Wild in the Streets

Wild in the Streets (1968)

If you're thirty, you're through!

Musician Max Frost lends his backing to a Senate candidate who wants to give 18-year-olds the right to vote, but he takes things a step further than expected. Inspired by their hero's words, Max's fans pressure their leaders into extending the vote to citizens as young as 15. Max and his followers capitalize on their might by bringing new issues to the fore, but, drunk on power, they soon take generational warfare to terrible extremes.

Date of release
1968-05-29
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (38)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Comedy, Drama, Music
Director
Barry Shear

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Wild in the Streets is a 1968 American dystopian comedy-drama film directed by Barry Shear and starring Christopher Jones, Hal Holbrook and Shelley Winters. Based on the short story "The Day It All Happened, Baby!" by Robert Thom, it was distributed by American International Pictures. The film, described as both "ludicrous" and "cautionary", was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing and became a cult classic of the 1960s counterculture.

Production notes

Lowering the voting age was an issue in 1968 and was passed in 1970, with Oregon v. Mitchell lowering the presidential minimum voting age to 18 and 1971 with the 26th Amendment lowering local and state election minimum voting ages to 18.

The movie features cameos from several media personalities, including Melvin Belli, Dick Clark, Pamela Mason, Army Archerd, and Walter Winchell. Millie Perkins and Ed Begley have supporting roles, and Bobby Sherman interviews Max as president. In a pre-Brady Bunch role, Barry Williams plays the teenage Max Frost at the beginning of the movie.

According to filmmaker Kenneth Bowser, the part eventually played by Christopher Jones was offered to folk singer Phil Ochs. After reading the screenplay, Ochs rejected the offer, claiming the story distorted the actual nature of the youth counterculture of the period.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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