Doc

Doc
Directed by Immy Humes
2007, 98 minutes

Doc is making its theatrical premiere at New York’s Film Forum: January 23–29, 2008 for one week only.

About the Film

Harold L. Humes (a.k.a Doc Humes) was brilliant and precocious (he went to MIT at sixteen) and a literary phenomenon (the author of two acclaimed novels, The Underground City and Men Die, who never wrote again). He was also 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. 

Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum

Director’s Statement

This film is about my father, Doc Humes. He was a lightning rod for some of the most interesting ideas of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, and I wanted to tell the story of his life, his mind, and the changing world he lived in.

Making the film has been a long labor of filial love. I loved my father and was proud of him, but he was no saint, and I don’t want to simplify the complexity of his character or minimize the damage he left in his wake. I always found it hard to describe or explain him to my friends or acquaintances, and one of the reasons I made the film was so I could show, not tell.

I have many motives. For one, I miss Doc’s outlook on the world, his dyed-in-the-wool values, his staunch yet puckish anti-authoritarianism, and his passionate faith in human goodness and possibility—a belief system he somehow maintained in the face of his own severe paranoia and anxiety. Especially now, in a time of constriction of idealism, I feel it is important to remember spirits like his.