By Cheryl Eddy

cheryl@sfbg.com

In 1966 26-year-old Ralph Arlyck moved from New York to Haight Ashbury. For three years he was totally in the middle of it, man, and all those now-clichés – tie-dyed hippies, Manson followers, radical rabble-rousers, you name it – regularly swirled past his Cole Street apartment. But as Arlyck reveals in the wry, insightful narration of his new doc, Following Sean, he was "more of a watcher than a participant," and his view of San Francisco's late-'60s remains unromantic. "Should I tell you it was great?" he asks, sounding like a guy who probably never used the word groovy in his life. "It was actually ... mixed."

Besides meeting his wife, a French expat named Elizabeth, Arlyck's most significant Haight encounter was with his neighbors Johnny and Susie, who lived upstairs with their four-year-old son, Sean. The boy, a strange blend of cherubic and world-weary, was the perfect centerpiece for Arlyck's San Francisco State University student film. Sean caused a sensation upon its release, in 1969, largely due to the tyke's casual bragging about his pot intake: "I eat it and I smoke it." Excerpted in Following Sean, the short is still a remarkable document nearly 40 years later. At the time it made even nonsquares worry about what would happen to the flower children's children when they grew up, and it's not hard to see why.

In 1994 Arlyck – who, after the success of Sean, made filmmaking his career – got to wondering himself. After leaving San Francisco with no regrets in 1969, he settled into East Coast suburbia with Elizabeth and their two sons. When he returned to the Bay Area, he touched base with Sean's now divorced parents before reuniting with his now grown subject; he then ended up documenting Sean for 10 more years. The title Following Sean reveals its double meaning fairly early on. Not only is Arlyck literally following Sean through his 30s, he's also charting the changes in his own life and outlook since the original film's release.

So what happened to that pint-sized pot-smoker? As an adult Sean is as articulate and expressive as ever but with a more mature outlook on life (of Sean, he jokes, "It was devastating for my political career"). Arlyck's 1969 footage of the child playing with power tools foreshadows Sean's profession: an electrician. Sean's obsession with work becomes more pronounced as the 1990s advance; he gets married (like Arlyck, to a foreigner), has a son, dreams of buying a house, and enters law school while still grinding away at his full-time job. "There ain't no more communes or sitting around on your ass," he observes dryly. "You've got to support your family."

Ironically (or maybe not), Sean's father, Johnny, is about as antiwork as it gets, and Arlyck spends a fair amount of time exploring the unusually pronounced generation gaps in Sean's family. Johnny, who values freedom above all else, comes from a straight-laced family of bankers; his ex-wife, Susie, is the daughter of prominent San Francisco communists. (Arlyck's own parents also flirted with communism, but with less conviction: "They surfed the '30s the way I skated through the '60s.")

As Johnny sizes up his overworked son, he remarks, "He's not as free as he once was." While that's certainly true (for one thing, Sean wears shoes now), the statement reflects back on all of the doc's participants: the perpetually broke Johnny, who never gave up on his 1960s ideals; commune-and-guru product Sean, who diligently pursues pragmatic goals; and Arlyck himself, who realizes halfway through the film that his self-propelled career feels "more like a blank page than a declaration of freedom." Fortunately, the involving Following Sean – which lets the air out of San Francisco's most celebrated era without being mean-spirited about it and draws extraordinary meaning from a relatively ordinary story – is anything but a blank page.

FOLLOWING SEAN Opens Fri/13 Lumiere Theatre (415) 267-4893 Act 1 & 2 (510) 464-5980 www.landmarktheatres.com www.followingsean.com.

Interview with Ralph Arlyck

By Cheryl Eddy

Ralph Arlyck recently stopped by the Bay Guardian offices to chat about the Sixties, the filmmaking process, Sean as a child and Sean as an adult, and the current popularity of documentaries.

Bay Guardian: What was it like writing for the Bay Guardian in its earliest years, during the late 1960s?

Ralph Arlyck: It was an extremely small operation. I got to this area in 1966, and I lived in Berkeley for a year and then moved into the city. I got myself into film school at San Francisco State and was making films but didn't have any means of support. My background had been journalism, so it seemed natural to look up a smaller operation. At that time, I think it was just Bruce [B. Brugmann] and a couple of other people. So, like any operation, when you join it when it's in the formative stages, it can be really interesting. It was great. I wrote, I think I took pictures – I did a variety of different things.

BG: When you were making the original film, Sean, did you have any idea it would be so controversial when it was released?

RA: I don't think I really had that idea – I just needed a subject for a film, and he seemed like such a wonderful subject. But I guess at some point in the process, I picked up that his mother might be concerned that it would be sensationalized. She was concerned that it would make them look like negligent parents. And they weren't – so I worried about that a little bit. I was surprised by the people who found Sean scary, part of an alarming phenomenon. I wasn't thinking that way. I guess I was kind of too much in the Haight – in a myopic frame of mind – to realize what Middle America would make of it. On the other hand, it's not a film that really got out to Middle America. It was picked up by some mainstream organs, but basically it was a student documentary.

BG: In Following Sean, your view of San Francisco in the 1960s is not exactly nostalgic. Have you encountered anyone who's taken issue with your point of view?

RA: This is not something that's often made explicit, but sometimes I get the sense that people say, "Don't touch my Sixties." I have a somewhat ambivalent attitude about it because even though it was exciting to be part of that moment, I also felt that there was a lot of dogma coming down that you really had to knuckle under. And that felt oppressive to me in some ways. I think other people are more attached to that time and those values than I am, though I also have a great fondness for the way I lived then.

BG: Prior to Following Sean, had you kept in touch with Sean since making the original film?

RA: I did keep in touch with Hon Brown, his grandmother – the communist grandmother – and she's the one who's really the center of the family. She keeps track of everybody. She's been in her same [San Francisco] house for years.

SFBG: How did the follow-up film come about? Over the years, I'm sure people were always asking what happened to Sean.

RA: Absolutely, yeah, people would often say that to me. But when you're a filmmaker, there's so much fundraising involved – it's complicated to make a movie. I thought [a follow-up to Sean] was a good idea, but it took me a long time to feel that there was enough interest in the period and that I could do it. It wasn't until the mid-90s that I got off the stick and said, "Let's do it."

BG: Was Sean up for it, or did you have to convince him to be in another movie?

RA: No, he was up for it. One of the things that's been so wonderful is that he never had an agenda for the film. He never was sort of hovering over it and saying, "What am I going to look like?" That's pretty true of that family in general. They don't worry about what other people think. I think, and maybe this is kind of pop psychology and a little facile, but I think it comes from the Communist grandparents. If you're a Communist American, you can't probably wonder a lot about what people are going to think about you. I think in their own way, Sean's parents were that way too. I think this carries down to Sean. I really believe that the freedom he was given early serves that well.

BG: Did you expect, when you started filming Sean again in 1994, that the process of making Following Sean would go on for ten years? How did that come about?

RA: A combination of a lot of things. One is, it's just hard to raise money for films. Many people work like I do, which is you start shooting, then you stop, then you fund-raise, and then you shoot more, then you start editing, and you show little sections to try to raise more money. It's just back and forth, and that drags it out for a very long time. And then the film was very hard to edit. It was very hard to make the two parts of the film work together – Sean's story and my story. When you make personal films – this film particularly, since it had a strong subject that was not me – there's always a tendency, like, what's this about? Is this about the kid, or is this about the filmmaker? Any time you make a personal film, when you use a first-person, you're walking the line of self-indulgence. So it was just very hard to make those stories not fight each other – to make the two stories connect and complement each other. Before we knew it, it was 10 years later.

BG: It's a happy coincidence, then, that when the new film ends, Sean's son is the same age that Sean was in the original.

RA: That's the upside of taking a long time to finish something. Wonderful things happen to your characters.

BG: When you set out to make Following Sean, did you know that you were going to make it personal and include your own family?

RA: A little bit, but never to that extent. I started out much more focused on the exterior subject, and I found that it became more personal as it went along. We reached a certain point in the cut where people were saying, you're either in or you're out. Either take yourself out completely and just make it a portrait of Sean, or you have to really do it. And I guess I decided that I had to really do it.

BG: What's Sean up to now, besides promoting the movie? Did he finish law school?

RA: He never went to law school – that's one of those things that's not quite clear in the film, despite the fact that we say it. He went to electrician school. He was teaching union electrician classes and for a while was doing that full-time. He's going back to doing regular electrician work. He said he actually wound up talking to a number of lawyers who talked him out of becoming a lawyer. He found out that they spend most of their time filling out papers – so he decided not to do that.

BG: Okay – totally changing gears. The Following Sean soundtrack features a lot of local San Francisco musicians, like Kelley Stoltz, Joanna Newsom, and Coachwhips. How did that come about?

RA: That was really largely due to my fellow producer, Malcolm Pullinger, who lives in the Bay Area and is a musician. He's the one who edited the film. He's really in touch with the San Francisco music scene, and that was really wonderful. So I would have to say that there were two reasons why that happened. Mainly because Malcolm was familiar with that music, but it's also the case that you can't get the rights to more obvious music. So it kind of forced us to be inventive and try something different, and I'm really happy that we did. There's a nice mix – there's some familiar Sixties music, and there's a lot of music that is much more in touch with what's happening here now.

BG: What do you think about the new surge of interest in documentaries these days?

RA: I'm delighted. I never would have dreamed that this would happen in my lifetime! I thought that we would always be consigned to associations with boring films in social studies classes. It's great to be bringing out a film at a time when people take documentaries seriously, and think that they can be fun – and that they can actually go to a theater and see them. I just would never have dreamed that that would happen to me, to all of us, who've done it for so many years. It's great. I'm really pleased.