Event

THE FLOWER THIEF

Dir. Ron Rice, 1960
59 min, USA

Special thanks to the Filmmakers Coop!

Spectacle favorite Taylor Mead (NO SUCH THING AS GRAVITY, CANDY AND DADDY) stars in Ron Rice's ode to meandering afternoons - THE FLOWER THIEF.

Mead wanders around the city getting in scrapes with kids, literally stopping to smell the flowers, and eventually kidnapped by cowboys all set atop the grain of surplus 16mm film - rumored to be leftover from the army's ariel-machine-gun-camera stock.

Rice and Mead met in sunny/smokey San Francisco and together, sometimes along with Jack Smith, made a number of dharma-bum/beat pics before Rice's untimely death at only 29. Parker Tyler compared Rice's romps to that of the Marx Brothers. In a perfect summation Light Industry's Ed Halter quips - "Today, Mead's Flower Thief uniformtight hoodie, button-down shirt, three-stripe tennis shoes, and beat-up jeanscan be seen on many an L-train habitué, en route to neo-Bowery facsimilies of post-war cafés, and so the parody has been reversed; such are our own meticulous restorations of the fantasies of other people's youth."