Oficiální web Miloše Formana

One day, fifteen-year-old Jeannie doesn’t come home. Her worried parents start calling her friends. Their neighbours rush to help them. Wives send their husbands to search the streets with Jeannie’s photo. However, the men soon give up and go to a bar.

While Jeannie’s father searches for her at a bohemian café he meets the mother of another missing girl who informs him about a support group for the parents of runaway children. This support group holds regular meetings where they try to understand their children’s interests and reasons for their behaviour.

In what has become as cult scene from the movie, a bohemian psychologist instructs the parents on how to smoke marijuana and all of the parents get stoned. That same evening Jeannie returns home; her drunk and stoned parents wake her up playing strip poker with their friends from the support group.

With this film Forman was making a comment on generational conflict of the late '60s and created a timeless, story about the helplessness of adults whose growing children have become too much to handle. These children try to leave home because they refuse to understand their parents’ conservative lifestyles that are full of daily compromises and resignation.

“Taking Off”is often viewed as a bridge between Forman’s Czech and American productions. His first American movie shares many common themes and formal techniques with his previous Czech films. The most explicit example of this is the quotations from the movie “Audition”.

The theme of generational conflict and the inability to communicate are brought into a different socio-cultural context when we compare the American parents to their Czechoslovakian counterparts. Although both situations are presented as ridiculous, the parents from the American suburbs are portrayed as lost, and the parents from a small town in socialist Czechoslovakia are portrayed as uneducated.

Forman uses his fresh look at American society to his advantage by bringing his amazement at American ordinariness. This becomes clear in his characterization of the conservative parents. 

• “I tried to capture as much spontaneity on the film as I could. In the strip poker game near the end of the story, I didn’t let the actors know who was going to lose each hand. For the first time, I arranged the deck the way I needed the game to come out, but the actors were playing real strip poker.”
• “By the time we actually got around to shooting “Taking Off” in the summer 1970, I’d been casting the film for a couple of years. My main helper was the photographer Mary Ellen Mark. Every weekend, Mary Ellen and I would go to watch the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, where the hard-core hippies mingled with the weekend hippies. It was a street-theater spectacular that never stopped. Mary Elen took pictures and I looked for faces for my film. I was also collecting material for my eventual production of “Hair”, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
• “We shot the movie for $810,000. I deferred my fee, and Mike (producer Michael Hausman) deferred his, too. All the actors worked for scale. Our transportation was Mike driving his own car to the location. The car was no limousine, but it fit Mirek Ondricek (director of photography of the movie, Miroslav Ondricek) and myself in the front seat and our principals Buck Henry and Lynn Carlin with one other actor in the backseat.”