Hollywood Studio Magazine (February 1968)

“Of course everybody is delighted with Nichols because he represents the old- time Hollywood in which you have lots of dialogue and stationary situations. The guy has a lot of talent and I have a great admiration because of it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the way he puts things together and the way he plays his angles.” Unions are another of Rooks’ pet peeves. “Chappaqua” was made without the ben¬ efit of Hollywood movie unions and as far from Hollywood as Rooks’ crews could get him. Explaining his adversion to film unions Rooks said with an easy smile: “I learned it is an industry de¬ signed to create more jobs. If I wanted to create a work of art it was secondary- in fact, it was highly unneeded. Once I grasped that, I realized what I was trying to do (with Hollywood union help) was totally insane.” But, coming from stubborn Missouri backgrounds, Rooks wasn’t one to be easily turned from making a film about his years as a drug addict. Realizing he couldn’t rely on hired help to make a film (at least until he knew enough about the medium himself to direct what he wanted to take place), Rooks set out to learn movie-making from the ground up by actual experience. As he remembers this period, Rooks said of himself: “It fas¬ cinated me that I might have the possi¬ bility of making an important film about drugs if I could learn fast enough. I want¬ ed to put it together totally out of my own head and being.” For more than 15 years Rooks had lived on the edge of a nightmare in the shadow world of hard drugs and booze. Coming from a wealthy family, Rooks found he was able to support almost any habit he cared to try. An alcoholic at 14, drug addiction at 18, with a crazy patch- work of international travel and experi¬ ences woven into the fabric of his life, Rooks led a life of almost complete self- indulgence. Freak-outs on the Cote d’Azur, opium dens in Ceylon, a stop-over with Tibetan monks, visions and mystical experiences, whatever was handy or seemed inter¬ esting. When his father died in 1962, Rooks was shocked out of his trance-like existence. He found himself alone and felt like he had to groW up. Gaining the presidency of Avon Prod¬ ucts, the older Rooks had no place to go, according to his son. Tired of stumbling through taverns in the U.S. and Europe, blunting his talents with body-abusing habits, Rooks decided to cure himself in a Swiss sanitarium where they feature a month’s sleeping withdrawal from nar¬ cotics. Now, five years later, Rooks won’t smoke or drink. “My father killed me with love. He was successful, and I tried to live in that orbit. He also gave me enough money for me to kill myself beau¬ tifully with booze and drugs,” Rooks said sadly. Far from blaming himself, Rooks con¬ demns Madison Avenue, “For,” as he puts it, “allowing liquor ads to imply masculinity has something to do with drinking.” Rooks can now talk about his near-fatal romance with debauchery with the air of a slightly tired battle veteran. Four years ago he decided to try and capture for others some of the hell he had known firsthand. Rejecting the idea of committing his experiences to print, Rooks settled on film. “Since the subject of drugs is such a visual and audio sub¬ ject, I think it is far more powerful to try and express it with images. It certainly gets nearer the world I wanted to por¬ tray.” Just what he originally wanted to do with whatever he got on film doesn’t seem to be clear. One gets the impres¬ sion he simply wanted to get his years of addiction off his chest and forget it - something on the order of self-analysis. Like many a genius before him, however, Rooks soon found he was just as commit¬ ted to film-making as he had been to drugs and alcohol previously. “It was simply a process of involvement that occurred,” he explained with a light shrug of his muscular shoulders. “I never intended to make a feature film; I never intended it to cost that much money . ..” Like Topsey before it, “Chap¬ paqua” literally just “grew.” Working without a script or really clear idea of what the final outcome would be, Rooks set to work, making flying trips around the world with Robert Frank one of the nation’s top underground photographers spawned by the “nudie” film industry in New York. Rooks found settings in France, the U.S., Mexico, England, India, Ceylon and Jamaica for his Russel Hardwick, the tragic hero of “Chappaqua,” to at his cinematic nightmare in. As a former printer who learned to combine the four basic colors, Rooks tried to duplicate the “whiteout” of a drug vision with various combinations of sepia tone, violet tone, black-and-white and Technicolor footage that has been double exposed, triple-ex¬ posed and even quadruple exposed. But it is not how Rooks accomplished his image-making, but the total effect it has on the viewer that is the most impor¬ tant important. Since the filming of “Chappaqua” began, Rooks has launched a one-man crusade against the evils of drug addiction and drinking. It is almost reminiscent of the one-woman movie cru¬ sade of Mrs. Wallace Reid, who set out in 1923 to avenge her actor-husband’s death from drugs with a film she directed and paid for called “Human Wreckage,” gave audiences of the time a glimpse of the evils of drugs. In fact, when one stops to think about it, Bela Lugosi was on the “H” habit (heroin) for many years. When he kicked the habit, in a hospital and returned to normal life, the aging actor used his for¬ mer fame as “Dracula” to spread the word among young people through con¬ fession articles denouncing drugs and drinking. It’s also likely if Cary Nation had known something about movie-mak¬ ing, we might have seen a rash of films about saloon smashing, but thankfully the country was spared that. In general, Hollywood has yet to decide what to do with the subject of drugs and the so-called “mind expanding” portions currently in vogue around the country. Not to be left out of anything that is com¬ mercially exploitable, one studio recent-