Welcome to Consequence‘s series Dusting ‘Em Off, which examines classic albums that have established an enduring place in pop culture. Today, Harry Nilsson shares his LSD epiphany with The Point!
For fans of Harry Nilsson, the origins of his cult classic multi-media project The Point! are as legendary as the dream that brought Keith Richards the riff for “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction)” or Paul McCartney pulling “Get Back” out of thin air. Armed with a healthy dose of lysergic acid diethylamide, Nilsson wandered into the woods, took in his surroundings, and had a pointed epiphany that would go on to drive the next phase of his creative life.
“I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the branches came to points, and the houses came to points,” the oft-repeated quote goes. “I thought, ‘Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn’t, then there’s a point to it.'”
It’s a sentiment that sounds like it doesn’t make sense, then, after careful consideration, becomes profound, before going elusive all over again — but that’s its power. The idea only comes into focus when squinting and is lost just as easily as it’s found. That quality, along with the endless amount of wordplay the word “point” allows for (seriously, take a shot every time you hear the 5-letter word and you’ll end up in the hospital), had enough creative steam to sustain an album, an accompanying comic, and an animated feature.
Regardless of the story’s medium, its core revolves around Oblio, a round-headed child in a town where — ahem — everything has a point. After the ill-intentioned Count and his pip-squeak kid convince the otherwise accepting King to banish Oblio and his canine companion Arrow for the seemingly pointless offense (damn, now I’m doing it), the two venture into the Pointless Forrest, encountering zany characters and new truths along the way.
On the surface, it’s a fairly standard children’s tale. It’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Ugly Duckling, or, for younger readers, Spookly the Square Pumpkin (which, come to think about it, also features shape-centered discrimination). And yet, Nilsson’s mature, left-field approach to the material allows for The Point! — both the album and the film — to achieve a surprisingly complex thematic payoff.
But before he could bake acceptance and existential dread into surrealist animation and some of the best pop songs of his career, Nilsson had to sell studio executives on the idea, presumably without the aid of a life-changing acid trip.
Fortunately, Nilsson had previous film experience. He had written the music for Otto Preminger’s 1968 Skidoo and, after originally submitting “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City,” nabbed a second wind for his now classic rendition of “Everybody’s Talkin'” when Midnight Cowboy used it in its opening scene. But for The Point!, Nilsson wasn’t just helming songwriting duties, he’d be fronting the project from the ground up. He wrote a 22-page treatment, submitted it to ABC, and, with the Oscar-winning animator and director Fred Wolf signed on, secured the green light.
The addition of Wolf would prove to be instrumental to the film’s ultimate charm. Nilsson originally stumbled across the outsider artist after catching a screening of his 1967 short The Box, a fittingly surreal tale that previews The Point!’s hand-drawn, playful visual identity.
Although The Point! would be many times the workload of the 10-minute The Box, Wolf handled animation duties entirely on his own; each colorful, stylized frame is Wolf and Wolf alone. While undoubtedly a grueling process, it’s hard to imagine the film’s aesthetic having the same magic without those efforts. From the character designs to the psychedelic vignettes to the way black colors are never truly filled in, but rather scribbled in a way that leaves gaps between the strokes, Wolf was perhaps more equipped to translate Nilsson’s vision than any other animator at the time.
Other notable faces behind the scenes include Mike Lookinland (later of Brady Bunch fame), who voiced Oblio, and Dustin Hoffman, who took over narration duties. Hoffman’s contract, however, stipulated that his work could only be used for the original 1971 ABC Movie of the Week broadcast. Subsequent reruns would see the role recast with the talents of Alan Barzman and Alan Thicke, with Ringo Starr handling the part for the home video release.
Even beyond Nilsson’s songs, the film excels as a funny, engaging, and unique treat. In addition to the work of Wolf and the cast, Norm Lenzer’s screenplay manages to sneak high-level flourishes into the otherwise family-friendly dialogues. The asides from the townsfolk as they comment on and argue about Oblio’s situation provide a bizarrely grounded mundanity to the otherwise absurd world. “While the farmers kept the villagers’ bodies nourished with pointed crops, the artist colony in the community, as in all communities, did their part to keep minds and souls filled with new points to view,” the narrator explains as mustached artists throw pies at each other, ridicule those drawing circles in a status-quo of triangles, and profess, “To be or not to be, that is the point.”
