In this era of instant cultural gratification, it is rare to have to wait 36 years to watch a film. But that’s how long it took for me to see “Maidstone,” Norman Mailer’s legendary exercise in improvisatory semifictional cinéma vérité. It finally arrived at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center this past July like a video transmission from the faraway Planet ’60s — a civilization in the throes of a crackup. I had been itching to see it ever since reading Mailer’s extraordinary essay on its creation, “A Course in Film-Making,” in New American Review in 1971, by which point the film had come and gone. For reasons its creator could hardly have anticipated, this lurid, ludicrous, lunatic spectacle was worth the wait.
At one level, “Maidstone” is a Norman Mailer version of a Rat Pack movie, albeit in the manner of Artaud. Filmed over five booze-, drug- and sex-soaked days in July 1968 in several Hamptons locations, it was a “guerrilla raid on the nature of reality,” as Mailer described it. Such forays were his speciality in those years, when he dominated a hopped-up, stressed-out American culture like a hipster-intellectual king of all media. No mere scribbler, he was a mega-celebrity and an oracle in an age that adored fame. Not since Hemingway had a novelist so stood astride the culture. Richard Poirier, in his 1971 study, “The Performing Self,” captures Mailer’s style precisely: “furiously self-consultive, so even narcissistic, and later so eager for publicity, love and historical dimension.”