Alex Gibney's 'Magic Trip' Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney’s muse seldom gets time off for good behavior. Even after he won the 2008 Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side” the stories continued to line up for the telling.
“Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” came hot on “Taxi’s” heels and then 2010 brought in quick succession “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” “Freakonomics,” and “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Elliot Spitzer.” But it was prior to all those films that his muse first prodded him toward the project that brings him to the Sundance Film Festival this year. “Magic Trip,” rescued from the editing room just in time for a couple of scheduled screenings and inclusion as a selection in the Doc Premieres category, is a creative compilation of the original footage shot by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as their legendary bus “Furthur” made its way along their now-famous drug-infused cross-country circus-parade route during the summer of 1964. It was while on a flight to Utah for the 2005 Sundance Festival where he was about to premier “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” that Gibney, flipping through the latest New Yorker magazine, came upon a piece about Kesey by novelist Robert Stone. As usual, his muse was reading over his shoulder. “All his life,” Stone wrote, “Kesey was searching for the philosopher’s stone that could return the world to the pure story from which it came.” Now, there, if there ever was one, was an idea for a film. The plan wouldn’t come to fruition any too quickly, of course, as the subsequent release of the half-dozen other films already mentioned easily proves. Gibney, taking time to speak over the telephone to The Park Record while on the road shooting yet another film, offered some of the reasons why “Magic Trip” took so long to complete. First, with Kesey having passed away in 2001, there were the negotiations with the estate for access and rights to his archives. And then, once the footage and audio recordings and photographs made by Kesey and the Pranksters on their iconic LSD-fueled “trip” had been unearthed, there was the time it took the UCLA Film Archives to restore the 40-some-year old print followed by an editing process that had to work around Gibney’s availability, which, at best, due to his other film projects, was rare indeed. The Merry Pranksters, Kesey’s personal performance art entourage, treated their journey as an evangelistic pilgrimage. LSD, still legal in the United States until 1966, was handed out to willing supplicants at every opportunity along the way. They were missionaries out to “turn on” the world. Jack Keroac’s road buddy Neal Cassady “drove” Furthur satisfying even the most arcane definitions of the verb. Robert Stone once described him as “the world’s greatest driver, one who could roll a joint while backing a 1937 Packard onto the lip of the Grand Canyon.” The film, which wasn’t finished and accepted into the Festival in time to make the “hard-copy” film guide deadline, did, however, slip in under the wire for the online version. And by the time this sees print, only one of the two planned screenings will remain on the schedule, that being at 3:00pm Saturday January 29 at the Egyptian Theater. But the opportunity is still out there to relive a time when quantum zaniness ruled. “Turn on” and take a “Magic Trip” with Kesey and the Pranksters. It’ll blow your mind! And, there’s really nothing like a good ol’ waiting line within which to truly space out. Call it “film studies.” Sundance will screen “Magic Trip” on Friday, Jan. 28, 3 p.m., at the Temple Theatre and Saturday, Jan. 29, 3 p.m., at the Egyptian Theatre. -- http://www.parkrecord.com/ci_17161308 Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
