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Taking Woodstock is Ang Lee's light-hearted look at how the three-day festival of peace, love and brown acid affected a family who owned a motel near Max Yasgur's farm (Yasgur, by the way, is played by Eugene Levy.)
The movie's based on a memoir by Elliot Tiber (played by stand-up comic Demetri Martin), who throws in his lot with the canny hippies organizing the festival, in order to save his parents' motel.
Lee felt, "after making six tragedies in a row," that he needed a laugh (Hulk was a tragedy? Who knew?). But he was also aware -- and maybe his star whispered this in his ear -- that comedy's a lot harder than it appears.
"If you do a comedy and people don't laugh, you've failed. If it's a serious movie and people don't get it, you can always blame the audience."
The other difficult thing, Lee said, was ensuring that all the extras had an authentic late 1960s vibe. This was more difficult than you might imagine, due to issues of ... well, personal grooming. One scene features some blissed-out skinny dipping, and "getting the pubic hair to look right, that was hard."
Added screenwriter James Schamus, "the challenge was to get extras who were skinny, but weren't working out all the time ... to find people who weren't staring at themselves in the mirror, and had hair down there. That pretty much encapsulates the difference in the past forty years."
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