 We'd like to welcome Richard Honigman to the Haydash very oral video project welcome. Thank you My name is Rebecca Nichols. I'll be moderating this interview Let's start from the beginning. We're reborn Richard. I was born in New York And your parents their names Henry and Jean and they were the first born in America in their family What were their parents? What type of work? When you were growing up to your brothers and sisters, what was his name? Johnny children. I have a step son. What's your step son's name? Rusty Rusty You're growing up and going to school in New York Yes And As you got a little bit older we were talking earlier you got inspired to did the bigger and better things Well, yeah growing up working class growing up poor in New York is not exactly a picnic And the Bronx is a very grim place There are many trees. There's a lot of red brick I remember staring out the window in the second grade all the brick all around me and Thinking about how my father would come home every day with an axe buried in his forehead Because he worked at a metal stamping plant and it was all this clanging and banging and noise and then the politics of the factory and the politics of the office Grinding him down to a pulp and I said the movies I look at movies and TV and it's all beautiful It's in California. There's motorcycles. There's sports cars. There's this beautiful country. There's this other kind of life That's where I'm going and so I had a plan from seven years old on to to grow up and get out and I Skipped two and a half years of school just just rapidly as possible sure and Got out of high school 15 and a half and pack my bag and say goodbye. Where'd you go great village and Let's start happening there. Well the East Village in the late 50s and early 60s was a phenomenal place It was sort of the hate Ashbury in miniature Which is why I understood when the hate Ashbury started heating up what was about to happen But never realizing will become ten times a hundred times larger than the East Village was sure But the East Village was a place of in order to have bohemia. You must have cheap rent Which is why bohemia is so shrunken today and why kids getting out of school Can't just go wander around and find themselves because they got to pay the college loans off and they're they're hung up in a high rent But we're in counties become the San Francisco become Santa Barbara Los Angeles The west side of LA which were all enclaves for people like ourselves the East Village itself You can get I paid twenty five dollars for for an apartment in the East Village is today $2,500 amazing. I had a law for for 90 bucks and downstairs for me was Walter Bohart Who started the East Village other and I helped him start the East Village other along with Alan Cancelley. How old are you here? Teenager yeah, 17 And I was going to different schools. I dropped out of regular college and started going to the new school and the art students leave and Set myself up in a loft and I was an abstract expressionist painter for a number of years the village and and In order to live what most of us did was put ads in the village voice Which at the time was 25 pages instead of a hundred and fifty page tone that it is today And we all had moving companies and a telephone and you'd be ABC movers For a couple of months until the PUC caught up with you ICC and because New York is really a third-world country. We just pay them off and go back in business the next week as XYZ movers And and people would call you up at two and three in the morning Trying to sneak out on their husbands or their wives. Hey, can you come over and move me right away? Sure, man. Go up a couple of friends and you run over your truck and you move them That's right, and that's how we live. That was underground life. It was sure and there was hundreds hundreds thousands of us involved in those moving and And so but I still had this this knowing need to go to California So I went up for the first time when I was 18. Had you touched film at all at this point? I hadn't touched film yet. No, but you still loved it. Yes. I was involved in graphic art, but I wasn't and I was I was also a Relative had gotten me into the concrete workers union. I was also building skyscrapers and Three months of that you could live on the money for years. It was very good money But one day in the February day, I urinated on a column In 18 degree weather and I watched my my my piss freeze Within three feet going down the column and I said this is too much Another winter in New York That's Saturday I left and put to California and Visited some relatives of Los Angeles and then drove up the coast of San Francisco. What was this about you in 1963? And then where'd you go? I went to North Beach and What was going on there? I went to City Lights book shop and saw an ad to rent a room and I rented a room on Grand Avenue and What was this scene like? Well, it was It was kind of like the village in that it was warmed over Memory of what Pete Nicks once were it was over and I'm of a split generation that was later called Gen Xers 20 years later But there were Gen Xers in the late 50s and early 60s and our name for ourselves were freaks Because we felt like we were freaks psychologically spiritually Emotionally we were not freaked out. We were just freaks. We weren't normal. We knew we were not normal people We were all reading Christian Murdie. We were all we were all studying all the spiritualists We were all discovering Madame Blabatsky. We were all discovering or a window. We were all discovering autobiography of a yogi. We were all Finding out what yoga was all about with meditation was all about Macrobiotic cooking used to be a macro a microbiotic restaurant on 7th and First Avenue that was a big scene in the village to a room discovered brown rice for the first time I mean, these are New Yorkers when we were used to fresh vegetables and stuff like that I didn't understand it. I'd never seen an avocado till I was 18. I didn't know what one was I didn't either and so And I enjoyed California very much. I stayed I lived and worked here for three or four months But I had things to finish up in New York. So I got hitchhiked back to New York And over the next year and a half I bounced back and forth three four five six times either driving or hitchhiking And the end of 1964 moved out here for good. You had some some Bill Graham had the film or East. I think it was 69 through 71. You had some History with that building before that. Yes There was a meeting Abby Hoffman came out. I was already on the Oracle staff and Abby Hoffman came out After the idea was born here in the West Coast Martin reminded us of it earlier It went you know, we were all calling each other and talking to each other What was the mission? What was the mission was? It was the first big Pentagon demonstration And what we wanted to do was lift the Pentagon up off the ground and twirl it on its axis And so we invited the shamans and medicine men and curanderos and curanderos and every everyone we could that we thought was magic to Because the Vietnam War was such an ugly awful thing that went on year after year and every permutation Was worse and worse. So we thought that by magic and by spiritualism, maybe we could stop it that way and so I was somehow voted upon appointed Somehow they got together and figured since I knew New York And yet was fully recognized in my California incarnation I would be the the California Oracle Digger the eight Ashbury representative to the Pentagon and And I've Abby and I got along well and also I was connected to the East Village other people, right? So that was an important Venue for me to be able to go out an event This was an event No, well, there's a Pentagon certain event we brought close to a couple hundred thousand people there And where did it take place? It took place at the Pentagon But we planned it in New York and operated out of New York with meetings in Washington And in order to get my bands out from the West Coast So you were managing some bands at the time. I wasn't managing bands But I knew them right and I and I asked them would they come to New York or if I could get them there and They said yes, but they like many people in the hate Ashbury. They had no political consciousness the hate Ashbury Was a very strange mixture of people with spiritual consciousness political consciousness Political and spiritual consciousness But 90% of the people with their partying and having a good time and finding love and right Like with any people only 10% are going to be intellectual intellectually inclined Well-read literate and understand history and politics Of course, and so I think that became a split and then those more politically minded went to Berkeley to people's park and I think you'd find the same split in Berkeley that you'd find here even though you have a college there Sure, so you have an intellectualism built in Still a lot of people who go to college don't really have an intellectual Framework in their mind. Sure. They're there to digest these books and learn how to make a living later Right is why they're there. So even in Berkeley you find that split. I certainly find it now I'm living in San Barbara at the University of California San Barbara. Did you find like-minded people of your Intellectual or more You could make a difference. Yes. Yes. Well, that's why I was on the staff of the Oracle and Work with Peter Berg and the dares and they have a slogan Do you have any stories? Do you have any stories? Oh, you can talk about Tell us one. We'd love to hear it. There were many communes set up all over the city and A different commune a day would be picked to make the free food in the park and just trying to I mean everything was always done on no money And so just trying to organize it for that day took a week To get the food together to get it cooked to get it prepared to try and have some kind of sanitary conditions And to find out who really knew how to cook A lot of people said they did but they couldn't and how to make something how to make health food edible How many people were they cooking for? Oh usually a few hundred a day right and And that became an interesting theme through my life because eventually I ended up with a health food restaurant Wow When I got back from India, but in India, I ended up cooking for hundreds of people During the Bangladesh war. I Was in Calcutta helping the mutti Bihini in their war and running food out to the concentration camps because the the Muslim Bangladeshis threw out the Hindu Bangladeshis not trusting them and the Hindu Indians in Calcutta Didn't want any more poor people. It's enough Lots of people living on the street. So these people now had no country. No home. No farm. No nothing, right? and I try to work with the Gandhi Peace Foundation and try to work with Different Christian charitable groups in the United Nations and none of them knew what they were doing none of them understood No You really needed a graduate degree from the streets of the city of New York the people making the rules and no idea That I had already lived in Mexico and understood corruption in the third world And I grown up in New York and understood corruption in the third world because that was New York and so I Was able to run five or six loads of food out to the camps in a broken-down old Volkswagen bus and You had to do it in a certain way Otherwise they would grab you and mob you and tear at your clothing and your money So you have to have accomplices to open the door and run through the camp at about 10 15 miles an hour throwing out sacks rice and bags of vegetables and whatever and another big mistake they made was the the peace Foundation and the Western Ministers We're trying to serve these people high protein powder What is a peasant know of high protein peanut powder? It's ridiculous. They have to eat what they know how to eat And that rice and doll and what they call subji which is vegetables sure and so that's what I decided to buy Bible and and feed them with so somehow from feeding people in the park I ended up feeding people in Bangladesh and then running away from the war when the war started because Indian police were after me Trying to figure out what kind of a racket. I was ready And they couldn't understand that I would just be trying to feed people And so I went across India three days on a train and ended up in Goa With thousands of other Americans and Europeans who were suddenly cut off from their money Coming from them from their families and friends and they had to be fed So we took over at Jesuit monastery on a stone outcropping facing the Arabian Sea and That had a huge clay oven that had to be fed enormous amounts of wood and We cooked on the wood stove for hundreds of people a day Maybe cooking in the future again I Have a couple questions At all when in your life, did you start to touch upon film? I Was your early dream Well was an early dream and I had a lot of friends in film But I also had an aversion to Los Angeles and an aversion to the film industry But enough friends of mine were art directors and art department personnel that they kept on Kept on clawing at me and when I came back from India I Lived in Santa Barbara after living in St. Helena in Marin for a while I ended up in Santa Barbara, and I ended up taking over a health food restaurant that was failing and Where was that looking that was located on Cannon Perdito and Garden Street. It was called the tea house and a bunch of lunatics were running it Would only serve raw food and it happened to have been a cold winter for Santa Barbara was cold out And obviously people needed hot food and hot soup So I fired everybody and started it all over again myself and I found some friends They needed jobs and we changed the menu and started serving Hot foods as well as salads and started making homemade pies and started serving ratatouille and started serving I Quickly jumped a fish and chicken and added that and in the early 70s. It was very hard to find organic food but then we did our best and and we found it and Within six months time we went from six employees to 36 employees. Wow We went from a thousand dollars a week to a thousand dollars a meal And my deal with the owner was all right if I make this thing work I get 25% and my salary goes up to five hundred dollars a week At the end of six months is good natured hippie Self-styled guru says well Richard. I've got the menu. I've got the staff I've got the reputation. I've got the business. Why should I sign a contract with you? I said but Harvey I can make more money in a movie in a week that I'm making here in a month This is ridiculous. This is my place too. I know you started it and I know you designed it But this was going down for the third time. You were gonna close. I saved it Then I get any credit for that. He says yeah, thank you very much pal So I say goodbye And I went to work on Cinderella Liberty in Seattle That a friend of mine was was art-directed. Oh Just as an artworker yes someone I could paint and build do various things and Cinderella really was a fairly popular movie in its time with Marsha Mason and James Kahn and Eli Waller and After the movie was over I went to visit friends in Canada up in the islands of the Georgia Straits and Spent the summer there in the early fall and then came back to California because California no matter How beautiful BC was I was still in love with California about what year it is 1973 I'm a character actor in Godfather 3. I Art-directed Halloween 5 I Art-directed the principal, but I didn't get credit for it because of bad politics They fired this is your story I don't want to write off anybody share they They fired the production designer and They wanted me to take over his production designer and I couldn't do that because he was a friend of mine sir, but I had art-directed it under him and The funny thing about if you're familiar with the principal I really lived out the story that James Belushi acts out in the movie because it was in a black slum by by children's hospital on 51st Street underneath the elevator to that train and The kids that they hired were robbing and stealing everything in sight And and it couldn't be that they ran off two different crews Sure, so I showed up with my crew of free carpenters from Marin County and Berkeley and all of a sudden Everyone understood what was going on and we told the kids look this is an experience. You're never gonna have again You're working on a movie right and we're gonna show you how a movie is made, but you've got to cooperate and One time I'm walking past a hallway, and I smell I smell reefer. I smell marijuana And that's what the kids were doing all the time. I'm getting instead of working So I grabbed I grabbed the joint and I took a tote and I passed it around and One guy said geez I never smoke any dope with a white man before I figured all the use were cops That's not quite the case, but listen do like we do do it at home This we've got to work very hard. You have so many weeks and so much time for everything to complete the job And that's what you're chasing you're giving them some experience and responsibility and focus and time frame And as soon as I catch any one of you again on the job doing this kind of thing you're going right And that was it so we got control we got control over the thing and they turned out that all of my people who were well experienced in life and well traveled and Didn't have a heavy value judgments And certainly weren't racist. Sure. We're able to get across to these kids these kids fell in love with the crew Yeah, and you gave them a window into a world they never knew existed. Yeah, that's right Um, I want to I want to bring you back to the Oracle for a moment I know some you wrote some articles. Yes, and Around what period was that and can you tell me what those articles were I came on later? I think my first edition was the seventh and that would be flower from the streets. Yes, and that's describing hate Street from from from a Participants I view rather than an outsider. So kept on reading about ourselves in time and newsweek and all the other men look And life by outsiders by squares by adult people in suits We're walking around reporting on it. It was ridiculous. And so I wrote it from the inside And then oh, no, that was the second article the first article was Indians for sale or Martin and I and About 10 12 of us went out to the Hopi land. I don't know to hold a ribie and hope Villa and We saw the petroglyph of the destruction of the earth Gord of fire and ash destroying the earth if men doesn't wake up And the reason why we went though was also because Congress was trying to pass a sneaky little law called the omnibus Indian Act of 1967 and it was gonna and it was gonna give deeds to all the Indians So they would all not live the way they're supposed to live Tribally and communally but live like white people with deeds and obviously they were out to screw them And buy up the deeds sure drunken Indians and end up getting their their reservations and destroying the reservation system You're out to destroy the Indians as they were right So we had we had the meeting with the Hopi's and I came back and wrote an article called Indians for sale and that article got around and It was read in a lot of it was repeated and all the other underground papers and Eventually bits and pieces of it got into the above ground newspapers and the act was destroyed The Indians are still on reservations So when somebody watches this video of fifty hundred years from now they could see the difference one person could make yes One person can always make a difference and we should never forget that. What was the third article the third article was Only ran for part of the issue and that was I was leaving for the Pentagon and so it was about the Pentagon demonstration But the Oracle we never had Like everything else in the heat actually we never had enough money So it was produced in batches when we had enough money for a batch of so many thousand we've run a batch Well the Pentagon demonstration came and went So there was no reason to have my angrily written article about what we're gonna do and we were gonna show them And we were gonna pick up the Pentagon and turn it around and so on so forth so I Think Ralph after Ackerman was responsible for replacing my article with the Buddha that's in the park Right was donated by gumps. Right. Right. That's right. So not bad And it was the right thing to do because it was over was history Real quickly. I also edited several other articles one of which was the bucket list of fuller article and Three or four others who I can't Well Bucky Fuller was a very interesting man and He had no value judgments or constraints on his mind And he saw this phenomenon out here and he correctly recognized it as Something akin to being in the left Bank of Paris in the 1870s or 80s or the left Bank of Paris in the 1920s or 30s Yeah, or the American Revolution or New York in the in the during the war or after the war an Abstract expression is sure I mean Expressionism and bebop are both in New York in the late 30s through the 40s Sure, and that's an extraordinary conflict of Time and place where extraordinary people get together right and he recognized that that's what was happening here And we understood that that this was an extraordinary time where extraordinary people were getting together And perhaps we'll never be historical figures Although I understand them in Google somewhere. Yes San Francisco we knew that very special But we knew that this was very special than very special people here And we had conversations and talks and comparisons of books that we have read that I've never had again in my life What what kept igniting new passion? Because I obviously I mean it was the people the people you've already spoken to in thousands of others that were just one of a kind extraordinary people if I if I if the world would listen to you And we take your advice What advice would you give the world for the future drop everything and live your life? Make sure you're doing what you want to do. Don't compromise because Well, when you compromise you lose way too much of yourself and you'd be surprised how your wife or your husband or your children Well, the rest of your family will eventually come to understand the action that you've taken Because many of us most freaks were outcasts from their family And we made family amongst ourselves and Reformed our family even though some of us remained alienated from our family all our lives or at least misunderstood I was never understood by my family, but it made no difference because I ended up with a family of thousands and something like like Thanksgiving in India With all the other Americans you can find in a place like Benares using a goose instead of a turkey Sure, and and the local gourds instead of pumpkins Are extraordinary experiences and why did we do that? Well, here we are we're Americans and we're in India We might as well get together and have that And you find yourself doing a lot of the old things You're you're you never lose your original culture No, you never stop being a Christian or a Jew or an Italian or a Polish or whatever But you also become this other person sure Yes, you grow and you find out that you're everything you're not nothing, but you're everything that you've ever done and been But all the people that have influenced you And that's the only way that you can live your life realistically Especially today we were facing a crisis beyond any crisis that we thought we were living in 35 years ago In the original Do you see hope? Sure, as long as we're alive as long as we get up the next morning or so Somewhere somewhere somehow Either as a group or an individual genius will come along and figure out a plan either a Gandhi will be born or a Bunch of people will just get tired of fighting Like it's happened so many times in Africa and in Europe where they just saw this ridiculous We can't we can't go on like this. Yeah Look how many people in Israel how many Palestinians and Israelis are working together instead of against each other Different organization time all the time trying to get it back together again So do you feel what we all came through and where we are now? It was worth it. Oh, yes, we've built some ground Yes, the world has definitely changed because of who we are and what we did. What are you doing now in your life? I'm writing a novel that I've been trying to finish for the last 10 or 15 years And I'm driving a taxi cab at night in Santa Barbara. I feel great I'm an insomniac and so I need not drink coffee all night Sure, and I drive and I compose my my novel light. Is it does it have a name yet father falafel Father falafel father falafel. Hopefully when this is watched in years to come night that book will be available It's written to be as a movie Wonderful, it's a two-fer. It's a script and it's a novel at the same time wonderful, you know, I just want to thank you So much for coming today You've added so much more information to what we've already had and what we're gaining and We could do nothing more than document this time because this gives value to every single person's life That has contributed that has made change and that we hope in the future will inspire Thank you