THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Getting Down To What Makes America High

(UNIVERSAL CITY, Ca) -- 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 he was
to appear in. 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 on the Universal Studios backlot, 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 said. "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."

He shook his head ruefully. His story, he admitted, is a "perfect
parable" for society's chronically wrongheaded approach to the
complicated problem of addiction. "One thing that quickly becomes
apparent," he said, "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 nonfiction television -- has made a
two-hour documentary on this very 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 on
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," standup comedy routines,
exploitation films like "Reefer Madness" and Hollywood blockbusters
(including his own).

"We came up with hundreds of hours of wonderful material," said
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.

"It was amazing what we discovered," said 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 full-blown from a groundswell of public indignation, was in large
part an economic imperative pushed by industrialists like Henry Ford who
wanted reliable, sober workers for their new assembly lines. That antidrug
public service announcements and school programs, though well-meaning and
organized with creativity and passion, have had little proven effect on drug
use.

Also: that the search for pleasure, chemical-based or otherwise, is a not
"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 one of the experts, "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 arrayed on the other side of the ledger.

"Considering that it wasn't intended to be an antidrug piece, but a
comprehensive and sophisticated treatment of a very complex issue, I
thought it was great," said Ginna Marston, one of Zemeckis'
interviewees and a spokeswoman for Parternship for a Drug-Free
America, the advertising-industry coalition that produces the
well-known antidrug public service announcements ("This is your brain
on drugs"). "When we signed on to Bob doing this," Mark Zakarin,
Showtime's executive vice president for original programming, said
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, and inside that framework enough objective reality that
we can all agree on."

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. Zakarin
maintains that inexperience was never a problem. Zemeckis didn't see
it as an obstacle, either.

"I'm addicted to documentaries," he said. "That's all I watch on
television. It started with "The American Experience," on PBS, and now
I watch the History Channel, the Learning Channel -- everything."
Zemeckis was born and reared in the Chicago area. He 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.
After making several unsuccessful feature films in the 1970s and early
1980s, he had a run of hits, beginning with "Romancing the Stone" in
1984. Soon after came "Back to the Future" (1985), "Who Framed Roger
Rabbit?" (1988) and "Forrest Gump" (1994). For the latter, he won the
Academy Award for best director.