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Peter’s own account is much less acrimonious than Mazursky’s:

“One night we all wanted to see a Fellini film, see? We were all just nicely high, and all the girls had baked hash cookies. But the owner comes in and says, ‘I’m sorry to tell you guys, but they didn’t wanna give us the Fellini film.’ I said, ‘Oh shit, fuck it.’ But this guy says, ‘No, listen, I got a film by Mel Brooks. It’s called Springtime for Hitler (the original title). So we gave out a few more cookies, things were very heavily hashed up, and we got ripped out of our minds. We started watching this film and were hysterical. I actually had to crawl out of the room on my hands and knees and go to the lavatory because I was almost sick with laughing. When I went back in, I just saw white on the screen. We were all just looking at the white until someone knew enough to say, ‘Change the reel!’ ”

Studio executives didn’t quite know what to make of Brooks’s stomach-hurting laughmaker, and The Producers was still looking for distribution support. Sellers thought he could help: “The following day I got hold of as many producers as I could, urging them to come and see this film. I got a good turnout. I took out full-page ads in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety. The movie is one of the greatest comedies that’s been made recently.” He had been unable to listen to Brooks’s lines because of the distractions of Bloomingdale’s, but once it was finished, he could see and hear it; even through his spiked-brownie haze, Peter saw what Hollywood executives were dismissing. His championing of The Producers gave it the industry attention that turned it into a smash hit.

• • •

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! is a flower-power comedy, a classic of its genre thanks almost entirely to Peter’s performance. Harold Fine (Peter), a middle-aged, asthmatic, Lincoln-driving lawyer, undergoes a profound life transition after his hippie brother’s breathy girlfriend, Nancy (Leigh Taylor-Young), bakes him some “groovy” Pillsbury brownies—“groovy” owing to the pot she adds with a liberal hand. Harold himself becomes groovy. He leaves his fiancée, Joyce (Joyce Van Patten) at the altar, outfits himself in glorious hippie duds, grows his hair into a shaggy, John Lennon-ish cut (a moderately less ludicrous version of Dr. Fassbender’s Prince Valiant in What’s New, Pussycat?), and takes to reading The Psychedelic Experience naked with the free-spirited Nancy.

While his histrionic mother (Jo Van Fleet)—her voice full of whining, her hair full of bluing—consoles Joyce with such splendidly grating comments as “women are built for hurt,” Harold seeks the advice of a white-robed guru. It doesn’t quite work. They walk together on the beach. “But how can you know what a flower is, Harold, if you don’t know who you are?” the guru asks. “I’m trying, guru, I’m really trying!”

“When you stop trying, then you’ll know who you are.”

Harold, meanwhile, is gingerly stepping over seaweed and bits of shell. “Well, I’m trying to stop trying.” This is not coming easily to Harold.

Harold cringes at the touch of cold ocean water on his Jewish feet as the guru goes on about flowers, energy, and life. Harold shivers and is pained. The words are amusing; Peter’s gestures and expressions are extraordinary.

Harold’s transformation ends when a gang of freeloading hippies overrun his hippified apartment. He reunites with Joyce but walks out on their marriage ceremony a second time. His life as a hippie has taught him nothing if not how to be even more selfish than he was at the beginning, but in 1968 this appears to have been considered a happy ending, because as he escapes down the sidewalk, a hippie calls out, “Hey! Where ya goin’, man?” “I dunno,” Harold Fine replies, breaking into a run. “I don’t know. And I don’t care! I don’t care! There’s got to be something beautiful out there! There’s got to be! I know it!” Peter was still organizing his life through his films’ dialogue. He still believed he