With: Paul Auster, Norman Mailer,
George Plimpton, and William Styron

“The fascinating life story of its subject, a brilliant man whose early life reads like a road map to the ideologies of the beat era… Cool, revelatory anecdotes from the likes of George Plimpton and Norman Mailer make it an invaluable record of one magnetic man’s historical footprint.”
– New York Magazine


Absorbing! Could have been subtitled Portrait of the Artist as a Madman… Doc emerges as a quintessential countercultural figure, embodying both the exuberance and the excesses of the times. More poignantly, Immy Humes finds redemption for the father who was often too preoccupied or too sick to tend to his family.” – Tom Beer, Time Out NY

“The latest in a series of documentary films… made about an esteemed and estranged relative by one
of the subject’s offspring. It is also one of the very best. Directed with tight, but understated control
by Immy Humes… (Norman) Mailer is particularly eloquent about Humes’s larger-than-life personality and the ebbing and flowing sanity that went with it. Expert blending of period documentary footage… some of the most well-spoken talking heads ever assembled… tempered by the affecting tenderness
of first-person emotional subjectivity… nothing short of inspiring…deliciously ironic…a fine film.”
– Bruce Bennett, The New York Sun

“(A) lively and loving documentary!” – V.A. Musetto, New York Post

“An extraordinary true story! The work achieves a fine balance between intimacy and a broad, culturally and historically nuanced perspective. Rediscovering Doc Humes is like opening a series of fat files filled with essential, yet unknown secrets about the 20th century literary world. The reprinting of Doc’s novels after almost 50 years will bring a major writer back to life.”
– Elizabeth Bachner, Film-Forward

“An engaging time capsule of ‘60s downtown subversive culture.” – Lisa Rosman, Flavorpill

“An exquisite example of a real life story given newfound dimension through a playful, scattershot montage… glued together by the film’s delectable soundtrack choices. The stylistic success here is so great that it’s easy to lose sight of the film’s central figure, a brilliant and inventive figure with a mind
as divergent and curious as the construction of the film itself… By so expertly meshing subject and approach, DOC achieves that rare case of a person truly given new life on the silver screen.”
– Rob Humanick, Slant

“DOC channels whole decades of American cultural history through its subject, revealing a personal yet unsentimental portrait of the man against the backdrop of his times. Through an imaginative use of drawings, writing snippets, stills, home movies, interviews, archival footage of New York, Paris, and London and a vibrant jazz soundtrack, the filmmaker mixes elements as textured as the subject himself.”
– Karen Kramer, The Reeler

Harold L. Humes (aka Doc Humes) was brilliant and precocious (he went to MIT at 16), a literary phenomenon (the author of two acclaimed novels, The Underground City, Men Die, who never wrote again), who was instrumental in founding The Paris Review. He was also a deeply paranoid, peripatetic “talking machine” (so dubbed by George Plimpton), who charmed, confounded and infuriated his distinguished friends and far-flung family. Plimpton, Norman Mailer, Paul Auster, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron and Timothy Leary recall an extraordinary man, a Zelig-like figure who led a protest in Washington Square Park (“3000 Beatniks Riot in Village” – NY Daily Mirror headline), championed the use of medical marijuana, and managed Mailer’s 1961 run for Mayor of New York. His daughter Immy Humes, in Doc’s own words, “puts a frame around the wreckage” in her affectionate, yet profoundly disquieting portrait.

Listen to our podcast:
Q & A with filmmaker IMMY HUMES
(Recorded January 23, 2008)

Links:

• The Doc Humes Institute
• Lord Buckley
• The Norman Mailer Society
• The Paris Review

USA • 2007 • 98 MINUTES • FILMSOURCE INFORMATION

Available at Amazon:
MEN DIE by H.L. Humes	THE UNDERGROUND CITY by H.L. Humes