a Brit.
One line in the film is almost worth a mildly mocking catcall.
When Ro and Guy have grievously found that Terry Gionoffrio has jumped to her
death from the Bramford (the fictionalized adaptation of the real Dakota
building on Central Park West), and there is talk about whether she had
relatives, Ro reveals that Terry had spoken about a brother. A policeman
queries about how he can be reached, and Roman Castevet opines, “It should be
easy to find him.” Today, we would say that (again, we’d try Google); but said
in 1968, it seems a rather cavalier, throwaway remark. “Are you sure about
that, Roman?”
By the way, Gionoffrio was played by Victoria Vetri,
credited as Angela Dorian; Vetri, as I didn’t know, was a Playboy playmate in 1967 and ’68.
Director’s dossier
See my review of Chinatown for a brief outline of
Polanski’s career.
End note.
In addition to being amusing for
its ancient production values and incidental quality, the 1968 special has a
few interesting remarks, made especially by Polanski. Farrow, for her part,
hippie-ishly says at one point that, as a general matter, she and Polanski “groove
together.” Polanski, at one moment, narrates that while Farrow (as makes her seem
emotionally complicated) had displayed a cheerful, childlike attitude in
non-working moments, as if she thinks others expect this of her, after she got
back from India (in early 1968), this playful attitude had diminished
noticeably.
The film was produced, from what
I can gather, from September through December 1967. The first shots were done
in New York in the late summer, including the phone booth scene. Later city shots,
as when Rosemary is on the streets around Christmas, were probably done in
December (to take advantage of New York street Christmas decorations); note the
time/temperature sign atop a tall building says 43 degrees at
11-something in the morning. The trip to India, for those of us familiar with
Beatles history, started in February 1968; certainly The Beatles saw Farrow (and
her sister Prudence) there. After returning to the U.S., Farrow might well have
reunited with Polanski for post-production work in spring 1968, when he would
have made his observation (just noted) about her changed attitude. Other
evidence as to the “dis-illusioning” of the various stars’ trip to Rishikesh
abounds: for instance, as Beatles historians know, The Beatles came back from
India distinctly more at odds with each other and self-assertive (the memoir by
engineer Geoff Emerick notes this), as if they had lost some key illusions—all a
fancier story than I can address here.
