Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976)

Perhaps no neighborhood was more influential upon American bohemian creativity than one patchy parcel of real estate nestled upon the lower extremities of 1950s Manhattan. Director Paul Mazursky’s autobiographical love letter Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976) brings to life the beatniks and poets, the hipsters and drifters, the gay iconoclasts and interracial boundary breakers who defined the seamy, loose, and free-loving underside of the official version of government-sanctioned morality, epitomized by straitlaced, stiff-necked uptight McCarthyism. Without the freewheeling free spirits of ’50s Greenwich Village, the world might never have known the hippies, the yippies, punk rock prophets, or pop tarts in the mold of Avril Lavigne. Return to the source with Next Stop, and relive the birth of counterculture.