DOPE: The only movie to tell the true story of the late '60s London counter culture
".. Dope, by seeking to have the effect of the very thing that it depicts, simultaneously transcends the period it was made yet reveals to us the very essence of the era."
-Ian O'Sullivan, article entitled "Anthem for a Consciousness" with interview with Flame Schon (Diane Rochlin) in Shindig! Magazine, Jan-Feb 2009, Vol2 issue 8 pub in UK
"Years from now DOPE will probably survive as an historical document of a time long ago. If so, it will surely inform and shape how anyone who has seen it thinks about the time and place it describes.' --Whitney Museum press release, 1975.
"..an unusually valuable testament to the spirit of its time and place..."--Tony Rayns, London, Monthly Film Bulletin-1971
Dope is dope. The movie is not about dope. Dope is the ground, like the earth - always there.”
- Flame Schon (formerly Diane Rochlin)
"Featuring Donovan and Australian artist/dancer Vali Myers, the spectre of underground folk legend Geno Foreman, Marianne Faithfull talking about poppers, Syd’s Floyd in full UFO freakout mode, The Fool and mainlining in Richmond Hill, Dope is the definitive document of counter-cultural life in the capital during 1967.
The rarely screened documentary Dope, by husband and wife directorial team Sheldon and Diane Rochlin, tells of two American couples and a free-spirited New Zealander living together in a large flat in Richmond and provides what is possibly the closest filmic insight to what life in London in 1967 was like for those on the inner circle of the counter-culture. Like Peter Whitehead’s Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), Dope shows the party in full flow as London threw caution to the psychedelic winds, but it also takes us to the down-time world between the fixes and the happenings....
Although drugs are prevalent throughout the film, anybody expecting to find an exploitation flick for the flower generation will be sorely disappointed. As US film trade bible Variety commented, on its screening at the Locarno film festival in 1968, Dope “is not just another look at the so-called drug, or hippie scene…(it is) a rugged documentary with revealing insights into the sad, touching, downbeat sometimes tender drug scene”. Also, as a documentary, Dope is no mere “fly-on-the wall” piece; the filmmakers lived with the subjects of their film, were their friends and as such are part of Dope too. One of the film’s many strong points is that it does not take sides or make moral judgements about the assortment of people and lifestyles that it depicts. In Dope, Diane and Sheldon Rochlin pushed the documentary format into new territory: 90 minutes of rapid montages are accompanied by a multi-layered soundtrack of voices, fleeting narrators, music and significant silences. Dope, by seeking to have the effect of the very thing that it depicts, simultaneously transcends the period it was made yet reveals to us the very essence of the era."
-excerpt from "Anthem for a Consciousness", an article on the movie Dope by Ian O'Sullivan in Shindig!Magazine, Jan'09, pub. in UK