Connie Britton (American Ultra), Mad Men & 60's dystopian turn

Connie Britton is the latest to join the cast of Lionsgate’s 'American Ultra,' the action comedy starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart that recently kicked off production. Eisenberg plays a seemingly hapless and unmotivated small-town stoner who is actually a highly trained, lethal sleeper agent in a government program. That program was created by Victoria Lasseter (Britton). Topher Grace, Tony Hale, John Leguizamo, Bill Pullman and Walton Goggins also star. Source: www.deadline.com

Access Hollywood: -Friday night lights... do you keep in touch with Kyle Chandler? -Connie Britton: I sure do. -Reporter: Good looking man, handsome man. -Connie Britton: We saw him recently. Went and visited. My son he's like: where is uncle Kyle? It's great. Source: www.accesshollywood.com

-You’ve been ranked as one of the best TV dads for Friday Night Lights, so how do your real life experiences as a dad affect your portrayal of your character [in Super 8]?

-Kyle Chandler: Well I mean the guy that I’m playing doesn’t have very good communication with his son and he’s mourning the loss of his wife and he’s rather distant so it’s not really similar but it is in the sense that I knew what I was missing playing the character. I’m very close with my kids and I’m a big hugger and a big talker and [I am] everything this guy is not. Source: www.viewauckland.co.nz

-I love Bob Dylan. I love all vintage -everything, really. I love fashion. And the fifties, I've always loved. But after working on 'Super 8' and seeing all the seventies clothes, now I'm really into Twiggy and 'The Virgin Suicides'. We were in West Virginia filming in this really small town [Weirton], which sort of felt like the seventies anyway. Then, being in all the clothes, you really felt like you were just there. I remember going to the wardrobe-fitting for the first time and seeing all the cool high-waisted jeans and halter-tops and that style is coming back anyway! -Elle Fanning about filming "Super 8" (2011)

It’s 1969, the culture is coming apart at the seams and a reckoning is on the horizon, a horizon that nobody sees, drenched as they are in narcissism and self-indulgence. What’s happening, simultaneously, is the demise of an old male order. Don Draper now back at work, but in a lowly position, pounding out ideas on a typewriter to please the boss, Peggy. Even the big boss who has replaced Don, the sharp-tongued, high-handed Lou, is revealed to be, in private, an absurd figure. The viewer who is even slightly aware of the thrust of recent U.S. history knows what the future holds – the optimism of the 1960s disintegrating, into the “Me Decade” of spiritual emptiness and moral decay, the decline of great cities, the traumatic attempt to disentangle from the mess of Vietnam. The end of entitlement for some, the evaporation of enlightenment for others.

In that context Mad Men now seems to take a dystopian turn. As it must. What seemed heavenly in the series’ first seasons – anchored in viewer nostalgia for the fashion, the social mores, the predigital requiescence of working and personal life – now turns, inexorably toward a vision of a hellish place. Darkness looms and if you look below the surface of Mad Men now it should make you shiver. Source: www.theglobeandmail.com

Project MKUltra is the code name of a U.S. government human research operation organized through the Scientific Intelligence Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people's mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, etc. LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge or informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after World War II. LSD was eventually dismissed by MKUltra's researchers as too unpredictable in its results. Alarmists and proselytizers alike collaborated in the belief that American youth en masse were abandoning the stable routes of American society and striking out onto unprecedented trails. Even as the editors deplored the current excesses (although it was a Life article that stimulated a psychologist named Timothy Leary to try his first psychedelic mushrooms), they were usually less than scrupulous in reminding their audience that most of the young were dropping acid and fleeing to the Haight-Ashbury.

There was enormous anxiety about whether the prevailing culture could hold the young; and on the liberal side, anxiety about whether it deserved to. Governor George Wallace and Dr. Timothy Leary agreed that what was at stake was nothing less than Western Civilization, the only question being whether its demise was auspicious. Thrown out of Harvard in 1963 for tampering with unwary undergraduates, Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert took their drug experiments to a millionaire heir's mansion in upstate New York, a quasi-religious ashram for what Leary called the International Federation for Internal Freedom, where psilocybin was superseded by the even more mind-blowing chemical LSD.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Kesey, who had been turned on to LSD by a Veterans Administration hospital experiment in I960, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, with its romance of crazy-like-a-fox heroes up against the Combine (a.k.a. System), and founded a countercombine of Merry Pranksters. How to summon up the enormous innocence of the Pranksters? In their reckless abandon, their sheer ingenuity and bravado, they were strangely of a piece with the nodules of the civil rights movement and the New Left. For Kesey, like Leary, was a proselytizer at a moment when millions were seeking a way to live beyond limits; he had a "vision of turning on the world." Expert chemists like the Bay Area's Owsley, who set up underground laboratories and fabricated potent and pure LSD tablets (still legal), were not in it just for the money; they kept their prices down, gave out plenty of free samples, and fancied themselves "architects of social change", toward which end Owsley helped, for example, to finance the Grateful Dead." -"The Sixties: Years Of Hope, Days Of Rage" (1993) by Todd Gitlin