We only have one life. Some lives are long, some lives are short. Everybody is born into a widely different set of circumstances and chances. (Maybe something that would have been beneficial to a person born in Athens, Greece in 431 BCE would be horrible for a person born in Austin, TX in 1974?) Once out and about, each person's life is made up of countless difference decisions and occurrences. One of the ways that I enjoy spending my own personal life is by learning about how other people have lived their lives. To me, it's endlessly fascinating to think about. One of the lives that I recently had the pleasure of learning about (thanks to randomly coming across this documentary) is that of James Edward Baker.
James Baker's was born in 1922 and other than the fact that he had a stint in the military and was a bit of a hell-raiser, there's not a lot about his early life in the doc. THE SOURCE FAMILY mainly focuses on him as a middle-aged man in Los Angeles in the 1960's. He got into healthy eating, spirituality and drugs. His rise to fame started when he opened the Source Restaurant on the Sunset Strip. It soon became quite the money maker and a gathering place for young people. Somehow, this silver tongued, self-proclaimed guru talked a bunch of teenagers and young adults (mostly females) into selling their earthly possessions and moving into his Hollywood Hills mansion. For the next 6 years or so, The Source Family lived in various places, ate a bunch of healthy food, got high as kites being drug behind the Space Shuttle, did a lot of fucking and rocked out with some awesome jams in their own recording studio. That's about it. Nothing too crazy ever happens. There's never a murder or group suicide. They just hang out and party a bunch. Eventually the Father dies (in a goddamn hang gliding accident of all things) and the Family simply drifts apart. The End. At their height, there was around 150 people in the Source Family.
The story of the Source Family is a wild ride. Unfortunately, while the story had me laughing in disbelief over and over, the actual documentary itself was just a very straight forward presentation of facts one after the other with no real storytelling skill. Example: at the very end of the film, literally a few seconds before the closing credits, a item popped up on the scene says "There were 54 home births in the family between 1972 - 1977." Says whaaaaaat??? How the hell is something like that just tossed in at the end? There was some mention earlier on about a teenage girl having a baby at home, but I didn't realize they had 54 babies!!!
Anyway, THE SOURCE FAMILY is definitely worth checking out. Especially for anybody (like myself) that's interested in 1960's/1970's hippie communes, cults, etc. For further reading check out the book "The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and The Source Family" by Isis Aquarian and Electricity Aquarian. Also, look up the music the Source Family created. Some of that shit is badass!!!
NSFW screenshots
