Immy Humes reflects on her experience directing Doc, a film about Harold L. Humes (a.k.a “Doc Humes”). Click here to learn more about the film and to view clips of the movie.
Q: Doc is a huge part of American social and political history and this comes through in the film for me. Why did you decide to make this film?
A: There were many reasons that I wanted to make this film. On the most basic and literal level, I just wanted to memorialize my father: to remember him and have him be remembered. But he was an appealing film subject for a lot of other reasons, too.
One is that I like making films that deal with social questions, but approached as they are lived, i.e., they don’t necessarily frame the story. Doc’s story leads one to everything from mental illness, the Cold War, drugs, feminism, and cinema—but without hitting you over the head.
Society, politics, and ideas, were important to Doc. He lived and breathed them his entire life. He was in that sense always a public person; he never really shifted his focus to the entirely personal. So there was no way to tell his life story through the decades of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, without also including to some degree our larger history.
At the same time, I didn’t want to stop the film short and fill people in, like—“Okay, here he is reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac. [Kerouac was a famous writer associated with the Beat movement.] The Beats generally were rejecting the mores of the straight world and seeking a greater creative and spiritual freedom—and I didn’t want to throw in those almost obligatory snippets of archival footage to set the scene either. So I’ve ended up not giving any historical background or scene-setting, beyond whatever Doc or others say themselves.
I worried that this might leave some people out in the cold. Especially younger viewers, i.e., if they hadn’t heard of Timothy Leary maybe I was doing them a disservice by not telling them who he was. But so far at least, I’ve found that young people like the movie, and would rather not have everything explained directly.
