Hippie Hippie Shake

An account of counter-culturalist Richard Neville’s misadventures in London at the end of the 1960s.

Synopsis

The landmark obscenity trial surrounding a satirical Australian magazine becomes a metaphor for a wild ride through swinging 1960s-era London in director Beeban Kidron’s adaptation of Richard Neville’s memoir Hippie Hippie Shake: The Dreams, the Trips, the Trials, the Love-ins, the Screw Ups: The Sixties. Cillian Murphy stars as Neville in a film that follows the editors of Oz as they relocate to London and are forced to defend a sexually explicit issue of their irreverent magazine after it raises the eyebrows of the Obscene Publications Squad. The resulting legal battle would become the longest obscenity trial in the history of English law. Though the publishers of Oz were initially sentenced to hard labor, a subsequent appeal would find their sentences commuted under the agreement that they cease publication of the controversial magazine.