Director Bob Rafelson worked in New York City as a writer on various television shows before moving to Los Angeles to work on The Monkees as a writer and director. He shared producer duties with Bert Schneider who would later produce Easy Rider (1969) and Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970).

Rafelson, writer/co-producer Jack Nicholson, and Dennis Hopper make cameo appearances in the Columbia-Screen Gems Studio cafe segment of Head.

Toward the end of The Monkees' TV series, rock 'n roll musicians Frank Zappa and Tim Buckley, father of Jeff, made appearances on the show.

You'll notice there are no opening credits for Head.

Head includes film clips from Gilda (1946), Golden Boy (1939), City for Conquest (1940), The Black Cat (1934), and newsreel footage from the Viet Nam war.

The Coca-Cola company took offense at the scene in which Micky beats up a coke machine in the desert and tried to get an injunction against the movie. They weren't successful.

The Coca-Cola machine scene is often excised from TV showings of Head.

Some of the Vietnam war footage that was used in Head was also featured in producer Bert Schneider's 1974 documentary, Hearts and Minds, directed by Peter Davis. It won the Oscar for the Best Documentary that year.

Carol Doda, who appears in a cameo as Sally Silicon in Head, was a stripper who worked at the Condor Club in San Francisco and expanded her breast size from 34B to 44D through silicon injections.

T.C. Jones (aka Thomas Craig Jones) was a cross-dresser and eccentric character actor who made memorable appearances in the Jayne Mansfield comedy, Promises! Promises! (1963), the psycho thriller The Name of the Game Is Kill (1968) and such TV series as The Wild, Wild West and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (the creepy "An Open Window" episode). He plays Mr. AND Mrs. Ace in Head.

The tagline for Head was "What is HEAD all about? Only John Brockman's shrink knows for sure!" [John Brockman was the mastermind behind the film's promotional campaign].

The first cut of Head ran almost two hours but after a disastrous sneak preview in Los Angeles it was edited down to a length of eighty-six minutes.

Peter Tork can be heard whistling the chorus to the Beatles song, "Strawberry Fields Forever" in one scene where he enters a bathroom.

Shortly after the completion of Head, Jack Nicholson was cast by Vincente Minnelli in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) on the basis of his performance in Psych-Out (1968).

According to Micky Dolenz, Frank Zappa once asked him to be the drummer for his band, the Mothers of Invention.

Micky Dolenz described Head in his autobiography as "action, thrills, adventure, sex, horror, slapstick, beautiful scenery, and state-of-the-art visual effects, including, to my knowledge, the first use of "solarization" (that saturated negative colorizing hippie trippie photographic technique). This film was a hippie's wet dream. Kind of like Hellzapoppin meets Peter Max."

The composer and conductor of the incidental music cues in Head was Ken Thorne who served as the musical director on Help! (1965), the Beatles' second film.

Percy Helton, who appears as the Heraldic Messenger in Head, was a prolific character actor who appears in countless films and TV shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and Bonanza. His film credits include Kiss Me Deadly (1955), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947) as a drunken Santa Claus.

Head choreographer Toni Basil had a top forty hit in 1982 with the song "Mickey." You can see her briefly in the "Daddy's Song" musical number in the Monkees' film.

Micky Dolenz recounted in his autobiography that "One day after the film had been released, I was standing around at a car wash waiting for my little red Mercedes 280 SL to get out of the bath when this fifteen or sixteen-year-old girl comes up and starts berating me about how I was "glorifying the war and condoning the killing!" She thought that by showing that footage in the movie we were somehow endorsing the war instead of decrying it. Needless to say, I was dumbfounded. But it did make me realize how far we had come, or rather how far we had gone from our original intentions and design."

Compiled by Jeff Stafford

SOURCES:
I'm a Believer: My Life of Monkees, Music and Madness by Micky Dolenz and Mark Bego
Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson by Patrick McGilligan
Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood by Teri Garr
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
AFI
IMDB
Hollywood Rock by Marshall Crenshaw & Ted Mico