You don't have to spend much time watching this made for TV movie or series pilot or whatever it was intended to be to figure out just what lies in store. The incredibly bad musical score makes its debut from the start. Seriously, if this isn't the worst theme I've ever heard, I certainly can't remember it. While the acting talent is available here, from Jeff Bridges to Carl Betz, Vera Miles, and Sal Mineo, the writing is atrocious and the story is contrived, filled with insipid stereotypes, and an obvious ripoff from Ken Kesey. Why must Hollywood always present tales from the sixties as if the so-called hippies were all unidimensional morons? It's too bad that such an interesting era in our exceptionally conformist social experience is generally depicted by out and out garbage so that the least offensive of the genre is now accepted as reasonably authentic when almost none of it comes even close to the way things really were. The best I've seen to date is a memoir called Looking Back by a guy named Becker, but who else has even heard of it? No one in Hollywood, that's for sure. They're too busy pushing tripe like this groaner of a movie to bother with reality.
Review of In Search of America
