By Anthony Peck - THE DAILY PILOT
We’ve all been there—well, most of us, anyway.
A night out. A few
too many cocktails. And then the inevitable and painful morning after, accompanied
by a half-hearted declaration of “I’ll never drink again.”
Sadly, this sequence of events—at a much more frequent and
severe level of self-destruction—is the life story of Newport Beach native Mark David Allen.
Allen has the dubious distinction of holding Newport Beach’s
all time record for arrests having been jailed on more than 100 (now over 400) occasions for public drunkenness.
Naturally, Newport
jailer David J. Sperling had plenty of chances to meet Allen, a familiar face in the city’s holding tank. So it was basically a no-brainer for Sperling, moonlighting as a film director, to use Allen as the subject
of a documentary.
Now, just about anybody can follow around a drunk guy with a camcorder
for a couple of days to illustrate the destructive nature of alcohol abuse. But
Sperling’s film, running about 40 minutes (now a feature at 81 minutes), reaches much deeper.
It covers a period of more than five years (now over 12 years),
in which viewers are introduced to Allen and this troubled past, the Newport
cops who bust him and others who have tried unsuccessfully to help him kick the habit.
Sperling even travels to Hawaii
to hunt down Allen, who at one point had suddenly disappeared from the streets of Newport after
accepting an invitation from his brother to start over on the island
of Oahu.
When Sperling is reunited with his subject, viewers may be shocked
by the drastic changes in Allen’s appearance, who clearly shows the signs of a steady decline. They may not, however, be surprised to learn that Allen had been arrested by Hawaii police more than 80 times.
It is a sad story, one that seemingly has only one possible ending,
and it is unlikely the audience will ever see a clearer view of the horrible, life-consuming effects of severe alcohol abuse.
In fact, Sperling could probably sell many copies of the film to
Alcoholics Anonymous.
“DRUNK IN PUBLIC” screens at 2 p.m.
today at the Orange County Museum of Art
