copped from Conscious Choice
Dr. Bronner’s Magic Media Soap Opera
The counterculture’s exceptionally eccentric soap family hits the big screen
By Charles Shaw
This is the story of one Dr. Emanuel H. Bronner, chemist, master soap maker, Holocaust survivor and lead prophet for the One God of Spaceship Earth. In 1947, Bronner escaped from a mental institution and began selling soap made from his family’s 150-year-old recipe out of the back of a Los Angeles tenement hotel. Today the company, run by his grandsons, David and Mike, sells more than six million bottles of soap a year.
This tragicomic drama propels the narrative of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox (magicsoapbox.com) , a new documentary by Sara Lamm that attempts to capture the essence of this thoroughly mad (and at times, thoroughly maddening) genius who was, in the purest sense, far ahead of his time.
As Soapbox illustrates, Dr. Bronner — who passed away in March of 1997, just shy of 90 years old — was definitely out there. He saw himself as part of the long lineage of prophets that includes Jesus, Mohammed, Hillel, Moses and Buddha. Bronner believed these prophets appeared on earth regularly — every 76 years to be exact, inspired by the arrival of Haley’s Comet — to lead their people to God. He was also convinced the most recent of these prophets was Mark Spitz, the American swimmer who won seven gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Unfortunately, the course of human history is littered with the literal and symbolic corpses of prophets — real or self-imagined — who bore new truths as harbingers of a new way. And Dr. Bronner’s fate was no different than those who came before him. He was locked away, called insane, discredited and dismissed. The FBI even had him listed in their “nut file.”
However odd or unorthodox his behavior or his theories, though, Emanuel H. Bronner’s product was a hit with the west coast counterculture, who became his best customers and sustained the business for decades. Blind for the last 20 years of his life, he remained first and always a subversive, a true believer in absolute freedom who embraced the work of Thomas Paine, made friends with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, advocated for hemp and organic farming, and was so rabidly anti-communist he put Nixon to shame. His “all-one” philosophy was a Universalist doctrine of mutual peace, respect and ecological harmony, based on the central tenet that we are all children of the same divine source.
Headlines Read: “Germ Wrongly Jailed by Soap!”
Another film — this one hitting the small screen (YouTube, to be exact) — continues the epic tale of the noble Bronner clan. The wry, upbeat and at times hilarious web short — which has received tens of thousands of downloads since it was released in early May — centers around David Bronner, grandson of Emanuel, hemp activist and current President of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, and the recent allegations by police in Newport Beach, Calif. that Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps contain traces of GHB (Gamma Hydroxy Butyrate), a notorious “date rape” drug.
Entitled Soap, Drugs & Rock and Roll the seven-minute short is an original and effective use of the media as a PR tool — with our heroes the unassuming soap makers who, in one fell swoop, cast serious doubt on the practice of field drug testing, expose the lies of commercial soap producers, advocate for organic products and educate the viewer on yet another layer of our culture’s dependency on oil.
The circumstances laying the grounds for the story have already become the stuff of legend:
On the night of April 4, Don Bolles, eccentric 51-year-old drummer for punk outfit The Germs, was driving through über-conservative Newport Beach, Calif. on his way to an AA meeting when his tricked-out van was pulled over, allegedly for a broken taillight. Bolles gave consent to search the van, and the presiding officer found a bag of legal medical marijuana sitting next to a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap. For some reason (perhaps because the bottle was clearly labeled as hemp soap) the officer decided to apply a NarcoPouch® 928 field test to the soap to assess it for drug content. The test came back positive for GHB, and Bolles was arrested and taken into custody.
Upon hearing this, the Dr. Bronner’s company immediately paid Bolles’ bail and legal fees, and stepped up to defend their brand publicly. David Bronner appeared before California media denouncing the charges as “totally absurd,” and suggesting that Bolles was pulled over for the offense of “driving while weird.” They then ordered the same NarcoPouch® 928 test and began testing their soap products. What they found was astounding.