Asked to explain the Monkees’ free-form movie Head, Micky Dolenz had an impish reply: “I have no fricking idea what it was about.” Actually, though, there’s one scene that he says encapsulates the acid-washed film’s groundbreaking worldview.
“The movie was essentially about the deconstruction of the film industry,” Dolenz argued during a Monkees Convention Q&A. As such, the moment he breaks down the industry’s so-called fourth wall encapsulates the larger theme at work in this movie, which was written and produced by Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson.
“It’s a calvary thing, with Indians, and [Monkees bandmate] Mike [Nesmith] and I are fighting off the Indians, and it’s a big set with all of the landscape and the backdrops,” Dolenz said. “I get hit with, like, four or five arrows – and I go: ‘Bob, I don’t want to do this anymore. This is just crap.'”
Then we see Dolenz “walk through the backdrop, and burst out of this fake Hollywood scene. I didn’t even think about this at the time, but now I look back – and that was the point of the movie, beyond the whole Monkee paradigm. It was about breaking out of the traditional old-school Hollywood. And they did.”
From there, Dolenz said, filmgoers saw a fundamental change in the way movies were made, over a string of outsider releases that included Easy Rider, Billy Jack and Raging Bull. “The idea was always that we were going to do something different than a 90-minute episode of The Monkees,” Dolenz said. “Jack, in his brilliance, and Bob Rafelson, took away all of this Monkee-ness – and penned this incredible, weird, psychedelic movie.”
Head was released on November 6, 1968; the soundtrack followed on December 1, becoming the last classic-era album to include all four Monkees. They’d stage only one more complete studio reunion for 1996’s Justus.
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To me, “Head” was the end of the Monkee myth – whether consciously or subconsciously of each member. It opens with a suicide! Davy, the cute one gets his face bashed in; Peter, the peacemaker belts a woman (sort of…) and so on. It breaks all convention. It has brilliant moments, it has disturbing moments. I enjoy it more than Magical Mystery Tour (which didn’t say enough between the better moments of that film).
Wrote my senior dissertation about it.