Nowsreal (1968)

Nowsreal was created in the spring of 1968, shot between equinox and solstice by Peter Berg and Kelly Hart. It depicts the final months of the San Francisco Diggers/Free City Collective before they were disbanded in June of that year. The Diggers were a radical community-action group of activists and street theatre actors operating from 1966 to 1968, based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Their politics have been categorized as "left-wing"; more accurately, they were "community anarchists" who blended a desire for freedom with a consciousness of the community in which they lived. The Diggers' central tenet was to be "authentic," seeking to create a society free from the dictates of money and capitalism.

The Diggers were closely associated and shared a number of members with the guerrilla theater group San Francisco Mime Troupe. They were formed out of after-hours Mime Troupe discussions between Emmett Grogan, Peter Coyote, Peter Berg, and Billy Landout. They fostered and inspired later groups like the Yippies.

The Diggers were urban activists who ran free kitchens, free stores, organised culture and art events and ran free medical clinics. They used theatre techniques to promote social equality and open public space and protested against the developing market economy and the rule of capital.

In the film a poetry action at San Francisco Town Hal is documented, which was covered by the SF Chronicle :

"The Free City Collective held a press conference and presented a "Modest Proposal" contaning five requests of The City administration, including refurbishment of empty city-owned buildings for free housing, distribution of surplus food and materials through a network of ten neighborhood free stores, setting up presses and trucks for free news distribution throughout the city, providing resources for neighborhood celebrations, and the opening of the parks for free life acts "all permit authority to be rescinded." After the proposal was read, one of the Diggers began reading a poem on America while wearing an American flag shirt. The police arrested him for violating a law against defiling the flag. A second man was arrested for profanity after shouting "Fuck" (the newspaper account described it as "a four-letter word meaning to make love." Ron Thelin (not named, but captioned in a photo) was arrested for wearing a mask after Judge Albert Axelrod informed that it was a violation of the Penal Code. A fourth man was arrested while trying to prevent Ron's arrest. A woman was also arrested, but no reason indicated. Terrence Hallinan, the Diggers' lawyer, charged that talks with the Mayor's Office had produced no results except for pressure from The City on produce market vendors to discontinue supplying free fruits and vegetables to the Diggers. He also said that the police had ordered the noon poetry events off the Polk street steps of City Hall. The SF Chron article quotes "Peter" aka "William Bonney" as saying that "San Francisco can 'burn or turn into a model for the rest of the cities to follow, with radical alternatives to riots and all those corny numbers.'" The Diggers provided free apples to the crowds. Other days they had provided free oranges and strawberries.

Subsequently, all charges were dropped on all five defendants at a court hearing on May 22 at the request of the assistant district attorney who declared that "there was a lot of confusion as to what went on at that poetry bust." Those who had been arrested included: Ronald Thelin, 30, 1324 Willard St. (arrested for "intent to conceal his identity," Section 650a of the Penal Code); Thomas Baker III, 26 (arrested for wearing an American flag); Charles Perkel, 21, 1360 Fell St. (arrested for profanity); Phyllis Wilner, 19, 110 Pierce St.; Israel Jacton, 1324 Willard St. The article mentions that the Asst. D.A. (Granklin Gentes) at one point "began to fidget nervously with a sheaf of papers" and that after the end of the proceeding, he "walked hurriedly out of court.""

The Digger Free Family left behind a plethora of historical evidence—street sheets, articles, posters, oral histories, memoirs, but scant photographic evidence. NOWSREAL helps fill that gap—the film that Peter Berg and Kelly Hart created (along with the active participation of the rest of the Diggers/Free City Collective) in the spring of 1968. Judy Goldhaft explained that Peter envisioned Nowsreal as a visual tribal history in the way that Plains Indians would sometimes paint their tipis with symbols that contained an intimate narrative of significant events. In the film we see the final cycle of Digger events in San Francisco before dispersal, starting with the month-long daily "Noon Forever" events on City Hall Steps. At one of these, Freeman House announces "A Modest Proposal" that lays out the vision of Free City including refurbishment of empty city-owned buildings for free housing, distribution of surplus food and materials through a network of ten neighborhood free stores, setting up presses and trucks for free news distribution throughout the city, providing resources for neighborhood celebrations, and the opening of the parks for free life acts "all permit authority to be rescinded." On that particular day (May 8 1968), Ron Thelin was busted by the SF Police for wearing a mask in public, and Ama was busted for wearing a shirt in the design of an American flag. The film depicts their arrests among numerous other happenings in that spring of 1968 leading up to the flashback (literally) depicting the Summer Solstice celebrations.