Who doesn't love a road movie, let alone the original hippie road movie, with rich color documentary footage of the actual Merry Pranksters' bus Further rattling down the highway in 1964, and a cargo full of dreamers? In Magic Trip, it all happens in front of you, bringing you back to the heady days when Ken Kesey, the 29-year-old, best-selling author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, joined forces with Neal Cassady, the real-life inspiration behind Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and hit the road. Watch the trrailer below
It's a mini, college-level course in the early 1960s, as mainstream America still clung to the repression of the post-war '50s as depicted in the cable TV show, Mad Men. It captures on film the moments when some of the remaining beatniks passed the counterculture baton to what would become the hippies - Baby Boomers who helped end the war in Vietnam, and opened young people up to recreational drugs, music, art and film.
Riding commercial success as an author, Kesey decided to take up filmmaking because he says if Shakespeare were around today, he wouldn't just use a pen. "I wanted to find out if people speak the way they do in novels, and they don't," Kesey explains.
Magic Trip is the perfect companion to Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-lAid Acid Test, only here you get to see it all for yourself and reach your own conclusions. Working with the Kesey family, directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood sifed through 100 hours of rarely-seen footage that languished in storage for decades.
Kesey, who died in 2001 at the age of 66, certainly didn't start out trying to turn the youth of America on to LSD. We first see him as a football player and wrestler at the University of Oregon, who gets chosen for an experimental LSD research program at Stanford when the mind-bending chemical was still legal. The film includes some of Kesey's audio recordings made by medical researchers at the time, and later spends quite a few minutes sharing the Merry Prankster's thoughts on acid.
After visiting New York in 1963, Kesey (left) decides to take a trip from his home south of San Francisco to see the 1964 World's Fair in the Big Apple. A bunch of friends sign on for the voyage, so they decide to buy an old school bus and customize it with beds, a metal turret, a back porch to hold a motorcyle, plus arguably the first psychedellic paint job that later inspired the multi-colored bus on The Partridge Family and countless others. Speed-talking beat Neal Cassady shows up as the elder statesman of cool to drive the rig across the U.S. Along the way, we see Americans gazing at the bus, mouths open, unaware of the millions of young folks who will soon take a similar path.
The movie ambles along with narration by Kesey and the Pranksters, and some amazing footage, including a party in New York where Allen Ginsberg and a drunk Kerouac reunite with Cassady, and meet Kesey and his stoned-out crew.
Not everybody lasts for the whole trip, One of the women, philosophy professor Jane Burton, is pregnant and bails after reaching New York, and another, known only as Stark Naked, takes too much acid and ends up heading back to California.
After they all return home, Kesey starts holding Saturday night parties at his house to work on the film and hang out. The parties keep getting bigger and start to get billed as Acid Tests, with a lot of LSD around. At that point, Kesey hooks up with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead. Garcia graciously points out that the Dead are just happy to find people that they can turn on to their music.
Summing it all up, Kesey says the red, white and blue-dressed Pranksters were honoring the pioneering spirit of America by celebrating the country from the highway and discovering new realms of consciosness through LSD.
Magic Trip rewinds to the first big counterculture happenings of the '60s that led to the 1967 Summer of Love and the 1969 Woodstock Festival. not to mention the thousands of Grateful Dead shows that followed. Instead of using Facebook and Twitter, the Pranksters did their social networking with the help of the most advanced color film and sound recording equipment of their time to capture the early days of the peace-and-love generation, when they were young, beautiful, a bit innocent and and very, very free.
