The Ultimate Trip:
"Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" Heads to the Big Screen
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/27451412/the_ultimate_trip_electric_koolaid_acid_test_heads_to_the_big_screen
Film version of Tom Wolfe's book on Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters
comes closer to reality
JOHN CLARKE JR.
Apr 10, 2009
The onscreen version of Tom Wolfe's literary cult hit The Electric
Kool-Aid Acid Test is primed to hit theaters by 2010. When published
in 1968, the book shattered cultural perceptions of the peaceful,
passive hippie zeitgeist by introducing the Merry Pranksters, author
Ken Kesey's roving gonzo army of LSD-fueled pioneers who tripped
about the country, mixing it up with rowdy Oregonians, Bay Area
hippies, Hollywood rockers, Hell's Angels and a flurry of left-handed
characters that launched the psychedelic movement into mainstream
America and ushered in the Grateful Dead.
Over the years, footage and audio of the Oregon-based Merry
Pranksters have surfaced, but was little more than ragged, disjointed
documentation of the group tripping and weirding out. Except for Neal
Cassady's endless speed-jacked rap, there was little narrative. Now,
director Gus Van Sant, an Oregon native, is helming the book's
adaptation to the big screen with Milk and Big Love writer Dustin
Lance Black. Milk's director of photography Harris Savides is also
committed to the film.
After several false starts, the project is coming together. "These
seeds have been in the wind for a long time," says Ken Babbs, Kesey's
best friend and fellow Merry Prankster. "I talked to Gus. And I was
happy he was making the movie. Back in the 1970s, Kesey and Gus were
friends and Ken told him if anyone ever made the film he wanted Gus to do it."
Van Sant originally pictured the late Heath Ledger for the Kesey
role, but now has two marquee names in mind: Woody Harrelson and Jack
Black, which might make the film more of comedy than a zany drug jag.
Carolyn Garcia (a.k.a. Mountain Girl), a Prankster and former wife of
Jerry Garcia, said Harrelson visited Kesey shortly before he died.
"They went out into the field and had a pretty good mind meld,"
Garcia says. "I just know he could play the role." Garcia mentioned
Black might be a fit for "The Mad Chemist," the infamous LSD
impresario Owsley "Bear" Stanley, who launched an untold number of
minds into outer space and was an artist and early sound engineer for
the Dead (he's credited with revolutionizing live stereo sound).
Black's camp had no comment. And who will play Caroline Garcia? She
suggests Scarlett Johansson. Maybe Maura Tierney. "Well, I'm 5'10",
so she would have to be tall. I mean, I ride a Harley Davidson."
Lynn Nesbit, Wolfe's literary agent, said the writer will not likely
be involved or play a major character in the film. Instead the focus
will be on Kesey and his acid-guzzling band of Merry Pranksters. She
added Wolfe left the twisted tales years ago and never looked back,
"But I should call him before he reads about this in the papers."
And then there's the music. Should it reflect the actual Prankster
playlist, it will be an outstanding soundtrack. ( Look back at the
Dead's career, in photos.)
Kesey's crew took earnings from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest to
fund their legendary Acid Tests, where they hired a relatively
unknown band called the Warlocks (later named the Grateful Dead). But
at the time of the bus trips, Babbs says they played Ray Charles and
John Coltrane: "But mainly we did our own music, which was a form of
communication without words." Garcia says there was also plenty of
Bob Dylan, early Beatles, Miles Davis, lots of Motown and Pete
Seeger. "We also played kids' music," she says. "That and classical
music like Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss. Some John Phillips."
Being in the wheelhouse during the early heady days of the Merry
Pranksters and the Grateful Dead, Garcia has strong feelings about
LSD, the book and those Halcyon days. "This is a very valuable
substance and appeared on the planet at the same time as the atomic
bomb," she says. "We called it inner space. I'll do it now time to
time, but I never took it lightly. When LSD came into my life I
realized there was another way. Now, I'm about bringing LSD out into
the front."
There are still questions about how the film will bring the book to
life similar dilemmas plagued another chemical classic, Hunter S.
Thompson's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Can certain aspects of the
book be translated, or will third-party observations and interior
monologue flow naturally through the storyline? Bear says "a very
large CGI budget" could do the trick. "I think I, along with a design
crew of my choosing, can work it out."
Now that the movie is closer to becoming a reality, both Owsley and
Garcia are reexamining their relationship to Wolfe's text. "If you
ask the people [Wolfe] spoke with they will tell you he wrote what
they told him, and that may be true as to the words said much of
which was designed to prank him," Bear says. "The book however is
more than the results of his interviews. The real tragedy was that
they did not manage to dose him, a common practice of the era."
When Wolfe spoke with Rolling Stone's Mark Binelli for one of our
40th anniversary issues in 2007, he described his Kool-Aid reporting
process: "One day Kesey said to me, 'Why don't you put the notebook
and the pen away and just be here, and then write about it.' The idea
was, join in, take some acid, have a few trips, and then write about
it. I didn't say anything. The next day I arrived with my notebook
and ball-point pen. He didn't say anything, but that was the answer."
"The movie is long overdue," Garcia says. "On the surface, the book
ain't bad. But Wolfe didn't dig into the darker, weirder corners. As
a film it will reflect the party. But hopefully it will get the
meaning of it all."
.
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