Doc
Directed by Immy Humes
2007, 98 minutes
Doc is making its theatrical premiere at New York’s Film Forum: January 23–29, 2008 for one week only.
About the Film
Harold L. Humes (a.k.a Doc Humes) was brilliant and precocious (he went to MIT at sixteen) and a literary phenomenon (the author of two acclaimed novels, The Underground City and Men Die, who never wrote again). He was also instrumental in founding the Paris Review. He was also a deeply paranoid, peripatetic “talking machine” (so dubbed by George Plimpton) who charmed, confounded, and infuriated his distinguished friends and far-flung family. Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Paul Auster, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, and Timothy Leary recall an extraordinary man, a Zelig-like figure who led a protest in Washington Square Park (“3000 Beatniks Riot in Village”—NY Daily Mirror headline), championed the use of medical marijuana, and managed Mailer’s 1961 run for Mayor of New York. His daughter, Immy Humes, in Doc’s own words, “puts a frame around the wreckage” in her affectionate, yet profoundly disquieting portrait.
Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum
Director’s Statement
This film is about my father, Doc Humes. He was a lightning rod for some of the most interesting ideas of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and I wanted to tell the story of his life, his mind, and the changing world he lived in.
Making the film has been a long labor of filial love. I loved my father and was proud of him, but he was no saint, and I don’t want to simplify the complexity of his character or minimize the damage he left in his wake. I always found it hard to describe or explain him to my friends or acquaintances, and one of the reasons I made the film was so I could show, not tell.
I have many motives. For one, I miss Doc’s outlook on the world, his dyed-in-the-wool values, his staunch yet puckish anti-authoritarianism, and his passionate faith in human goodness and possibility—a belief system he somehow maintained in the face of his own severe paranoia and anxiety. Especially now, in a time of constriction of idealism, I feel it is important to remember spirits like his.
I also wish to show, through this one particular case, what mental illness can do to a life and a person, and how hard it is to be close to someone who is mentally ill. How complicated and subtle it can be, and how impossible it is to separate the illness from the person. A person who continues to be real and non-dismissable, even if, in some ways, as mad as a hatter.
I started filming when Doc was dying of cancer in 1992. Too late, but I got a little. Ever since, I’ve been collecting bits of his legend, engaged in a quixotic attempt to put Humpty Dumpty back together. Or, to use a more fitting metaphor, trying to capture a cloud, an individual vaporous being before it entirely disappears. ITVS, which gave me a commission as part of an experimental low-budget digital filmmaking initiative, has been tremendously supportive, giving me time to expand and rework as I discover new caches of material.
Although Doc’s life was steeped in ideas and information about social change and politics, the film does not take the approach of a social issue documentary. Nor is it a typical personal documentary with an obvious emotional hook, as I do not approach it as my story. I hope that young people will be especially interested; it seems that there’s a growing interest in the Beat Generation and the 1960s. I hope the film will resonate with many who are starved for media about the values they believe in, and are interested in people who tried to live those values.
Director’s Bio
Immy Humes has been making documentaries for more than twenty years. Her films and videos range over a variety of subjects and formats, but have a distinctive, recognizable voice. They treat social and political themes relating to justice, class, gender, and race, but often take an indirect approach or use a semi-comical tone.
