Biograph Times: Part Four: '73's Follies and '74's Timeline of Changes

Rebus reminiscing about what mattered in 1973.

By F.T. Rea

Fan Free Funnies

Note: This is a piece I penned about the time in which underground comics mattered, culturally. It was published by Style Weekly on Oct. 21, 2009. It ran as a sidebar to a feature story about editor Françoise Mouly interviewing artist R. Crumb at CenterStage in Richmond. 

*

During the spring semester of the 1972-1973 school year the student newspaper at Virginia Commonwealth University published three tabloid supplements that were inspired by the irreverent, frequently-salty underground "comix" of that age. The first issue of Fan Free Funnies came out near 1973's St. Valentine's Day.

The timing was perfect for Fan Free Funnies. It was created at the zenith of the hippie era in the Fan District. FFF published my first Rebus strip.

Before Rebus even had a name he had been appearing as a spokesdog on flyers touting midnight shows at the Biograph Theatre, which I managed at the time. Rebus was somewhat influenced by R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, in that I went to school on how Crumb used Mr. Natural as a spokesman, sometimes like a carnival barker. However, Rebus was hardly a holy man. Instead, he was an everyman schlemiel with a dog's head.

In that time some local, mostly VCU-trained artists, were making paintings and prints in a style reminiscent of some old animated cartoons of the 1930s and then-current underground funny books. Some of the same young artists also were making short films in Super 8 and 16mm. So the Biograph became a hub of a sort for them.

Not long after FFF came out, my 3-year-old daughter, Katey, asked me a question. “Is Rebus real?”

I shrugged. “What do you mean?”

She said, “Like Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck.”

“Sure,” I said, “Rebus is real. But only the cool people know about him.”

The inspirational Crumb was the most celebrated of the underground artists in the days when cartoonists bitterly lampooning the tastes and values of middle class America were making an impact on popular culture. Spontaneously, Crumb launched the movement in 1968, selling his “Zap Comix No. 1” out of a baby carriage on San Francisco sidewalks.

In 1973, in spite of cultural changes that had been in the air for years, mainstream pop culture was still serving up plenty of safe schmaltz and accessible old hat: Billboard's top single of the year was “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree.” A month after the first issue of FFF was published the Oscar for the Best Picture of 1972 was presented to “The Godfather.” Thus, the term “underground,” as associated with art, film and music, still had a yet-to-be-fully exploited edge to it.

Perhaps the best known of the FFF cartoonists was Phil Trumbo (VCU 1972). “Ed Slipek, the editor of VCU's student newspaper, Commonwealth Times, approached me to help create an underground, comix-style supplement,” Trumbo remembers. “I suppose he contacted me because I had done some independent comics and was exhibiting paintings influenced by comics imagery.”

Each invited artist was instructed by Slipek to create a full page, drawn to proportion, in black and white. Some submitted a page of images set within traditional comic strip frames; others wandered into loose, more avant-garde styles. Scans of the three issues of Richmond's 1973 underground comics can now be seen online at the VCU Libraries Digital Collection.

“The journalism department at VCU didn't see that this was journalism,” recalls Slipek (who is, today, Style's senior contributing writer). “The media [advisory] board questioned the fact that we were doing this, but it was very well-received with the students. I'm proud of it because the Commonwealth Times continued to have comics of some sort — it's a lasting tradition that started with us.”

Trumbo left Richmond in 1984 to pursue a career in animation, which eventually led him to the West Coast and his current position as an art director at Hidden City Games. Along the way he picked up an Emmy Award for his work on “Pee Wee's Playhouse” and has been the art director of more than 100 video games, including “Lord of the Rings” and “Spider-Man.” Also a noteworthy musician, Trumbo recently returned home to play a reunion show with the Orthotonics, the influential Richmond band that he played with during his time here.

Charles Vess (VCU 1974) is another award-winning illustrator who contributed to FFF. Vess' art has since appeared in “Heavy Metal” and “National Lampoon”; he's a World Fantasy Award-winner who has worked for comic book publishers such as Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Epic. Other contributors to the 1973 series included Bruce Barnes, Eric Bowman, Michael Cody, Greg Kemp, Nancy Meade, Bill Nelson, Trent Nicholas and Ragan Reaves.

“Fan Free Funnies was a really diverse collection, representing vastly different graphic styles and inventive, experimental approaches to sequential storytelling,” Trumbo remembers. “We were all influenced by the amazing work of '60s underground cartoonists, like Robert Crumb, Rick Griffith, S. Clay Wilson and Trina Robbins and the rest.” 

Note: Scans of the art presented in the three issues of Fan Free Funnies can be found here.

*

Discovering the Fan 

In the spring of 1973 an ad hoc group of 21 merchants along the commercial strip, just north of most of VCU's Fan District campus, cooperated for a one-time-only promotion called Discover the Fan. It should be noted that none of the participating businesses are still there today.

On April 14, 1973 a lingering cold spell left town and warm breezes brought in a bright spring day. For that Saturday afternoon the 800 and 900 blocks of West Grace Street, and environs, were packed with an unprecedented amount of foot traffic. Hundreds of helium-filled balloons and free prizes donated by the merchants were given away. The street was not closed and the vehicular traffic was slowed to a crawl all day. There was live music on-stage.

Motorists traveling toward the West End were treated to an unexpected scene, given the neighborhood's then-bohemian image. (Grace Street was a busy one-way street heading west in those days.) On that Saturday there were thousands of ordinary people milling about having a good time. Many of them acted like tourists on a lark. Kids with balloons were everywhere.

The illustration below is a scan of a handbill done by yours truly. With its list of participating businesses it provides a snapshot of the area in what was probably the zenith of the hippie age. Some of the characters who ran those businesses were rather interesting people. (H/t: One-on-One co-owner Fred Awad came up with the name for the event.)

At this time I had been the manager of the Biograph Theatre for a little over a year and the Discover the Fan promotion itself was my project. I convinced my fellow merchants to chip in and promote our oddball collection of businesses as the equivalent of a hip shopping center in the middle of town. Many people helped put it together and worked on aspects of it, but the happening couldn't have come about without the help of Dave DeWitt and Chuck Wrenn (the Biograph's assistant manager), which was significant.

Below is a piece about this event. It was penned by the late Shelley Rolfe:

Shelley Rolfe’s
By the Way
Richmond Times-Dispatch (April, 16, 1973)

It was breakfast time and the high command for Discover the Fan Day had, with proper regard for the inner man, moved its final planning meeting from the Biograph Theater to Lum’s Restaurant. Breakfast tastes ran a gamut. Eggs with beer. Eggs with orange juice. H-hour -- the operations plan had set it for noon -- was less than three hours away. Neither beer nor orange juice was being gulped nervously.

Terry Rea, manager of the Biograph and the extravaganza’s impresario, was reciting a last-minute, mental things-to-do list. There was the vigilante committee, which would gather up the beer and soft drink cans and bottles that invariably infest the fronts of the shops in the 800 and 900 blocks of W. Grace St., focus area of the discovery.

The city police had promised a dragnet to sweep away the winos who also invariably litter the neighborhood. The day had bloomed crisp and sunny, the first dry Saturday since Groundhog Day. “I knew it wouldn’t rain,” Rea said with the brash confidence of the young. “Lots of young businessmen around here,” a beer drinker at another table said. The free enterprise system lives.

REA WAS assigning duties for the committee that would rope off two Virginia Commonwealth University parking lots that would serve as the setting for a fashion show and band concert. The committee to blow up balloons, with the aid of a cylinder of helium [sic]. One thousand balloons in a shrieking variety of colors. “If we only get 500 kids... two to a customer,” Rea said cheerfully.

“I need more people,” said the balloon task force leader.

Twenty-one businesses were involved in the project. Each of them had contributed prizes, and gift certificates had been put into plastic Easter eggs. An egg hunt would be part of the day, and Rea had a message for the committee that would be tucking the eggs away: “Don’t put them in obvious places, but don’t put them were people can get hurt looking for them.”

“We talked about doing this last summer but we never got it together,” Rea said. There had been fresh talk in late February, early March, and it had become airborne. The 21 businesses had anted up $1,500 for advertising, which was handled by Dave DeWitt, proprietor of a new just-out-of-the-Fan, small, idea-oriented agency.

“Demographically, we were aiming for people between 25 and 34,” Rea said. There had been newspaper advertising and spots on youth-oriented radio stations. “We had a surplus late in the week...” Rea said. The decision was made to have a Saturday morning splurge on radio station WRVA. “Hey,” said a late arrival, “I heard Alden Aaroe talking about it.”

“We wanted people to see what we have here,” Rea said. “People who probably close their windows and lock their doors when they drive on Grace Street and want to get through here a quickly as possible.”

Well, yes, there must be those who look upon the 800 and 900 blocks as symbolic of the counterculture, as territory alien to their visions of West End and suburban existence. Last November the precinct serving the 800 and 900 blocks went for George McGovern, by two votes. Not a landslide, but, perhaps, a trend.

NOON WAS approaching. Rea and DeWitt set out on an inspection tour. Parking lot ropes were being put into place. Rock music blared from exotically named shops. The balloon committee was still short on manpower. An agent trotted out of a shop to report, “They’ve got 200 customers ...” And how many would they normally have at this hour of a Saturday” “They wouldn’t be open,” Rea said.

Grace Street was becoming clogged with cars It would become more clogged. Don’t know how many drivers got out of their cars, but, for a while they were a captive audience making at least vicarious discovery.

Also much pedestrian and bicycle on the sidewalks. Merchants talked of espying strangers, of all ages. A white-haired woman held a prize egg in one hand, a balloon in the other. A middle-aged man had rakishly attached a balloon to the bill of his cap.

The fashion show went on to the accompaniment of semijazz music and popping balloons, most of them held by children. Fashions were subdued. A dress evocative of the 1840s. Long skirts. Loudest applause went to a man who paraded across the stage wearing a loud red backpack. Everybody’s urge to escape?

ON GRACE STREET a sword swallower and human pin cushion was on exhibition. No names please. “My mother ...” he said. He wished to be identified only as a member of “Bunkie Brothers Medicine Show.”

Discounted merchandise on sale included 20-yesr-old British Army greatcoats and a book fetchingly titled “Sensuous Massage.” Sales resistance remained firm.

On Harrison Street a sidewalk artist was creating. A wino, who had somehow escaped the dragnet, lurched across the sidewalk art muttering. “Free balloons ...” In a shop a man said, “I want the skimpiest halter you have ... for my wife.”

On an alley paralleling Grace Street, a man holding a hand camera and early on a VCU class assignment was directing actors. One stationed in a huge trash bin. “Waiting for Godot” revisited? The second, carrying a an umbrella in one hand, popcorn in another, approached the bin. A hand darted out for popcorn. “I ran out of film!” screamed the director.

Everything was being done again. The actor in the bin emerged, seized the umbrella and ran. “Chase him,” from the direct. Actor No. 2 did a Keystone Kop-style double take, jumped and ran. A small crowd that had gathered applauded.

LATE IN the day. Traffic still was at a saturation level. Early settlers said the territory hadn’t seen such congestion since the movie, “Deep Throat.” Rea spoke of objectives smashingly achieved. Euphoric talk from him on another day of discovery in September. City Hall would be petitioned to block off Grace Street.

The writer, Rolfe, lived only a few blocks away from the Biograph, so he was actually quite familiar with the cinema I managed and the surroundings he described. This was a day in which many things could have gone wrong, but didn't. So it is remembered fondly. Some of the participating merchants said they set new records for business in one day.   

 *

  A 1974 Timeline of Changes

The last American last combat troops left Vietnam in 1973. Since the horrors of the Vietnam War had loomed over our political and cultural landscape for a decade, in 1974 the absence of war made for a different vibe. During 1974 a lot changed in the U.S.A.; probably more changes than most years.  

 

However, of the many changes that were in the air during 1974, the one that stayed at the top of the news was the steady unraveling of Richard Nixon's presidency.

 

With the turning of those two significant pages of history the zenith of the hippie era itself was behind us and styles in music, politics, movies, drugs, clothes, hairdos and you-name-it began moving in different directions. 

 

For my demographic group, the 20-somethings, the temptation to celebrate having been right about Vietnam and Nixon was irresistible. So it was an excellent time for a party. Maybe in an empty warehouse or an art studio ... at least, that's how I remember it ... looking back through the compression of a long lens.

 

*   

 

While some of 1974's changes were fairly predictable, others seemed to come from out of the blue. For instance, not many of us foresaw the most popular gesture of civil disobedience and group defiance on campus during the '60s and early-'70s -- the protest march -- would mutate into impromptu gatherings to cheer for naked people running by. Well, in the spring of '74, streaking on college campuses suddenly became a national phenomenon. 

 

It seemed most folks laughed off the streaking fad, or they just didn't care much. Yet, some people were outraged into quivering fits by it. Naturally, such reactions inspired some adventurous young people in the Fan District to get in the act.

 

However, after hearing about incidents of streaking on Virginia Commonwealth University's campus, Richmond’s police chief, Frank S. Duling, told the media that his department would not tolerate streaking on the city’s streets, in the alleys, etc. He promised to do his duty to rid the city of the threat streaking posed.  

 

Then a VCU spokesperson insisted that if the streaking occurs on campus, that would be a university matter. So it would be properly dealt with by its own police personnel. 

 

Truth be told, the relationship between the City of Richmond and VCU was still working itself out in 1974. VCU had been growing by leaps and bounds in the time since its 1968 creation, by way of the merger of Richmond Professional Institute and the Medial College of Virginia. All that sudden growth was rubbing some Richmonders the wrong way.

 

It should be remembered that VCU's academic campus had some busy (and still has) city streets running though it. Thus, it wasn't altogether clear to everyone just who ought to have the say-so over the university's exhibitionist students playing on those city streets and sidewalks.

Moreover, leading up to this point, there had been a series of the-cops-vs-the-kids skirmishes in the lower Fan District, on or near the VCU campus. The most bitterly remembered of them occurred after Allen Ginsberg spoke at the VCU gym on Oct. 12, 1970. Reports I've read and the many firsthand accounts I've heard have agreed that the city police used overkill force to break up what was essentially a spontaneous outdoor after-party in the vicinity of N. Harrison St, where Grove Ave. and Park Ave. converge. 

 

Hell broke loose. Debris was thrown. It was said a cop was hit by a flying piece of brick. K-9 dogs were unleashed upon the crowd. It was a turf war mess. Then there were lots of resentments to do with the increased pot busts in the neighborhood, frequently facilitated by the squealing of undercover narcs. 

 

There were other lesser clashes in the neighborhood. Anyway, grudges were held. So, leading up to the incident described below, which played out three-and-a-half years later,  there was a troubled history . 

 

By about 10 p.m. of March 19, 1974, several small groups of streakers had already made some quick runs on the streets, sidewalks and between buildings near the intersection of Shafer and Franklin Streets. Cops on patrol rode by a few times, but took no action. 

 

At first... 

Then four young adults slowly rode along of the 800 block of W. Franklin in a convertible and stole the show. As they stood up in the middle of the block -- as naked as jaybirds -- and waved, the crowd of some 150 spectators cheered. 

 

At this point the prevailing mood was quite festive. Peaceful, too. Because I was in that crowd when the convertible passed by, I know this firsthand. It all happened just a block from the Biograph Theatre, on Grace St., where I worked. Trent Nicholas, also on the theater's staff, and I had noticed the commotion and walked over to see what would happen.

Then a group of maybe 60-to-70 city policemen zoomed into the scene on small motorbikes and in squad cars. They were executing what appeared to be a planned raid. They wasted no time in arresting the four streakers in the convertible. The crowd booed.  

 

After a lull in the action, several uniformed policemen suddenly charged into the assembled spectators on the sidewalks and lawns on either side of Franklin St. Other than the crowd booing the cops for arresting the streakers, I don't remember any particular provocation for that abrupt change. A few of the bystanders were randomly seized, dragged into the middle of the street, roughed up and thrown into paddy wagons. 

 

One kid, close to where I was standing, was shoved from his bicycle to the curb. Two cops grabbed him and slammed him several times against the front fender of a police car in the middle of the street. By then the crowd was scattering. A few unlucky bystanders were beaten with clubs or flashlights.  

 

What set the cops off that night on Franklin St. is still a mystery to me. Maybe they were following orders. I didn't stick around to ask. By the way, as I remember it, VCU cops were conspicuous by their absence.

 

Two weeks later, in Los Angeles, a man named Robert Opel streaked across the stage of the 46th Academy Awards ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. On the live broadcast, as Opel ran by, flashing a peace sign with his hand, the upstaged host, David Niven, promptly jabbed: "The only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings."

Other Noteworthy Events in 1974

Jan. 2: To conserve precious gasoline in an oil shortage crisis, President Richard Nixon signed a new federal law, mandating a 55 mph speed limit, coast-to-coast. (Imagine how that would go over today!)

 

Jan. 12: After narrowly defeating Henry Howell in the general election, Mills Godwin was sworn in for his second term as governor of Virginia. He had been elected governor as a Democrat in 1965. It turned out, he was the last of the string of Byrd Machine Democrats to serve as governor (1966-'70). In 1973, for his second term, Godwin ran as a Republican. 

 

In this time it was fashionable for conservative Southern Democrats to cross over, to sit other side of the aisle. Virginia's Republican Party, which had previously been the more liberal of the Commonwealth's two parties on some issues, suddenly absorbed a flock of right-wing politicians who had once been a part of the deplorable Massive Resistance movement that had fought the integration of Virginia's public schools. 

   

Feb. 4: Patty Hearst was abducted. Eight days later a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army told the extremely well-to-do Hearst family it had to cough up $230 million in food aid to the poor.

Feb. 11: Richmond's Biograph Theatre celebrated its second anniversary with free movies, free beer and a wee prank. Once all the seats were filled for the 6:30 p.m. show -- "The Devil and Miss Jones" and "Beaver Valley" -- thousands who had lined up were turned away. 

 

A couple of hundred simply stayed in line, to be sure of getting into the 9 p.m. show. When the essential details of the prank reached them, as they waited, some left once they heard no skin flicks were being screened. Others stayed for the second show, anyway.
 
Mar. 2: President Nixon was named as a "co-conspirator" in the Watergate cover-up by a federal grand jury. Later on the public learned about how damn crazy Nixon got in his last months in office. Yet, at this point in the story, it was still hard to see that he wasn't going to last out the year.

Mar. 29: After flying by and photographing Venus in February, the Mariner 10 reached its closest point to Mercury. Photos of Mercury beamed back to NASA revealed a barren landscape not unlike the Earth's moon.
 

Apr. 8: Playing for the Atlanta Braves, outfielder Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s supposedly "unbreakable" career home run record with his 715th round-tripper. Eventually, the public was told about the many sick messages, including death threats, Aaron had received from the public leading up to his feat. Once again, we could plainly see that for some dyed-in-the-wool racists nothing would ever change.

Apr. 15: According to photographic evidence Patty “Tania” Hurst seemed to be helping her captors rob a bank at gunpoint. It was hard to know what to make of it. Tania?

April 27: At the Cherry Blossom Music Festival, staged at Richmond's City Stadium, club-wielding peace officers and pissed off hippies made national news. Headlined by the Steve Miller Band and Boz Scaggs that well-attended event (which I did not attend) turned out to be when the feud between the two groups finally boiled over. Accounts said things got totally out of hand when police officers attempted to arrest some pot-smoking members of the festival's audience. 

 

Several police cars were destroyed during what turned into a four-hour battle. A friend shot some color 16mm film of the scene that looked like news footage from a third world country. In all, 76 people were arrested. The fallout from this unprecedented melee put the kibosh on any outdoor rock 'n' roll shows in Richmond -- with alcohol available on the site -- for several years. 

 

May 10: A great offbeat thriller, "The Conversation," began a two-week run. The booking was owing to a lucky quirk of business that allowed the Biograph, an independent cinema, to play several of Paramount's top first-run pictures that year. Paramount (the distributor) and Neighborhood Theatres (the dominant local chain) weren't speaking for a few months.

 

May 15: Richmond-based A.H. Robins Co. yielded to pressure from the feds to take its contraceptive device, the Dalkon Shield, off the market.

May 17: A tongue-in-cheek article published in New Times, penned by Nina Totenberg, listed the 10 dumbest people in Congress. Virginia's Sen. William Scott was put atop the list. A week later Scott called a press conference to deny the charge. Scott: "I'm not a dunce." 
 

June 28: "Chinatown," another Paramount first-run picture, premiered at the Biograph. It ran five weeks. The games the staff played using lines from the movie were plentiful and a lot of fun. During that five-week run it became my all-time favorite movie. It still is. 

 

My favorite line in "Chinatown" is spoken by Noah Cross (John Huston): "'Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."

 
July 27: The House Judiciary Committee voted 27-11 to impeach Nixon. Three days later the Supreme Court said Nixon had to surrender tape recordings of White House meetings that had been sought by the Watergate investigation’s special prosecutor. While Nixon's presidency was surely in a death spiral he continued to vow that he would never resign.  

Aug. 9: Nixon resigned. Gerald Ford was immediately sworn in as president. 

Aug. 12: The Biograph Theatre closed for four weeks to be converted into a rather awkward twin cinema. The work was done by a chemically-fueled, round-the-clock construction crew. The Liar's Poker games in the middle of the night were the stuff of legends.

Sept. 8: Ford pardoned Nixon, which didn't come as much of a surprise, but it still frustrated a lot of people who wanted to see him to face the music.

Oct. 29: Muhammad Ali regained the world heavyweight boxing crown he had lost by refusing to be drafted into the army in 1967. In Zaire, Ali defeated the heavily favored champion, George Foreman, by a knockout in the eighth round. 

Nov. 13: Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, addressed the UN with a pistol strapped to his waist. Supporters of Israel cringed. Israel's enemies puffed up their chests. Lovers of peace weren't necessarily encouraged, but hoped for the best.

Nov. 24: The 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of an early human ancestor was discovered in Ethiopia. The scientists who found it named the skeleton, “Lucy.”

Dec. 10: "Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones," a first-run concert film, began a four-week engagement at the Biograph in No. 1 (the larger auditorium). A special sound system was brought in to beef up the surround sound to rock 'n' roll concert level. 

 

Dec. 19: The former governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate Republican, was sworn in as Vice President.  

Dec. 28: The last published Billboard Top 100 list of 1974 revealed that the No. 1 pop single of the year was Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were." 

*

1974 Note 1: During 1974, Richmond's Biograph made a lot of news, local and elsewhere. That process revealed to me just how much most of the local press seemed to want to help the Biograph succeed. In any city advertising and media pros tended to like art house cinemas. The same went for college art and communications professors. To that community we were the risk-taking good guys of the local film scene. 

 

Thus, after three years of learning on the fly how to manage Richmond's repertory cinema(s), I could see that to succeed at the box office often enough to keep the place open in the years ahead, I probably had to get better at helping that community to help us.   

 

1974 Note 2: Of the three partners who worked in the Biograph offices in Georgetown, the one I knew the best was David Levy. In early-1974 he split, to go his own way. Levy soon began operating his own cinema, also in Georgetown, The Key. 

 

1974 Note 3: In late-February of 1974 Trent Nicholas and I shot the 16mm footage that went into "Matinee Madcap." We used borrowed equipment (shout-out to Mike Moore). 

 

Trent played the protagonist, a harmless pauper trying to sneak into the cinema. Bernie Hall played the dutiful usher/schlemeil, determined to stop the freeloader. Others on the theater's staff and several friends played various supporting roles and served as extras. A nine-minute black-and-white comedy, it was styled after the classic silent two-reelers of the 1920s.  

 

It was basically a string of gags held together by the thinnest of plots. All of the film's action was shot at the theater. It ends on the sidewalk in front of the theater with a brief homage to Charlie Chaplin.

 

Over the next couple of weeks I edited it in the theater's office. Then, in a few more weeks, with me kibbitzing, Dave DeWitt added the sound track in his studio; for the sound we "sampled" a bunch of different pop music snippets. The style we used borrowed from what we had developed producing a bunch of goofy radio spots promoting the Biograph's midnight shows.

 

In the next several years that followed, "Matinee Madcap" was screened at the Biograph countless times. It was exhibited at a film festival in D.C. and received brief praise from critic Tom Shales in the Washington Post. Brief.

 

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