You could, in short, make movies like Gold, make them on your own with a gang of nude trippers in the hills of California, and not be very concerned that the resulting product doesn't make a lick of sense -- because it doesn't. Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie looks like an accomplishment of concision beside Levis's film (his only one).
Starting out with a crystal-clear suite of iconic '60s images -- 'Nam corpses, Kent State bodies, Thomas Merton, police brutality, the Kennedy brothers -- that you have to remind yourself were still accumulating when the film was made, Gold quickly devolves as you knew it would, like a chess game between unsupervised toddlers. There's a locomotive, a suited conservative jerk trying to reign in all kinds of free love and nudity and indecorous behavior (or at least profit from it), and Del Close as some kind of crippled pilgrim scrambling across the perfectly lovely western countryside.
It seems to be trying for comedy, an almost child-like political satire bordering on the pubescent -- or, at least, chemically stupefied. But the quasi-vaudeville nature of the cavorting and luxuriating around with nature studiously avoids being funny. I can't say for sure what's going on, but I can tell you there are mud orgies, raucous skinny-dipping, completely arbitrary cutaways, plenty of full monties, Che Guevara, real cannon blasts, and at least a few instances of what looks like real intercourse. (The soundtrack, it should be noted, is real, noisy psychedelia from MC5, Beastly Times, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, not the lame faux jazz you usually get in movies from the '60s.)
Who wouldn't have wanted to make this movie? And that's the large picture: In the Decade of Godard, the authentic experience of making an independent film was at least as important as the experience of watching it. Sometimes, though, the blast the filmmakers clearly had doesn't carry over to the viewer. You sign up with an unhousebroken jungle animal like Gold - -in which public sex is an act of open anti-capitalism -- not for well-engineered entertainment but as a time capsule, a lost generational attitude captured like fireflies in a jar, predating Woodstock and doped on the era's hedonism. Levis's movie was never shown anywhere until years after it was made, and remains virtually unknown -- a thing made for the fun of making it, truly, naked and high and idealistic in the wilderness. In its way, it's as inebriating a form of lifestyle porn as Sex in the City -- only very different.