Your kidding me right?

And the fact that like...70% of the book was missing wasn't too pleasing either. Eh, it was okay though.

Yeah, see... the way I look at it, people who are going to be scared off drugs by a movie are simply the type to be scared off drugs by anything. People who aren't the type to be scared off drugs by a movie won't be affected by it, and will go ahead and use or not, as they like.

By which I mean, this movie is utterly ineffective as an "educational" film. I'm actually surprised to hear (read) people say that it reflects their own descent into drug use; I've seen nothing like it outside other fiction, and I wonder if people's memories have been addled by said drug use. I'm even more surprised to see that some people credit the movie with their lack of drug use--but then, I'm not the type to frighten easily, so I can't empathise with people who are.

As has been pointed out several times, the book itself was a fraud, edited by Beatrice Sparks (ostensibly ghost-written by several authors working under Sparks' direction), who wrote/edited several other "diaries" of poor teenagers falling victim to broken homes and sin (those of us born and raised in the 60s and particularly the 70s had the pleasure of being targetted by this sort of "straighten up and fly right" novel--school libraries were full of 'em!).

Yes, but have any of those movies helped you to distinguish between your and you're? Appears not.

To Original Poster:


Well, you are watching it in present day and on youtube.

I watched it when I was young, on TV when it first came out (way before youtube days, of course :)

Picture, if you can, a time of no home computers with endless websites of just about everything you can imagine right there at your fingertips and before your eyes; available were only a handful of TV stations with shows that, although they were starting to adapt to the changing mores of society, still were fairly restrictive in what they broadcast; a time of no VHS or DVD movies that you could watch at will, at home. Coming of age to TV shows along the lines of Andy Griffith, Star Trek, the Brady Bunch, the Monkees, etc. What came into your house as a young person in the form of media was pretty tame compared to nowadays.

'Go Ask Alice', and later 'The Death of Ritchie', were pretty powerful BACK THEN to a young person watching it.

Go Ask Alice also was unusual back in the day in that it was told from the viewpoint of a young 'modern-day' girl transformed by the 'modern-day' drug scene and did not portray this in some Hollywood glitzy style. Alice's life was fairly mundane at first, and then got kind of gritty, but still was not overblown, and that made it even more realistic. At the time, everyone thought that this was an utterly true story and that made it even more potent. The scenes about the couple who abused her and her friend when they were on the run, and later what happened when she was slipped the LSD while babysitting, were fairly frightening at the time to young viewers inexperienced at seeing portrayals of such events on TV.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since those days, and there is a 'jaded-ness' nowadays that wasn't as prevalent back then. Many of us were as naive as Alice, growing up in times that were making it more and more difficult to maintain that certain kind of naivety for long. This movie was a bit more than a 'drug movie'.

This movie might not 'hold up' for today's crop of first-time viewers, but I still like to watch it every now and again -- for the story, for nostalgia, and for some of the performances. Sorry you can't appreciate it.




"I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than..a rude remark or a vulgar action" Blanche DuBois