One Step Away

Overview

Look at a crumbling hippie commune in California. In the words of Ed Pincus: "It was the Summer of Love, 1967. The Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco was to be the center of a vast cultural experiment. Ideologically it was an attempt at a post-industrial society, where people no longer needed to work and communities of choice allowed people to “do their own thing.” David Neuman and I set off to film what happened that summer. We decided to do what we thought would be a film about a rural commune, because that seemed to be the apotheosis of hippie ideals. What we found was a bizarre replication of bourgeois society—the sun rose on the nothing new. We decided to use an anecdotal editing style with an attempt to enforce a narrative line."