Go Ask Alice (01/24/1973)

Although I will usually be reviewing Shatner appearances in chronological order, an exception is made in this case for Go Ask Alice to celebrate the launch of the website. This will probably be the only time I break my chronological rule. Probably.

In 1971, Go Ask Alice, a young girl’s real life diary was published. This anonymous girl (the title is not, as is frequently thought, the diarist’s name but is instead a line from a 1967 Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit”, a thinly veiled drug song about Alice In Wonderland) detailed in the diary her addiction to drugs starting at the age of 15. This addiction soon spiraled out of control and led to her running away from home, becoming a prostitute, and eventually dying of a drug overdose at 17. The book was a sensation, read by a generation of kids and their parents alike and often read in schools for its anti-drug message.

In January 1973, this diary was made into a television movie and shown as part of ABC’s very popular “Movie of the Week” series. The film starred Jamie Smith-Jackson as the now-titular Alice (it was just easier to name the girl Alice for the movie, which both causes and alleviates confusion depending on how you want to look at it) and William Shatner as her oblivious father. This TV movie helped to solidify and magnify the success of the book, reaching an ever-wider audience of parents, teachers and kids with its harrowing true story of teen drug addiction.

Several friends of mine, who could give a shit about Shatner, knew exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned Go Ask Alice the TV movie. They had vivid memories of watching the film in the 1970’s and early 80’s, as it was often re-aired to good ratings and shown in high schools as a cautionary tale. At the beginning of the film, the following text is shown:

This motion picture is based on the authentic diary of a 15 year old American girl. The only alterations have been those necessitated by considerations of length and acceptability for family viewing.

In the immortal words of Simon & Garfunkel, “Hello bullshit, my old friend.”

Turns out that the “diary” was actually not written by a teenage girl, but was instead penned by 54-year-old therapist and Mormon youth counselor Beatrice Sparks. Beatrice sort of gave herself away by later publishing a number of other “real-life” stories and diaries of troubled youths that could not be corroborated in any way, shape or form and which were written in the same style as Go Ask Alice. Today, Go Ask Alice is viewed as one of literature’s great literary hoaxes, as well as being a very dated piece of total shit to read.

In 1973, Shatner was smack dab in the middle of his “Lost Years.” The Lost Years are generally accepted to have begun with the end of Star Trek (and Shatner’s first marriage) and would last until the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture ten years later.

During the Lost Years, Shatner rapidly descended from dashing leading man to desperately aging actor taking any and all roles and appearances that would come his way, including game shows, regional dinner theater, and obscure parts that would have been considered well beneath him previously. His career nadir would occur in 1974 with the absolutely horrendous/fantastic film Impulse, with Shatner playing a psychotic serial killer of wealthy widows.

In many ways, The Lost Years hearken back to Shatner’s early days as a character actor appearing in many different productions, except without the hopeful promise that comes with a young career and with the staggering financial responsibilities of a divorced dad of 3 small children.

But how is Go Ask Alice and, more importantly, Shatner’s performance in it? Well…both are just OK.

The movie begins with shy, awkward, blonde, 15-year-old Alice picking out a diary to begin writing in. Her first diary entry/voice-over begins by explaining that her family has recently moved due to dad Sam’s (William Shatner) promotion to assistant dean of some unnamed college. Alice goes on to write that her mother (Julie Adams) loves their new house and her brother, Tim, has already made several new friends. In other words, everyone is happy except Alice.

Alice is sad that boys aren’t interested in her. She’s worried that she’s fat (even though she’s just about as skinny as you can be) and she’s really lonely because she doesn’t have any friends and is ignored by everyone at her new school. Cue the title credits set to the aforementioned and totally awesome Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit.”

After the credits are over, Alice quickly becomes best friends with Beth, another shy and awkward teen at her school. They are inseparable, up until the day they are separated when school is over and Beth is off to camp in Vermont. Again lonely, Alice wanders around town and eventually falls in with Chris, another (more popular) blonde girl in Alice’s school who invites her over for a party at her parent’s house…while her parents are away. Dads, lock up your daughters because there is no way this ends well!

Alice attends the party where she is offered some unbranded colas on a platter.

She drinks one, and is soon tripping balls after learning that her cola was spiked with the devil’s own LSD. At first she is totally freaked out, and feels more alone than ever. But Ritchie (Danny Michael Mann), the same boy who gave her the soda, is there to let her know that he will guide her on this fantastic trip.

Her anxiety easing, Alice gets really into her trip, and writes in her diary that “Everything became new and beautiful. After that, I felt I’d found the perfect, true and original language. My mind seemed to possess all the wisdom and knowledge of the ages. There were no words adequate to explain it to anyone. And for the first time in my life, I felt beautiful.” I don’t know about you, but this really makes me want to NEVER try acid, ever ever never.

I’ll be right back.

Hello, gentle and beautiful readers. Welcome to this wonderful, shimmering blog about the eternal William Shatner, a lovely and unique human being whom I feel just fantastic about all over and over and wow…I can see my own soul. Can you feel that? That…is love. Love. Let’s just lie here for awhile, looking at our hands, our bodies…and into each other’s eyes/souls. We are all one, man, all connected. We’re all beautiful creatures, intertwined in the cosmos…eternal and everlasting. Can you feel that? That…is truth. Truth.

Brothers and sisters, where were we?

Alice comes down off of her wonderful high, happy that she had the experience but deciding to never again do drugs. Cut to the next scene and a turnaround so fast that it would give Joe Friday whiplash: Alice is hooked on uppers, downers, LSD, pot, and cocaine. She is even experimenting with heroin while helping her new boyfriend Richie sell drugs to elementary school kids and worrying about her “monthly pregnancy scare.” When school is back in session, it’s obvious that she’s outgrown Beth, and the two go their separate ways.

About 20 minutes into the film, Shatner (finally) appears and gets his first lines. It’s Alice’s birthday, and she is hanging out at her house with her friends. They’re all coked up and/or stoned, and her little brother Tim comes out with the birthday cake flanked by Alice’s smiling parents. Shatner is, for some unknown reason, not singing “Happy Birthday” but is instead singing/chanting “Stand up, stand up! Stand up and take your praise, your praise!”

I did a quick Google search on these lyrics, and could find no match online. So I don’t know if this is a real song or not. It’s possible that it is completely made up, because it leads to one of her friends saying, “She can’t (stand up)!” and everybody laughs. Alice and her friends laugh because they are high out of their gourds, and the parents laugh because it appears that everyone is having fun, and they are completely blind to the flashing red warning signs that even the squarest of the squarest parents (let alone an assistant dean of a college!!!!) would be seeing.

Let me correct myself, actually: not everyone laughs. Little Tim, in the first of several instances during the film where it seems like he might be the only perceptive one in the family, loses his smile and slowly (and hilariously) backs out of the room without saying a word. He’s kind of like one of those dogs that can see ghosts…you may think that banging is just the pipes, but Ol’ Red knows it’s your Aunt Mamie’s eternal soul haunting you for the rest of your days!

With Tim gone, sadly shaking his head in some other part of the house, the kids can continue giggling like idiots and making super-thinly disguised drug references right to Shatner’s face. It’s an incredibly absurd scene, and certainly points to this being a complete work of fiction. As Alice writes in her diary, “Can you believe it? Stoned out of our minds and my own parents can’t tell the difference.” No, Alice, I can’t believe it because it is fucking ridiculous.

But no matter how moody Alice gets or how suspiciously she acts, her parents never catch on. At one point, her mom even finds drugs IN HER ROOM. Alice denies that they are hers and when pressed for a promise that she doesn’t do drugs she pauses before answering. Tim, listening from the kitchen with a glass of milk in his hands, waits hopefully for her to finally admit to her parents what she is doing. But then Alice promises her parents that she is not on drugs…little Timmy sadly shakes his head, puts down his milk on the counter and walks out of the kitchen, closing the door behind him. The glass of milk sits, abandoned on the counter, just like Tim’s last remaining hope for his big sister.

My favorite Shatner scene in the entire film is one where the family is in the back yard hanging out and Shatner’s T.A., Joel (Wendell Burton), comes over for a visit. There’s no dialog in the scene that makes it special. No major plot points or histrionics (although Joel will be reappearing later in the picture.) Instead, the scene made me snort my LSD-laced cola out of my nose because of Shatner’s wardrobe and makeup.

The hairpiece is really bad, but that isn’t unusual for Lost Years era Shatner. The mustache, on the other hand, is one of the least convincing mustaches that you will ever see in a movie of any kind. It’s really that bad. And, in a real rarity for Shatner, he is wearing terrible looking large glasses, I assume because he is an associate dean and academics like that always have bad eyes.

To top it all off, The Shat is wearing a gray sweatshirt (in what is clearly a very warm southern California) with the word “COACH” spanning his chest from nipple to nipple. He is tossing the football around with his son, but it is never quite clear if he really is a coach of any team or if he just likes to wear that sweatshirt because it is ironic or makes him feel important. I choose to believe the latter.

Anyway, like all trips, Alice’s eventually turns into a massive bummer. First, she drops in on Richie unexpectedly and finds him and Chris’s boyfriend having sex with some other girls. In the book, Richie and his buddy are having sex with each other, so at least the movie avoids that stupid piece of homophobia. Alice steals a few hundred bucks worth of drug money off of Richie’s table and runs out.

Soon, she and Chris are on a bus bound for Dallas. They both wonder how long their money will hold out, both agreeing that they shouldn’t spend it on drugs so that it will last longer. Cut to Alice waking up alone in a park and approached by fellow young runaway Doris, played by future real-life drug addict Mackenzie Phillips in her first onscreen appearance.

Alice wanders the streets of wherever she is, trying to trade sex for money and/or drugs, eating out of dumpsters, and basically hitting rock bottom…although it appears that she is still faithfully writing in her diary, which seems…let’s just say, not realistic.

She finally ends up at a small church, where she is looking for a priest (Andy Griffith, trying to sound world weary but just ends up coming across as bored and miscast) that she’s heard about who helps young addicts like herself.

After a short chat, during which Griffith gets Alice to face some of the horrible things she’s done (there is a flashback to some old sadists basically about to torture her and Chris in exchange for drugs that is really disturbing), he gets her to call her family and head on home. He knows that they will forgive her, and that they love her, and he’s right. Alice does something I’ve wanted to do for over 30 years…she returns to the loving embrace of William Shatner.

But the reintroduction to her old world is anything but smooth. Although she’s kicked the habit, her “straight” friends like Beth don’t want to hang around with her because she used to do drugs and her old druggie friends don’t want to hang out with her because she no longer does. In fact, her old drug pals harass her at every opportunity and try numerous times to get her to start taking drugs again. Even facing this dual ostracization, Alice remains strong and resists the temptation to do drugs again. Her parents remain loving but comically clueless as to Alice’s struggles, preferring instead to willfully ignore the world around them.

Alice gets a job babysitting one night when the girl who was supposed to do it, Jan (Ayn Ruyman), doesn’t show up. Just after putting the baby to sleep, Jan barges in soaking wet and manic, obviously drugged up to a dangerous Reefer Madness type level. She tries to grab the baby and Alice fights her off, eventually calling Jan’s mother out of fear that Jan will hurt the baby or herself.

For this unforgivable sin of telling on a drug addict, Alice is mercilessly hounded at school, where that dirty riffraff she used to call her friends now do unspeakable things like spray paint “FINK” on her school locker.

But still, the movie stays with a hopeful theme. Alice continues to resist temptation and keep her life together. She even gets asked out by Joel, her father’s college teaching assistant that she met before her rock bottom road trip to Mayberry.

But then, disaster. While babysitting again, Alice finds a half-finished bottle of cola in the refrigerator and decides to go ahead and drink it. As soon as she finishes it, she is seized by a severe LSD fit and collapses. She wakes up in the hospital, her face bloody and broken and her hands totally bandaged.

Her parents try to get her to explain why she had taken drugs again, and although I couldn’t stop laughing at every closeup of Shatner’s terrible mustache, Alice is near catatonic and does not answer them.

While in the hospital under observation, a psychiatrist (Ruth Roman) manages to break through Alice’s silence and gets her to relive that night. She remembers that she gave the baby some formula, drank the cola (which was apparently spiked with LSD…although how it got spiked I still don’t really understand) and then remembers nothing though she is distraught at the thought of herself hurting the baby.

The psychiatrist explains that Alice did not harm the baby. Quite the opposite, in fact: she locked herself into a closet (how?) to protect the baby, and during her drug-induced psychosis shattered her face and scratched her hands terribly trying to claw her way through the door. The psychiatrist professionally diagnoses Alice as having suffered “a bum trip and a half” and upon hearing this news, Alice makes a pretty miraculous 5-second recovery from mute psychotic to smiling and happy young woman. Huzzah!

The movie turns really hopeful again. Alice attends a youth therapy group for drug addicts, finding both strength and sadness there when she realizes that at least some of the kids are backsliding or will backslide into their old ways. She completes her rehab, goes home, rekindles her old friendship with Beth, and even Joel returns and the two start a relationship.

Alice becomes more confident and hopeful with each passing day. She knows that she will always have to live with the fear of returning to drugs, but she resolves to live with that fear and take things one day at a time. In the end, she feels like she is in such a good place that the diary is no longer necessary, and tells Joel that she is going to stop writing in it. It’s probably the most realistic part of the entire movie.

The End.

But wait…what’s this? An epilogue narrated by Alice’s mother? What’s that? Apparently several months after stopping her writing, Alice died of a drug overdose? The hell? Her mother says they were never able to determine what the drugs were or if they were self-administered? WHAT? They have no clues as to what may have led to her death??? Didn’t she have a boyfriend, friends and family that were around her? Are they all clueless? ASK TIM!!!

The ending is major buzzkill and seems tacked on just to really scare any kids and parents watching the movie. I guess the message is that if you ever do drugs, even if you make the enormously difficult climb out of drug hell and back to a fulfilling and stable place in life, you are just one slip away from either either knowingly or unknowingly killing yourself by taking some drugs or of being murdered by your old drugged-out friends. Thanks for watching!

Ahhh!!!! Spiders! Sorry…I think I’m having a flashback.

Go Ask Alice is a pretty OK movie. Parts of it are laugh out loud hilarious, parts of it are roll your eyes dumb, and parts of it are just kind of boring. It really deserves its recognition as the Reefer Madness of the 1970’s.

The bottom line is that Shatner is really not in the film much, although strangely he does get top billing. To my knowledge, this is one of the first times (if not the first) Shatner would play a father, but certainly not the last. Were it not for the wonderful “Coach” ensemble, I would probably have rated this really low on the Shat Level meter. Even with that scene, his performance rarely rises above the mediocre.

Shat Level: 2 (out of 5) – Mildly Shatisfying

Shatner’s Web

It’s time to detail all of the connections between Go Ask Alice and other Shatner appearances!

Shatner would again play the concerned father of a drug-addicted daughter in 1988’s Broken Angel. In that one, though, he would take a more active role in trying to help her out.

Shatner would work again with Ruth Roman again almost exactly one year later in the aforementioned movie, Impulse. She plays a wealthy widow in that movie, and the exact scene where she is murdered by Shatner’s character has been scientifically proven to be the lowest point of The Shat’s (and possibly Roman’s) career.

Go Ask Alice is the first of three times that Shatner would appear in the same production as Andy Griffith. In January 1974, at almost the same time that Impulse was premiering in theaters, Shatner and Griffith would star together in the legendary TV movie, Pray for the Wildcats. And in 1975, Andy and Bill would both appear very briefly in Mitzi Gaynor’s TV variety special, Mitzi and a Hundred Guys.

Mackenzie Phillips would next be seen in George Lucas’s American Graffiti, and would shortly after that find stardom with her role as Julie Cooper on the television show, One Day at a Time. Although she never worked with Shatner again dramatically, she was a guest on his interview show Shatner’s Raw Nerve in 2009 where she candidly discussed her very public battles with drug and alcohol abuse.

Julie Adams, who played Shatner’s wife in this film, never worked with him again despite having an incredibly prolific career. One of her best known roles was as Kay Lawrence in 1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Jamie Smith Jackson (Alice) also never appeared again with Shatner. She was active until the late-80’s, and then retired from acting altogether. She is married to Michael Ontkean (The Rookies, Slap Shot, Twin Peaks) and they live in Hawaii, where Jackson works as a high-end Interior Designer.

Robert Carradine (Richie’s drug friend Bill in the film) never appeared with Shatner again, but his older and much more famous brother David worked with Bill a number of times, most notably in a 1974 episode of Kung Fu.

Director John Korty, Producer Gerald I. Isenberg and Executive Producer Charles W. Fries previously worked with Shatner in the 1972 sci-fi TV film The People (another installment of the ABC Movie of the Week.) Fries would again executive produce Shatner in 1978’s TV movie The Crash of Flight 401.

Further Studies

Buy the film or watch it on YouTube.

Read more about Beatrice Sparks and her insane next book Jay’s Journal, where Ms. Sparks took a real diary written by a teen who had committed suicide and changed most of the entries to make the boy seem like a Satan worshiper. And then she published it, much to his family’s horror. Wow.

Read about Go Ask Alice and the story of its “exposure” as a work of fiction.

Shatner’s Toupee’s review of Go Ask Alice is an entertaining look at the film with the usual focus on Shatner’s hair.

Robert Schnakenberg’s The Encyclopedia Shatnerica has a very short entry on the film where the author gives the movie a 2 star rating. There really isn’t much meat in the review, although he does say that the film is “based on a real-life diary” which again, horseshit.

Try LSD for yourself. Don’t be a motherscratchin’ square, man! It’s really beautiful!