The Social Seminar: Guy

Year Published: 1971

Complete Record: This short film explores "the experiences of Guy, a 15-year-old Mexican-American who spends a great deal of time stoned on reds. Shows his flight into passivity and escape from the realities of an ungiving environment. Questions why he needs to escape and what should change in his surroundings to make his life more challenging." Guy is a 15 year old Chicano, and while he enjoys spending time at the community center, he is otherwise directionless. Guy’s father beat him up all of his life. This escalated from the time Guy started to act out in school until his father left the family. Guy is seen hanging out with his friends, drinking and smoking cigarettes and pot and abusing “reds”, another name for the then-popular barbiturate Seconal. The short film abruptly ends when Guy’s mother tells the filmmaker what he already knows: that Guy is being detained at a juvenile facility on the suspicion of kidnapping and rape. "The Social Seminar is a series of educational films for adults produced by the Extension Media Center of the University of California at Los Angeles in the early 1970s. The series was executive produced by Gary Schlosser, an Oscar-nominated producer of short-subject documentaries. The series was produced for the National Institute of Mental Health as a "multi-media training series."Five episodes of The Social Seminar are known to have been produced: "Buddy," "Guy," "Teddy," "Tom," and "Changing." Each depicted, in a cinema-verite style without voiceover or introduction, aspects of the lives of a selected person or family as they dealt with personal, interpersonal and societal change."