An Acquired Taste

Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck interviews his neighbor, Sean Farrell, a 4-year-old living on San Francisco's Haight Street in 1969. Sean gives his thoughts on life in his home, a hippie crash pad, and casually mentions that he smokes pot, which caused this short film to become a national sensation.

Personal-essay documentary. Via the New York Times: "[Director Ralph] Arlyck uses film of his family and friends in upstate New York as well as bits from television news and fund-raising telethons to raise questions about the value of social activism and the way ordinary citizens can know what to be activists about in the first place."

Filmmaker Ralph Arlyck first met Sean while living as a graduate student in Haight Ashbury at the height of the 1960s. The city was awash with the trappings of America’s cultural revolution-the San Francisco State University campus flooded with cops in riot gear, the Haight filled with drifters and idealists, and, on the third floor of Arlyck’s building, a come-one-come-all crashpad apartment. It was from this top floor commune that the precocious 4-year-old Sean would occasionally wander downstairs to visit and talk-and one day Arlyck turned on his camera. Sean’s casual commentary on everything from smoking pot to living with speed freaks was delivered in simple sincerity throughout the soon-to-be famous 15-minute film. This First Child of the notorious decade may have shaken the audience with his simple sentence- “Sure, I smoke pot”-but it was his barefoot impishness which would encapsulate the hope that lay in front of the nation: a promise of infinite possibility.

People talk or laugh about aging, its irritations and relentless progression, but rarely confront the reality of dying or being left alone. Nor do they consider the lightness and calmness that can come when the race seems not so crucial. I LIKE IT HERE is about all those things and, finally, about the pleasures of being alive. A figurehead of American independent documentary film, Ralph Arlyck conveys how it feels to look back on your own life, to contemplate your place in an ever-changing world, and what to make of the time that remains.