Just watched this rare documentary of Tinseltown during the late '60s on fancast.com. With scenes of surfing, political meetings, premieres, and other events common to Hollywood, this film seems to have it all for anyone interested in what it was like there during a time of turbulence. We also go to Universal Studios where Alfred Hitchcock is filming Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, go to a luncheon where retired cowboy musical star Gene Autry talks about the Watts riots while Carol Cole-an honoree of some kind who's the late Nat King Cole's daughter and therefore also future star Natalie's sister-listens on. There's also a musician named Bobby Jameson who performs a protest song in front of a rich, middle-aged audience that seems to not really listen to him as they're ignorant of the scathing lyrics. I could mention others but there's so many things going on that this review would just be too confusing to many of you reading this. So I'll just say that Mondo Hollywood was a fascinating time capsule to this writer who was born during this era.

I had a chance to meet the director of this documentary when I went to see the movie on screen. Robert Carl Cohen presented himself as a Social Scientist that studies the demographic inter-relationships of cultures and how they co-exist with one another. Mondo Hollywood was his first analyzing of a culture in the brink of exploding with new eccentric and openness that was the sixties. This film is a study of what Hollywood was in the 60s and how each actual persona represented the culture that was booming in that era. It's nothing like I have ever seen, so low key yet thrown in your face with eccentricities. Each persona was so beautiful in their own way but that was their reality when you can watch and merely just be baffled by the way they live in a day by day life. Extremely recommended to those that have an inkling and fascination with the era of the psycho delicatessen of the 60s and those moved by pure truthful film making! And merely those in awe of the mystical Hollywood...

For Jayne Mansfield fans like me -- who shelled out big bucks for a bootleg copy of this extremely rare 60s doc, "Mondo Hollywood" -- be warned: YOU WILL BE ROBBED. There is no interview with Mansfield, nor anything more of Big Jayne than a four-second-flash in a stock-footage / montage sequence along with dozens of other stars of the mid-60s out & about in Tinseltown. That's it. So don't be fooled into thinking she participates in this film. She doesn't. Those who do appear, however, can occasionally be intriguing. Especially the Manson murder victim, Jay Sebring. Seeing him whirl about his Hollywood hair salon in his prime gives "Mondo Hollywood" is core quotient of Hollywood Babylonia, which is what I expected the rest of the doc to explore. Instead, its dippy, drifter subjects simply waft through the film on a blahs-ville high. In the end, the "underworld" hype that the film has accrued over the years was a big fat bust.

This low-budget 60's hippy/peace/love exploitation fare features Mansfield at an all time low in her career. Of main interest here is Beausoleil, who is now in prison for a Manson Family related murder, Sebring, who was soon to be a Manson Family victim, and a musical score by Mike Curb, who would go on to become Attorney General for the sate of California!