Drugs would help

Rico says that this is ancient history, even for him (who's already ancient, these days), but a new movie is coming out, and Charles McGrath has a review of it in The New York Times:

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, a film by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, is an exercise in what they call archival vérité. It’s a documentary that uses old footage to recreate a documentary that Ken Kesey intended to make about his 1964 cross-country bus trip, the one so memorably chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s account, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In all, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as his crew called themselves, shot some forty hours of 16-millimeter film, but the project was never really finished. As Wolfe wrote: “Plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you.” Kesey showed all forty hours unedited a couple of times and also hacked the footage up into various shorter versions before stowing the film cans in his barn, near Eugene, Oregon, where they rusted away until Gibney and Ellwood showed up.
Kesey was onto something similar to what we would now call reality television: scenes of people with odd names (Mal Function, Gretchen Fetchin, Generally Famished) getting stoned and behaving weirdly. After publishing the novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, by 1964 he'd wearied of writing, or so fried his brain with hallucinogens that he embraced what he saw as a brand new art form: a drug-enabled psychic quest that would document itself as it was happening. The famous bus— a psychedelic-painted International Harvester with a sign in front that said Furthur and one in back that warned Weird Load— was wired for sound, and there was a movie camera on board. With Kesey sometimes directing and sometimes just standing back and watching, the Merry Pranksters filmed one another and also their interactions with an uncomprehending public when, for example, Neal Cassady drove the bus backward down a Phoenix street as the Pranksters, stoned on LSD, pretended to campaign for Barry Goldwater for president.
Gibney, who won an Academy Award for Taxi to the Dark Side, his 2007 documentary about American uses of torture during interrogation, and Ellwood, a film editor who has worked with him on several projects, including Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, first learned of the Kesey footage from a 2004 article in The New Yorker by Robert Stone, who was for a while one of the Pranksters. “That much footage; I thought, wow, what we could do with that,” Gibney said recently at the Chelsea office of his company, Jigsaw Productions.
But, after acquiring the rights from Kesey’s widow (he died in 2001) the filmmakers realized that the footage was in terrible shape, scratched and deteriorating, and first had to be restored. With help from Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, technicians from the University of California at Los Angeles, worked on it for over a year. And then there was the problem, which took Ellwood and Don Fleming, an audio expert, several more years to solve, of making sense of a jumble of seemingly random, disconnected reels and snippets, where the audio track did not match what was taking place on screen. The recording system was run through a generator on the bus, Gibney explained, which would unaccountably slow down and speed up. Nor was anyone operating a clapper to help synchronize the audio and visual tracks. “In forty hours, they used the clapper once,” Gibney said. “That was in New York, when Kesey hired a professional sound man, but who got so frustrated he quit.”
Ellwood grew so desperate to find moments that synched, she said, that she even hired a lip reader to transcribe what the people were mouthing, in hopes of finding matching audio.
On the other hand, Gibney also found in Kesey’s barn some audiotape recorded about ten years after the bus trip, in which various Pranksters comment on what’s happening on screen, and this made possible what is probably the most interesting feature of Magic Trip: its way of eliminating the talking heads so common in documentaries. There are a few moments of exposition, narrated in mock newsreel style by Stanley Tucci, but for the most part the viewer hears from the participants back when they were still Pranksters, more or less, and not nostalgic senior citizens. “We planned to do it the other way,” Gibney said. “We were going to interview the survivors and intercut those scenes with the original footage. But we found that to be dull, in part because the Pranksters had practiced their stories so many times that, to some extent, they had ceased to be interested in what the real stories were.”
Ellwood said, “We thought that if we did it in the traditional way, it would take you off the bus, and we wanted to stay on the bus.”
Edited to under two hours by Gibney and Ellwood, the Kesey footage has several memorable scenes, including one in which the novelist Larry McMurtry, whose middle-class house in Houston has just been invaded by Kesey’s band, finds it necessary to call the police and explain that a Prankster, apparently suffering from a drug-induced breakdown, has gone missing and that in keeping with her nickname, Stark Naked, she’s not wearing any clothes.
But there are also long, aimless sequences that seem to take place in druggy slo-mo: Pranksters covering themselves with pond scum; staring raptly at the random designs made by paint swirling in water; tootling interminably on instruments, apparently under the delusion that they sound like John Coltrane. These people are clearly zonked out of their gourds, and so is whoever is holding the camera.
“If you had to watch all forty hours, it would be like something out of Clockwork Orange,” Gibney admitted. “They’d have to prop your eyelids open.” He added: “Kesey had an innate distrust of experts: stay away from the experts. In this case that meant stay away from a cameraman. Imagine how great it would have been if they'd had a real cameraman. But instead you get all the bonehead mistakes of the amateur. There are no establishing shots, the camera is always jiggling, and none of them had a particularly good eye.”
The surprising thing about Magic Trip is how sweetly innocent it all seems. The Pranksters are not longhairs. They’re cleanshaven, wear red-white-and-blue outfits, and could almost be a patriotic revival group. Most of them too young to be beatniks and too old to be hippies, they have one foot in the ’50s and one in the ’60s.
Kesey, a former college athlete, is blond and muscular and movie-star handsome. He could be Paul Newman’s stand-in. But it’s Cassady, the real-life model for Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in On the Road, who steals the film. He, too, is buff and magnetically good looking, and while driving he keeps up a nonstop, amphetamine-fueled monologue. Listening to him is so exhausting that the Pranksters have to take turns sitting next to him. Who in his right mind would travel with such a person at the wheel? And yet, blessed by a guardian angel and a mystical GPS in Cassady’s head, the bus navigated flawlessly while Pranksters leaned out from a turret cut in the top, or cavorted half-naked on a platform welded to the back. “They got stopped jillions of times by the police and never got a ticket,” Ellwood said. “I don’t think Cassady even had a valid driver’s license.

Rico says that, as a young man, he lived only a few miles from La Honda, where this was all happening; he missed the whole extreme-hippy thing by only a few years, that and a lack of interest in drugs...