“If Shakespeare were alive today, he wouldn’t use a quill pen” says Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, in Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s documentary film “Magic Trip”. In 1964 Mr. Kesey, accompanied by Neal Cassady and The Merry Pranksters, used a camera to create a new type of novel when he filmed his legendary LSD-fueled road trip crossing the USA from west to east in a painted bus called “FURTHER”.
Through watching their journey, beautifully compiled and curated by Mr. Gibney and Ms. Ellwood, we are invited to experience what these truth seekers felt and captured; and we are given opportunities for questions: what are we to do in this world while we are all controled by corporations and money?
Raised in a family of dairy farmers in Colorado and Oregon, Mr. Kesey became a high school and college wrestling champion and married his high school sweetheart Norma while still in school. Going along the perfect happy road of life, he volunteered to participate in a CIA-financed LSD test while enrolled in the creative writing program at Stanford University. This experience was the impetus for him to be an icon of ’60s counter-culture.
Today Mr. Kesey is sometimes considered part of the Beat Generation that included Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but he didn’t agree, “I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie, ” he says. After the world’s loss of innocence from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the tensions of the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movements, the “Tomorrow’s World Expo” was held in New York while anxiety caught the country. Neither beatnik nor hippie, wandering between the times, Mr. Kesey tried to find out what tomorrow would bring.
Mr. Gibney as director and Ms. Ellwood as editor have created socio-political documentaries such as “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money”, and “My Trip to Al-Qaeda” which have made us examine the corrupted world we live in now. However, “Magic Trip” is a story of an idealistic group of people that looked for the truth behind the facade of the world they lived in. The film may show events that happened in 1964, but the story is universal; you can see the world as it is now through the world back then. As in that time, there is anxiety today because we have no idea what the future will be; we are the new lost generation.
Cool sat down with Alison Ellwood to discuss her first time as co-direcor with Alex Gibney on the feature documentary film “Magic Trip”
When we think about those days, it’s not ancient history but it’s old and long ago enough, and film is fragile enough that it had to be quite a project just to put all this together.Yes, it was a pretty big restoration project. There was about 50 hours of 16mm footage that they had shot reversal film, which is a positive image, and which unfortunately allowed them to project it without duplicating it. They then tried to cut and make a film themselves out of it so they started editing the material. This went on for a number of years so the footage was pretty severely damaged. Basically if was found six years ago in the barn at Kesey’s house in Oregon, and we shipped it down to UCLA where they began a restoration process; they repaired it, cleaned it and tried to make sense of what was what. It took several years to do that. And then there was 150 hours of audio recording that they had done as well.
How did you create the raw atmosphere, as if we are experiencing the trip? Could you talk about that from the storytelling and editing aspects?
When I look at that footage, it just immediately pulled me into it. I feel like I could smell the bus fumes; I feel like I’m there. The footage is raw. We wanted it to be a very experiential and immersive experience for people to watch, and that’s how I felt looking at it, so that’s the angle I approached the material from. We didn’t do traditional interviews and take you out of that moment. It was always trying to keep you “in the moment”.
There are great bits of animation, especially at the opening and Kesey’s acid trip. How did you work with the animators?Imaginary Forces did the animation; they did a spectacular job. One of the very first things we did was getting them working with the acid trip scene. They would do storyboards. We wanted everything to start from seeming real, like you see the Wollensak tape recorder, the bed, the glass of water, and as it progresses it gets stranger and more abstract. There was always the idea that it would come from the footage and get stranger.
How did you get a hold of Kesey’s first acid test from the government?Believe it or not, that was found in a white audio box in the barn at Kesey’s. It just said “VA Hospital, 1960-whatever the year was.” We got it back to New York, had it transferred and started listening to it and, “Oh my god - this can’t be what this is!” and sure enough it was the real thing.
What were your thoughts putting music to all of this?
Everybody thinks of, again, jumping forward into the 60s: that [music] wasn’t what they were listening to, it didn’t exist then. The Beatles were just coming out then; rock ‘n’ roll was just beginning. What they were listening to was jazz and R&B and some early rock, for sure; so we have “Love Potion No. 9″ by The Coasters, we have The Isley Brothers singing “Twist and Shout”. The attempt was to make it absolutely what they were listening to. And even The Dead music at the end is very early, from the very first album that they put out. They were initially called The Warlocks. Even that we wanted to be true to the time.
It’s fun to see the bus as it is today, very interesting. I was reading the notes: there’s a project going to get it fixed?
Yes, it’s been pulled out of the swamp subsequently, too. That footage actually was shot awhile ago by a friend of mine. So it’s been pulled out of the swamp, it’s in the barn, but there is a second bus that Ken actually helped build many years ago that went on tour in England. And one of Ken Kesey’s sons, Zane, gets that bus out and drives it around Oregon. I got on that bus.
You’ve worked with Alex Gibney before, so I think you’re interested in power and corruption too. What is your responsibility as a filmmaker?To tell stories to find truth. The look behind the curtain and to show what is there; often we’re afraid of what’s behind the curtain because we think it’s the wizard and it turns out to be a little guy who has no power whatsoever. And, as often as you can, pull back the curtain to either reveal or show something exciting, new and different.
What is your opinion or feeling about money?It stinks! It has a way of ruining just about everything! And materialism certainly, as connected to money and this, has taken over the possibility for spiritual quest. We’re all so ingrained to believe that we need to have this and this and this, and it’s all such a scramble to get to that place. But I’ll take it if you’re giving it away [laughs].
In an interview for “Casino Jack” Alex said he was usually interested in characters that made him angry, and I feel at some level you have the same kind of sense. What made you angry about “Magic Trip”?
I don’t think there was any anger at all in this. I was intrigued. In this case, their bus trip was just a myth in most people’s minds, and here it is; it’s real, it exists and there’s a fun origin story behind it. There’s this time in American history when something was about to explode. Where there is a good story, a good film can be made.
In another interview, Alex said he was interested in human psychology. Are you interested in psychology as well?Yes, absolutely.
People do bad things in the name of “job” or “order”. They don’t want to think about morals. Could you talk about human psychology and how you reached to “Magic Trip” through that?I think Alex and I are both interested in the line that divides morality and immorality. And it’s a very thin line; it’s a very easy line to get closer and closer to, and the closer you get to it, I think, the less you see it. Good people do cross over that line and those are very interesting characters because they are tragically flawed. They make for interesting stories because we all have that capability; it’s sort of like rubbernecking, when you turn your head to look at a car wreck. We all have that desire to look, but thankfully most of us don’t cross over. I don’t know how that relates to this film. I think there were some negative things that happened as a result of the explosion of drugs that Kesey was a huge player in making happen in San Francisco. But it certainly was not an immoral intent to cause harm whatsoever. He was a light-seeker, a truth-seeker and thought that this would help people open their eyes, see new things, open consciousness and better mankind. He believed the tests he was doing with the government were to benefit sick people, people with schizophrenia. He had no idea he and others were being used by the CIA to test tools for interrogation. I think that’s the closest that element comes into this story.
I think in a way you are the truth-seekers. You wanted to know what the magic trip really was and it was a mystery. You saw much more footage than we did. What was the truth for you by the experience of creating the film?
We’re in a time now that I think is very similar to the time that they came out of; this sort of very fearful time and there’s a lot of “powers that be” in charge of things that we feel helpless about. Ken felt that and his idea was, “Get out of the bunker. Get out, have some fun. You don’t have to conform to what they say.” I hope that people can walk away from this film with a sense of exploration and “what else is out there?”.
What would you want to do if you could go back to the 60s?If they would have had me, I certainly would have been on the bus [laughs]. What an adventure, right?
“Magic Trip” opens on Friday August 5th
text by Taiyo Okamoto & Joseph Reid
