As a member of the cast, film historian Joseph McBride saw the rushes, and later saw a two-hour rough cut assembled by Gary Graver in the late 1990s to attract potential investors. McBride wrote that the film "serves as both a time capsule of a pivotal moment in film history — an 'instant' piece of period nostalgia set in the early seventies — and a meditation on changing political, sexual and artistic attitudes in the United States during that period." However, he differentiated the bulk of the film — which he praised very highly — from the footage of Hannaford's film-within-a-film: