ZEMECKIS DIRECTS AN IN-DEPTH LOOK AT GETTING HIGH

UNIVERSAL CITY - SEVERAL years ago, the Oscar-winning director Robert
Zemeckis was making a movie on location when he discovered that one of his
principal cast members had a serious drinking problem.

The actor failed to show up for a night scene. After a costly delay, it was
discovered that a local bartender, having watched the actor drink himself
into insensibility, had driven him back to his motel.

As Zemeckis remembered it during an interview in his office at the Universal
Studios back lot, his immediate reaction was swift and terrible: At 2 a.m.
he phoned the local doctor who was on call for the film company, summoned
him to the set and proceeded to berate him, loudly blaming him and him alone
for the actor's inebriated state.

"Irrational? Of course," Zemeckis says. "I would hope that I wouldn't react
the same way again. But it was simply the unbelievable frustration of not
being in control of this problem."

'Perfect parable'

He shakes his head ruefully. His story, he admits, is a "perfect parable"
for society's chronically wrongheaded approach to the complicated problem of
addiction.

"One thing that quickly becomes apparent," he says, "is that there is no
solution to the problem. You can't control what is basically a personal
journey. You can't legislate sobriety."

Not that American legislators haven't tried. In fact, Zemeckis -- a
48-year-old Hollywood filmmaker not formerly even vaguely associated with
the low-profile world of non-fiction television -- has made a two-hour
documentary on the subject.

Titled "The Pursuit of Happiness: Smoking, Drinking and Drugging in the 20th
Century," the film is to have its premiere on the Showtime cable network
Sept. 13 as part of "In the 20th Century," a millennium-related series using
well-known directors to take on major subjects of their choosing. It is a
rare full-length examination of a topic that lends itself easily to rousing
slogans and pithy sound bites.

Indeed, it is with the help of dozens of these fleeting but oh-so-emphatic
references to drugs, alcohol, tobacco and addiction that Zemeckis makes his
main points. He culled them from sources as varied as presidential press
conferences, the utterances of presidential "drug czars," newsreels, beer
commercials, old magazine ads, old sitcoms like "Leave It to Beaver,"
stand-up comedy routines, exploitation films like "Reefer Madness" and
Hollywood blockbusters (including his own).

Varied sources

"We came up with hundreds of hours of wonderful material," says Zemeckis.
One can see, for example, Desi Arnaz hawking Camels, Newt Gingrich
advocating the death penalty for drug dealing, Jack Webb pontificating on
the horrors of LSD, a gaggle of tobacco executives swearing that cigarettes
aren't addictive and a psychedelically dressed Sonny Bono urging his fans
"not to become potheads."

Interspersed with these half-forgotten audiovisual artifacts are on-camera
interviews with numerous historians, former addicts, addiction counselors
and other experts, including a spokesman for Alcoholics Anonymous, an
advocate of medical marijuana use, a libertarian proponent of drug
decriminalization, the author of "Denial Is Not a River in Egypt" and the
radio personality Dr. Demento, a connoisseur of drug-soaked pop music from
Cab Calloway to Kurt Cobain.

Rampant drinking in 1830s

"It was amazing what we discovered," says Zemeckis. "For instance: When I
started this project, I thought that the so-called drug crisis was something
that was happening right now; our generation's problem, as bad as it's ever
been. But it turns out that the crisis has been going on forever -- and
actually, the worst period in our country's history was the 1830s, when the
entire country was on a bender and everybody was walking around drunk.

"Actually, the country has been sobering up pretty interestingly since then"

Among the other arguments made in "The Pursuit of Happiness": that American
society has habitually criminalized the substances used primarily by
minorities (i.e., opium for Asian immigrants and marijuana and cocaine for
African-Americans) while legalizing those used by white adults (i.e., beer,
alcohol and tobacco). That the advent of Prohibition in the 1920s, far from
springing from a groundswell of public indignation, was in large part an
economic imperative pushed by industrialists like Henry Ford who wanted
reliable, sober workers. That anti-drug public service announcements and
school programs, though well-meaning, creative and passionate, have had
little proven effect on drug use.

Also: that the search for pleasure, chemical-based or otherwise, is not a
"problem" that can be addressed as if it somehow stands apart from our very
identities as Americans and human beings. One of the most striking moments
in the documentary is at the beginning when an actor recites the "pursuit of
happiness" clause in the Declaration of Independence against a background of
images ranging from public inebriation to a smiling little girl twirling
herself dizzy on a tree swing.

"You know," intones an expert, "the impulse to alter what we ordinarily call
ordinary waking consciousness is inborn."

Perhaps the most provocative aspect of "Smoking, Drinking and Drugging" is
that its approach is accepted by the very experts and authority figures
usually on the other side of the ledger.

"Considering that it wasn't intended to be an anti-drug piece but a
comprehensive and sophisticated treatment of a very complex issue, I thought
it was great," says Ginna Marston, one of Zemeckis' interviewees and a
spokeswoman for Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the
advertising-industry coalition that produces the well-known anti-drug public
service announcements ("This is your brain on drugs").

'A point of view'

"When we signed on to Bob doing this," Mark Zakarin, Showtime's executive
vice president for original programming, says carefully, "we realized that
he was going to bring a point of view to it. All we asked was there be an
intelligent framework to his subjectivity."

Before his current project, the sum of Zemeckis' experience with the
documentary form was in the early 1970s, during a short stint as an
assistant news editor at a Chicago television station. But neither Zakarin
nor Zemeckis was worried.

"I'm addicted to documentaries," Zemeckis says. "That's all I watch on
television."

Zemeckis says he was a heavy drinker in college -- a habit, he adds, that
disappeared once he transferred to film school at the University of Southern
California, long before his rise to prominence with films such as "Romancing
the Stone" in 1984, "Back to the Future" in 1985 and "Forrest Gump" in 1994,
for which he won the Academy Award for best director.