I’ve been waiting for this to hit YouTube: the trailer for a documentary of an archetypal American character, the freewheeling intellectual.

As a somewhat freewheeling intellectual myself, I feel no hesitation at saying that Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz was a completely self-centered man who confused hedonism with enlightenment and whose pathalogical need to be “different” rendered him incapable of being free. The most humbling truth apparent in this biographical film is this: that voluntary subjugation to the tyranny of doctrinaire antiestablishmentarianism should not be mistaken for intellectual triumph or self-determinism. It is fascism.

Now, enjoy your surf movie! Hippies in a bus = good times!

Right?

Here is the much prettier official statement:

Like many American outsider-adventurers, Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz set out to realize a utopian dream. Abandoning a successful medical practice, he sought self-fulfillment by taking up the nomadic life of a surfer. But unlike other American searchers like Thoreau or Kerouac, Paskowitz took his wife and nine children along for the ride, all eleven of them living in a 24 foot camper. Together, they lived a life that would be unfathomable to most, but enviable to anyone who ever relinquished their dreams to a straight job. The Paskowitz Family proved that America may be running out of frontiers, but it hasn’t run out of frontiersman.