The Smiley Smile Message Board

 go to wcco.com and click bill lee pod casts...interview with bill p. about the new movie half way through pod cast. poss. release date is told.  listen..listen ..listen

http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2014/01/20/bill-pohlad-on-producing-12-years-a-slave/ (http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2014/01/20/bill-pohlad-on-producing-12-years-a-slave/)

Quickly transcribed (some words, sentences were left out, this is the gist of it though):

So, it has no distributor at this point. I wonder how widely it will be released? It's hard to get films distributed these days because independent films are being pushed out of the multiplexes by the so-called tentpole blockbuster type movies. Though that would make it more realistic to expect it to be released in the fall, when most of those movies have mostly cleared out of theaters.

Many thanks for doing that, appreciated.

Brian Wilson is not schizophrenic.

Thank's for sharing, the end of summer will be here as soon as we know it!

He's not? I'm pretty sure he is. What makes you think he's not? I'd like to discuss, this is not meant as a provocation.

It's been discussed at length on this board, he suffers from clinical depression.  Along the way, he was treated with schizophrenia class medications by hack Dr. Landy and others, which caused brain damage.  A combination of clinical depression and street drugs, will lead to an endless cycle of dysfunctional behavior.  Depressed people withdraw from life, such as when Brian withdrew to his bedroom for a period of time. 

I believe we've been told his diagnosis, haven't we?  But I can't remember.  Schizo affective?  Bipolar?  Cyclothymic? 

I'm not an expert on these things, but I believe if a person hears audible voices in their head, then there is a "schizo" element to their mental illness.

Yes.

It will be a miracle if this movie get's a wide release

Paranoia also fits into the picture. Landy's drugs very obviously did brain damage to Brian, but that doesn't mean Brian's brain disease is absolutely non-schizophrenic.

I thought they were calling it schizo affective, which has symptoms of schizophrenia but isn't the full disease.  Hearing voices isn't ordinarily a symptom of depression and Brian says in interviews that he hallucinates voices.

I'm in a band with two people that suffer from this, and I can certainly back up what was said here. The interesting thing was I was telling them about Brian's illness before I knew about theirs.

I'm not being a jerk, I'm not being disagreeable, and I'm not singling you out, but...

Do you or any other posters know what drugs Landy gave to Brian in the 1980's that caused permanent damage or had side effects that still affect him today, 25 years later. I'm asking to obtain knowledge, to learn more about the Landy period, not to be argumentative.

Regarding auditory hallucinations and diagnoses: You can have hallucinations, including auditory, without having schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder. It can occur in depression and bipolar disorder, for example.

It's interesting that there are TV ads for a medication called Abilify that treat it like it's some kind of lightweight medication for depressed people to add to their Prozac if Prozac isn't enough. I see the Abilify commercial all the time on network TV. Out of curiousity, I looked up what it does, exactly. It's an anti-psychotic medication that's given to schizophrenics as well as depressed and bi-polar patients. I find it weird that a powerful anti-psychotic drug is advertised on primetime network TV with a cute-sy animated commercial, but I guess those problems are more mainstream and widespread than you'd think.

I don't know what speciifc drugs Landy prescribed, but based on what I have read, it's my understanding that Dr. Landy had medication that is used to treat schizophrenia prescribed for BW.  Landy couldn't have  written prescriptions as psychologist, so he had to have someone who was an m.d. write the scrips.  I've also read that Landy would get different doctors to prescribe meds, so that no one had a handle on all the meds BW was taking and all the side effects and toxicities, etc.  A real medical mess.

I remember reading in Tim White's book that he was on a lot of different drugs, over ten at one time, but I don't remember if it listed which ones. It did mention that he took an anti-Parkinson drug to stop involuntary tremors caused by one of the anti-psychotic drugs.

These disorders are not as widespread and mainstream as the advertising suggests, but it is a sign of the Big Business of pharmocrats: eighty-percent of the population is currently taking some kind of anti-depressant, according to the latest figures. There's a concept called FALSE POSITIVE. If you exhibit enough symptoms, you qualify for the diagnosis which gets you the prescription. You may not have a real problem, but you qualify for the drug.

Fact: no condition is listed in the DSM (the guidebook for diagnosis) without a sponsor.
Fact: no drug is considered for market by the FDA unless it is linked to a specific condition listed in the DSM.

Small investment when you have a potential to make billions of dollars, and the latest version of the DSM expands the number of diagnosis so that nearly everybody in the population can get themselves a prescription for one drug or another or both!

Most people won't think to ask their doctor about "Abilify" or any of the other drugs unless the advertisements tell them that there are drugs for certain kinds of symptoms. But are those symptoms really a medical condition, or are they something else? Like, a spiritual dilemma or a philosophical problem? Disease is socially defined, part of our consensus reality, and there are many professional cliques that earn billions of dollars by drugging the population unnecessarily. Cute ads make it "safe" and normalize it for consumption. It's a twisted business.

Anyway, I always thought it was interesting how Brian wanted to be a psychologist, before he became successful as a musician.

Yep, I agree with the above, and wish they had never made prescription drug advertising "legal" on American TV. It's also a bummer that such a large number of ads on American TV are for some malady or another.

BTW, the schizo-affective diagnosis for Brian is something that has been put across by Brian and his people for the past few years. It comes up in Google search and it appears in a number of article results from major publications. He also is said to be bipolar along with schizoaffective, not just depressive. It's very honest of them, when he really doesn't have to reveal that much. It will be interesting to see how they put it in the film, because the film director himself is saying it's a form of schizophrenia and I'm not sure it is.

No worries, everybody's discussing in a gentle manner here so far, including you, and I don't feel singled out... :) I don't have knowledge of the medicaments. Recently I read about schizophrenia and it mentioned auditory hallucinations and paranoia, which naturally made me think of Brian and his behaviour during SMiLE, when he was seriously thinking there are mind gangsters and the occasional witch who were after him.



Have you deeper knowledge about this that you might want to elaborate? I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't really add more to this discussion than what I wrote above.

Yes, I'm a psychologist. I'm doing most of my posting here on my phone so that's why my last post was a bit short. Using the phone now as well but hopefully I can make some time to elaborate later.

Thank you very much in advance! :)

John Cusack did an AMA on Reddit about 4 hours ago (it's actually still going on as he is still on there answering people's questions at a pretty rapid rate).

I got on and posted a question, didn't think he would answer but it turns out he did! So I asked what it was like to work with Brian and being on the set of Love & Mercy


Yeah it's not much but still pretty cool. I guess he was in a rush haha.

Also, I realized that Bill Pohlad was the producer of 12 Years A Slave which was all over the Oscars this year so that makes me even more excited for this movie.

This movie has a ridiculous amount of brilliant people involved, it should be incredible but I doubt it will.

Indeed it has!

I bet it won't be anything we imagine it to be right now. I'm pretty sure they are trying new stuff and taking risks in about every department - not only storytelling-wise. I have a feeling it'll be great. It might not be every die-hard fan's cup of coffee, though.

Thanks for asking him about it! I arrived to the thread 2 hours after he started the AMA, I assumed he was already gone...terrible assumption.

I'm starting to have high hopes for this movie. And, if it does come out in the fall, I'm sure we'll get a trailer mid-summer.

Agreed ^

Hope its something that really had care put into it. I dont care how they tell the story, as long as its fair to each member and does not skip over too much, I will be happy.
Anyone know when the jump from young Brian to old Brian will occur? My guess is at the demise of Smile, but they could as far as Holland.

My bet would be on a frame narrative with Cusack's 80s Brian (or an even older Brian). Everything else would be flashbacks, reminiscences, remembrances. That's roughly what has formed in my mind, judging from everything we've heard and seen.

We already have a decent BW biopic, this new one won't hold a candle to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_1mxNtLCK0

Great flick. :happydance

The pictures from the set made it look terrible, I lost faith in the project at that point. I hope to be pleasantly surprised

Are you referring to the '62/'63 beach photos and/or the Brian & Melinda images? Both looked 'okay' to me.


You can hardly ever draw 'conclusions' to the finished product from set photos. They are merely static snapshots of something that will be in motion in the final film, after months of post-production. It's impossible to anticipate the actors' performances, editing, lighting, etc.

Indeed, 'schizo-affective disorder' has been put forward by relevant sources over the last ten years or so. But it is also true that in mental disorders, very rarely, if ever, things are black or white (like in: you have caught the flu or not, you have appendicitis or not). It is almost always about gradual scales and co-morbidities. So diagnosis is a tricky business.

I don't know what Landy (or better: the doctors in his team, he had a few IIRC, I recall one Murray Susser, for instance) prescribed to Brian. I have a slight hunch that not only were the doses too high, but also that (presumably with intent) pretty old-fashioned meds were given, with harsher outcomes and more side effects. Perhaps Peter Reum knows more about this. The stories about tardive dyskinesia and eventually life-threatening results make me think that not really the most state-of-the-art stuff was handed to Brian.

Interestingly enough, a certain researcher has taken the time to publish a psychological analysis of Brian and the conclusion it came to was all three. Take of it as you will.

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefano_Belli/publication/223533269_A_psychobiographical_analysis_of_Brian_Douglas_Wilson_Creativity_drugs_and_models_of_schizophrenic_and_affective_disorders/links/02e7e51647cd5413b4000000

I can't read it...says I have to register, and it won't let me progress...

That "certain researcher" wouldn't be you by any chance, would it? :)

And BW's lyrics are described as "unremarkable or even poor"! Aww.... i don't think the author is a fan of BB Love You.

My expectation levels for most things related to Brian at this point are zero so I'm not going to be disappointed.

I don't expect this film to be mediocre. It'll either fall by the wayside or do a Juno and be the unexpected hit of the decade in which case I'll pull myself out of this torper and start whooping.

I am a little taken aback by the author of this published paper doing a diagnosis without ever talking to or meeting with the subject of his research paper and running a computer program to yield a diagnosis. Call me old fashioned, but one should at least have spent some clinical time with the patient before  publishing. That said, his references are quite solid.