The first film to depict hippies may be The Fat Spy (1966), a low-budget comedy in which a musical group led by Jordan Christopher invades the island home of millionaire Brian Donlevy and his daughter, Jayne Mansfield.

The hippie movement first gained widespread notice in 1967, starting with the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The Monterey Pop Festival later that year started the "Summer of Love," during which newspaper and other national media coverage put the counter-culture on front pages around the nation. As a result, an estimated 100,000 people traveled to San Francisco to tune in, turn on and drop out. Although the movement began dying out by the end of the year, its influence on fashion and music continued for years afterwards.

The movement also inspired a series of low-budget films depicting the counter-culture, often in sensationalistic terms focusing on free love and drug abuse. Low-budget hippie exploitation films started to appear around 1967, with Hallucination Generation (actually 1966), Riot on Sunset Strip, The Trip and The Love-Ins all coming out at about the same time.

The year I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! was released, Hollywood discovered the youth audience when young people, many under the influence of recreational drugs, made a hit out of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A year later, the success of Easy Rider (1969) led to a series of films attempting to capture the changes in American life embodied by the counter-culture. These films, many of which embraced the hippie movement whole-heartedly, would eventually eclipse the position of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas as one of the first Hollywood films to depict the youth culture.

Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker worked together on two more film scripts, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969) and Alex in Wonderland (1970), after I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!. When the team ended, Mazursky continued making acclaimed films like An Unmarried Woman (1978) and Enemies: A Love Story (1989), while Tucker returned to television writing and producing.

It would take Inspector Clouseau, in Return of the Pink Panther (1975), to revive Peter Sellers's position as a box-office star. He would not return completely to critical favor, however, until his Oscar®-nominated performance as Chance the Gardener in Being There (1979).

Despite strong reviews for I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!, Leigh Taylor-Young's film career refused to take off, hurt greatly by the flop of The Big Bounce (1969), in which she co-starred with husband Ryan O'Neal. She enjoyed a comeback as a porn-star-turned-mayor on the television series Picket Fences, which brought her an Emmy in 1994.

By Frank Miller