July 18th, 2006

Following Sean

It’s strange how you’ll pause to investigate something as innocuous as a mention of your own name used elsewhere. I’m glad I did, otherwise I would’ve never come across the story of Sean Farrell (and in many ways, the story of all of us).

[…]

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.

Thirty years, three generations, and a lifetime later, Arlyck has returned to San Francisco in search of who the adult Sean might have become. And what he finds, to his surprise, tells him as much about his own east-coast migration as it does about the Californian life he left behind-that the choices we’re handed and the choices we make are, very often, quite odd bedfellows.

Anyone know where I can get a copy of Ralph Arlyck’s 1969 student film, Sean?