To examine the relevance, or lack thereof, of yippieness in the year 2000, I sought out one of Abbie's closest friends and yippie compatriots, Stew Albert.

Albert was the vaguely serious one among the lunatics who made up the initial yippie front guard, a cast of characters that included widely known countercultural players such as Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Anita Hoffman, Phil Ochs, Ed Sanders, Paul Krassner and eventually John Lennon and Yoko Ono. And he was instrumental in pushing the yippies toward the extreme leftist politics that followed the summer of 1968, negotiating a "Yippie-Panther Pact" with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. A slightly mellowed Albert now lives in Portland, Ore., with his wife, fellow yippie graduate Judy Gumbo, where they both remain active in leftist environmental politics.

I was one of their youthful followers. In 1968, Abbie's first book, "Revolution for the Hell of It," exploded in my adolescent brain -- more Molotov cocktail or acid tab than tome. My many months of trying to connect the Marx of my political education to the Kesey of my pleasures were at an end. None of that mattered much anymore. What mattered was how alive we young people were. We would reject the straitjacketed bourgeois workaday life, screwing, tripping and dancing our way to total revolution.

This celebratory existential politics has cast a long shadow over my life and work, to both good and ill effect. Some have even called my latest project -- a political party and presidential write-in campaign under the banner of "The Revolution" -- Hoffman-esque, but I wouldn't claim that degree of courage or originality.

Albert has courage and originality in spades, and our conversation ranged from the Hoffman biopic to technophobia to share-ins on Rodeo Drive.

"Steal This Movie" isn't particularly artful, but I can't imagine any young person not familiar with the amazing stream of political pranks and punch lines Abbie pulled off in the late '60s and early '70s finding these dramatic reenactments anything but inspiring.

I have some objections, however, to the film's honesty. Abbie's portrayed as a militant liberal. It doesn't really communicate that crazy sense of total revolution that was so palpable at that time. For instance, they show him leading a shout of "Hell no, we won't go!" after the conspiracy trial, when, in reality, he was talking "Off the pig, pick up the gun" at that time. I mean, I don't want to do David Horowitz's work for him, but on the other hand the whacked-out reality of that time might have made it a more complex and exciting movie. Then again, I suppose I could just go see "Cecil B. DeMented" again.

Well, the movie was definitely made by radicals, not liberals. They work in the Hollywood movie industry and usually have to turn out a liberal product. But with the Abbie film, they pushed their limits.

Abbie had a political evolution. When I first met him, he was something of an anarchistic "flower child" with a great talent for performance art. In "Revolution for the Hell of It," Abbie describes himself as a political goof-off and me as a Marxist-Leninist. Not true, but close. Over time, Abbie became more leftist and less flower child. The film catches some of this. As Abbie tells his lawyer, "Flower children have grown thorns."

In terms of the ultramilitant rhetoric, Abbie initially resisted the "Panther-Yippie Pact." That was something that Jerry Rubin and I cooked up with Eldridge Cleaver. At first Abbie thought the alliance would stop us from being yippies and turn us into imitation Panthers. But after he met Bobby Seale, he became much more pro-Panther.

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