THE FLOWER THIEF | Ron Rice 1960

Taylor Mead traipses with elfin glee through a lost San Francisco of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafés, oceanside fairgrounds and collapsed post-industrial ruins. Boinging along an improvised picaresque up and down the city’s hills, Mead teases playground schoolkids, sniffs wildflowers, gets abducted by cowboys in the park, and has a tea party on a pile of rubble with a potbellied bathing beauty…  With Eric "Big Daddy" Nord, Beat Generation-era nightclub owner, poet, actor, and hipster, beat poets living in North Beach and the poet Bob Kaufman (who in Bagel Shop Jazz, called its patrons "...shadow people...mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings, smelling vaguely of mint jelly…turtle neck angel guys...".)   and shot using surplus black-and-white 16mm film  from film cartridges left over from aerial gunnery equipment used during World War II.

 (Taylor Mead, Jeffrey Joffen, Ron Rice)