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Mumford is not a great film, but it is a film full of great moments and delicious characters. I worked on the trailer for this film, and saw it all the way through at least five times, and saw the trailer editor's select-reel over twenty times. I saw many scenes hundreds of times, because the studio made us cut over 40 versions of the trailer, and then we made about a half-dozen TV spots. Unlike most movies that start to get very tired after a few viewings, Mumford just kept giving up more secrets and revealing more little gem-like moments every time I watched it.

It's about a young psycho-therapist named Mumford who moves into a small Pacific Northwest town called Mumford. He begins to help a lot of people with their problems, and disrupts the nice, comfortable business of the town's two existing therapists. But Mumford has a secret, and the potential revelation of his secret drives the rather thin, low-key plot.

The movie isn't really about the plot. The plot follows an unusual trajectory, timed very differently than other movies with a similar secret at their heart, and ultimately has trouble finding a satisfying ending. It isn't so much about Dr. Mumford himself, either, who is scripted very low-key and given a rather weak performance by Loren Dean (which is the film's other main problem). This combination of weaknesses makes Mumford different from a lot of formula films, and at the end, you feel a little unresolved.

But on the other hand, it's hugely enjoyable all the way through. Why? Because it's really about the people Mumford meets and the transformations he inspires in them. Among the stand-outs are Zoe Deschanel, who steals the movie with her adorable debut performance as a disaffected teen forced to attend therapy after a drug bust; Jason Lee as an insecure skateboarding software billionaire; Hope Davis as a psychosomatically fatigued daughter of an overbearing mother; Ted Danson in a hilarious one-scene role as a rich schmuck; Mary MacDonnell in a kind of trance-state as his mail-order shopping-obsessed wife; the wonderful David Paymer as the town's leading psycho-therapist who affects red cowboy boots; Jane Adams as his rather mousy colleague and lover; and Pruitt Taylor Vince is delightful as a man with an exceptionally rich fantasy life.

This movie confused the Disney marketing department, who desperately wanted to make it into a teen comedy. (It isn't.) It was ultimately dumped onto the market with only one TV spot which did not run much, because the studio had no faith in it. Nobody saw it, which is a real pity.

In the trailer business, where you see and become intimately familiar with dozens of movies every year, I tended to divide movies into three categories: 1) Movies worth paying to see, 2) movies worth seeing for free, and 3) movies not worth watching under any circumstances because they're just an unrewarding theft of your time. Mumford falls into Category 1 for me.

Anastasia was a sort of landmark picture, in its own ironic way. It was a production that showed you what animation really could be, and simultaneous;y demonstrated why it probably wouldn't happen in the foreseeable future. The story of Anastasia (as it was laid out in the 1950's play) is made beautifully, brilliantly, thrillingly. Grafted onto it, in an all-too-obvious and sadly misguided commercial strategy, is the bizarre subplot of the supervillain Rasputin and his sidekick, the albino bat Bartok. The movie-studio logic that instigated this bit of narrative frankensteining is patently obvious:

animation means child audience children need good and evil to root for Evil needs a sidekick to talk about his evilness with Merchandising needs a character to sell to the boys (Bartok) or it'll just be a girl-flick and we'll lose half the money.

Alas. Movie studios have to chasae a buck, they need it to keep making movies. Sometimes, they do it intelligently and great film-making results. This is the other way they pursue it, studio logic at its most craven and cowardly. The entire Rasputin-Bartok aspect of the movie is godawful. The notion that Bartok might somehow be appealing is appalling. The integration of the two aspects of the movie is virtually non-existent. Large animation projects are generally executed by several different teams working concurrently, and integrating the the different segments with some stylistic consistency is part of the art of the supervising team. It is utterly absent here. In a way, that's a good thing, because it keeps the "bad movie" from tainting the "good movie."

But the message is all too clear: "we can't just make a good drama or romance in animated form, because we can't trust anyone over the age of 9 to come to an animated film. So if it's animation, we have to pander to children." And in their eagerness to pander, they made the supposedly kid-friendly part of the film so bad it's insulting to any audience of any age.

Which is a real pity, because the Anastasia story, the real one, is an excellent movie that advanced the art of animated narrative.

This work comes out of the era when people were starting to distinguish between "movies" and "films," and Dr. Chicago is not a movie. I saw it in Phill Niblock's SoHo loft around 1976, as the centerpiece of an evening of avant garde films. (Other filmmakers represented included Bruce Conner and Ken Jacobs, to give you some context.) I could not say what it's 'about' in a narrative sense. I'm not sure I ever knew. I have a vague recollection that the title character, Dr. Chicago, is an abortionist on the run (but this may be entirely mistaken.) What I believed it to be about at the time - and I still believe that - is "seeing." More than almost any other film I can think of, the images are the content. It is a quality shared somewhat with the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, but Manupelli goes much farther with it than Tarkovsky usually did.

(I note that George Manupelli is listed as writer and cinematographer, and that no director is listed. At the time I saw it, it was clearly presented as the work of George Manupelli, that he was the filmmaker.) The film is composed of very long takes, many of them probably full 10 minute camera reels. The camera is static through most of the film. I do not remember any cutting within a scene, which is to say, each take was a scene and vice versa.

Many of the images were highly layered. I remember one in particular where the title character, Dr. Chicago, sat in a semi-darkened room talking to a woman who was lying on a bed. He was seen in profile through a screen door. The late afternoon light on the screen rendered him half visible, the woman almost invisible. He talked in a low, rhythmic voice. The scene was hypnotic. After a while of looking at it, the screen seemed to undulate and produce weird light patterns. The longer you looked, the more you saw. That's another thing Manupelli shares with Tarkovsky: the work requires great patience on the part of the viewer, and a willingness to keep looking and let the images wash over the eye and accumulate an effect.

It is worth noting that the character Dr. Chicago is played by Alvin Lucier, a renowned New Music composer and theorist. Alvin was a student and friend of John Cage, and has been a professor of Music at Wesleyan University for decades, where he has trained an entire generation of composers.

I don't know if it possible to see Cry Dr. Chicago anywhere anymore. In it's time, it was part of the category called Underground Films. (That name has been applied to a very different sort of film recently.) If there is still an audience for these films, I think it has probably gone underground.

It is a stunning work in its way, composed of motion photographs and, as I remember, very sparing sound. I would not call it minimalist, because the images were often complex. By its reduction of sensory inputs to a few elements, it achieves one of the properties that I personally believe is common to all great art: experiencing it teaches you about how your senses work.