Go Ask Alice – The Novel And The Movie

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1971 / 1973 – Spoiler alerts No, they haven’t made a movie about the life and times of our Admin leader Alex /Alice, but the user name reminded me of this lurid sensationalist drugs are bad novel from the early 70’s and the passable TV movie version that followed a few years later, starring Jamie Smith Jackson, and William Shatner (playing her father). The story is pretty basic. A sweet innocent fifteen year old girl tries LSD at a friend’s party and ends up spiralling into hard drug abuse, ruining her life. She seems to get over it but then relapses into her habits and dies. The book was presented as found material in the form of an anonymous diary, but it was actually complete fiction, written by Mormon author, Beatrice Sparks. There is no one called Alice in the book, and the title is a quotation from the song White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane, a drug-fuelled take on Alice In Wonderland. The film calls the diarist Alice to avoid explaining this. Both book and film assume any casual drug use is the start of a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to extreme addiction, so the story rarely succeeds in promoting its propaganda message, but it remains a very popular text. The movie in full on Youtube Arthur Chappell