'National Lampoon' Documentary Chronicles the Maddest Magazine of All Time
To anyone working in the modern magazine industry, the new doc Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon — which premiered Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival — documents a time that now seems like a far-off fantasy. It was an era in which a magazine could change the culture, reach 12 million readers, launch superstar careers, and foster a work culture in which drugs and rampant nudity were office staples. Few publications have that kind of reach nowadays, but National Lampoon, which debuted in 1970, wasn’t just a scathing, subversive read; it was a big business, eventually spinning off into a radio show and live shows, bestselling books, and movies like Animal House and the Vacation films.
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Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead — a fun if, at times, too-fawning chronicle — tells this story with the same tools employed by so many pop-culture docs these days: zippy animation, wall-to-wall classic rock tunes, and talking head interviews with alumni, fans, and hangers-on, including Chevy Chase, John Landis, and Ivan Reitman.
Still, for all the reminiscing, the film’s most effective moments are when it places the magazine’s incendiary content front-and-center. Seeing the magazine’s acidic satire on the big screen — especially artifacts like Michael O’Donoghue’s ”Vietnam Baby Book,” which brutally highlighted the atrocities of war — is a reminder of how gutsy these infidels really were, especially compared to now, when mainstream political satire is largely toothless, and presidential candidates are treated as guests of honor on Saturday Night Live.
But while Drunk captures the goings-ons of the Lampoon's mostly male, white and proudly immature staff — one staffer fondly describes the crew as “a bunch of jerk-offs” — it glosses over the fact that the Lampoon was also a skeevy boys’ club, one in which women were more likely to be found posing naked for a Foto Funnies spread than working at a desk. At one point in the film, a prominent female Lampoon alum mentions, only half-jokingly, that she got the job “on her back,” a point that’s never addressed further. Drunk does a solid job of celebrating the mag’s smarts, moxie, and hedonism. But it would be a lot more effective (and honest) if the filmmakers occasionally stopped the party and asked why the guest list had been so limited in the first place.
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