Skidoo (1968)

Skidoo is a 1968 comedy film directed by Otto Preminger, written by Doran William Cannon and released by Paramount Pictures. It satirizes the modern world and its creature comforts, technology, anti-technology, hippies and free love, and features the use of LSD.

The movie featured a cast of stars and veteran character actors, including Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Cesar Romero, Frankie Avalon, Michael Constantine, Frank Gorshin, Richard Kiel, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, Slim Pickens, George Raft, Mickey Rooney, Arnold Stang, and Groucho Marx in his final speaking movie role. It has a score by singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, who also appeared briefly in the movie.

The movie missed the mark with both critics and audiences, and bombed at the box-office. A soundtrack album by Nilsson was issued, along with a single, "I Will Take You There," but neither became a hit. The movie received some belated attention in the 1980s when it was shown on cable television, and the soundtrack was lauded when it was reissued on compact disc in 2000 (in the UK) and 2003 (in the US). Nonetheless, no official home video release has ever been made, and the movie is presumed locked away in the Preminger archives, as was Bunny Lake Is Missing for several years. 

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City periodically exhibits a 35mm print of the movie, and it was also shown in Los Angeles in 2007. Skidoo appeared most recently on cable, on January 5, 2008, on Turner Classic Movies as part of its TCM Underground movie series.

Writer Paul Krassner published a story in the February 1981 issue of High Times, relating how Groucho Marx "prepared" for his role in an LSD-related movie by taking a dose of the drug in Krassner's company, and had a moving, largely pleasant experience. (In his 1976 book The Groucho Phile, Marx commented that both the movie and his performance as the mobster boss God were "God-awful!") Most of the rest of the cast and crew, though, apparently had no familiarity with the drug; Nilsson (who reportedly did use LSD years later) confessed he'd simply pretended to be drunk for his role.