Gary Kent is a name that should be spoken in hushed, reverent tones by anyone who loves genre cinema. The man didn’t just work in the movies; he bled for them, tumbled for them and fought his way through the toughest biker flicks and drive-in classics of the 60s and 70s. He started the old-fashioned way — in Allied Artists’ mail room — before working on Westerns. Then, he kept on moving up, becoming the stunt coordinator for Hell’s Angels on Wheels, the production manager for De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise and the guy who survived Al Adamson’s Dracula vs. Frankenstein. And oh yeah, Tarantino interviewed Kent while writing the script for Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood and used him as the real-life model for Cliff Booth.

Booth may have fought Manson’s Family on film, but Kent met them for real. In his book Shadows and Light, he recalls filing lash of Lust at the Sphan Ranch. The dune buggy used as a camera car suddenly broke down, and the women who lived in the shacks on the grounds recommended that Charlie fix it. Kent wrote, “Charles Manson’s handshake felt like a dead trout and he wouldn’t look me in the eye. We were on the Spahn Ranch, the hangout for Manson and his creepy-crawlies…to me, Manson was as shifty and full of hot air as a corn-eating cow.”

In 1976, Kent stepped behind the camera to give us something far removed from the switchblades and chrome of his usual haunts. The Pyramid is a Dallas-shot, metaphysical time capsule that feels like it was beamed in from a very specific, patchouli-scented corner of the past. AGFA said that Kent “…returned from a 1970s vision-quest to gift us with The Pyramid, his ultra-personal study of crystal healing and plant whispering in the mold of Medium Cool.”

Chris Lowe (pre-videotape, lugging a 16mm camera like a true pro; played by C.W. Brown) is a TV news cameraman who is absolutely done with the industry’s “if it bleeds, it leads” cynicism. He’s a sensitive soul: he plays guitar, practices yoga and isn’t afraid to let the tears flow. He’s a New Age Southern man whose best friend is L.A. Peabody (Ira Hawkins), an African-American reporter who is also feeling the weight of a world that just won’t stop breaking people’s hearts.

The movie follows Chris as he tries to pitch uplifting stories, like spoon-bending psychics and the healing power of pyramids, only to have his news director (a guy clearly failing his way down from New York) throw them in the trash. Instead, Chris and L.A. have to cover the grim reality of car wrecks and the senseless police shooting of two Black youths during a robbery.

It’s a heavy mix. You’ve got confrontational therapy encounter groups contrasted against the raw, unscripted rage of L.A.’s failing personal life. It’s a movie that wants to talk about everything: race, mysticism, infidelity,and the human behavioral spectrum.

The pacing is pure 1970s TV movie-of-the-week. It’s slack, it’s scattershot and it tries to juggle way too many ideas at once without ever really catching any of them. By trying to cover every issue of the day, it might just end up glossing over the very depth it’s searching for. But as an artifact of the movie past? It’s fascinating. It captures that brief moment when we thought we could heal the planet with positive vibrations and a little bit of geometry. It’s mystical, it’s messy and it’s pure Gary Kent, a man who spent his life falling down so that cinema could stand up.

You can watch this on Cultpix.