The Self as Hero

Most people, when they feel autobiographical urges, sit down and commit their story to the typewriter, or just talk to the wife, a bartender or a psychiatrist. Not Conrad Rooks. He decided to make a movie about himself. The result is Chappaqua, named after the Westchester County commuters' village where Rooks spent what he considers the only happy years of his youth (from 8 to 13). The film is an 82-minute phantasmagoric apologia pro sua dolce vita in which the ex-junkie-alcoholic takes himself into and then out of the world of addiction and related vice.

Aided by the fluent camerawork of Robert Frank and Etienne Becker, Rooks served as his own writer, director and star, turning himself inside out on the screen. He traces his course from mixed-up rich man's son along a dizzying downward spiral, through some hard-edged therapy at a Paris sanatorium, and toward the bright end of self-realization. Rooks sees most of his life from a hospital bed in a series of intricate overlapping flashbacks that add up to a collage of visions, ranging from drug-inspired distortion to moments of near lucidity. A razor-sharp editing job and imaginative juxtaposition of black-and-white and color succeed as few films have in suggesting how alcoholic and narcotic hallucinations appear to the beholder.

Rooks is an amateur at film making, and it shows: plot coherence is not one of Chappaqua's strengths. Nevertheless, he lured Veteran French Actor Jean-Louis Barrault into playing a key role as the sanatorium's head doctor, and persuaded Sitarist Ravi Shankar to write a vibrant background score that often deservedly moves into the foreground. The film is otherwise peopled by a random collection of the current cool, including Novelist William Burroughs, Poet Allen Ginsberg and Jazzman Ornette Coleman in bit parts.

Rooks, now 32, put 41 years into the making of Chappaqua, along with an inherited $500,000. He refers to the project as a "rehabilitation program," and claims that "any halfway-intelligent spectator will see that it is not favorable to drug addiction." His only previous movie experience came at 21, when he had a brief fling in production at Expert Films, Inc., part of Manhattan's nudie industry (TIME, Oct. 20). That ended when Rooks was arrested for possession of narcotics. Given a three-year suspended sentence, he drifted in and out of odd jobs and a brief marriage, occasionally stealing cash from his father's wallet to buy dope.

When his father died in 1962, Rooks repaired his shattered psyche at a Swiss sanatorium, along lines that suggest the substance of the film and his ultimate redemption. Currently, he neither drinks nor smokes, lives in a Manhattan town house, and bristles with new film projects. He already has a contract with U.S. Distributor Walter Reade to film Hermann Hesse's mystical Siddhartha in India next January. "Hesse," says Rooks, "answers the three questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? If I can make a film showing this, I can reassure people of the meaning of existence."

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