Magic Trip brings to audiences an invaluable document privileging original footage and contemporaneous commentary over historical analysis and insight. In 1964, Ken Kesey and the Band of Merry Pranksters (as they later became known), took off for the New York State Fair (such a funny, hokey, even square destination for such a ground-breaking, revolutionary even group and project) in a school bus named "Furthur" that had been painted with layers of psychedelia (as it later became known). Driven by Neal Cassady ("Dean Moriarity" from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road), the bus survived several breakdowns, numerous police stops, and innumerable acid trips to eventually, nearly fifty years later, it rots in a pasture at the Kesey La Honda ranch amid rumors of Phoenician restoration.
When we think about the '60s, we likely think about hippies, Haight-Ashbury, acid tests, and Vietnam protests. But in 1964, none of this had happened, and the country was more Ricky Nelson than Grateful Dead. The police who pulled over the group on its cross-country journey literally had never seen the likes of this before. The paradigm shift is sometimes difficult to remember, and the film begins with that reminder.
Drawing from over 40 hours of raw footage, filmmakers Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood have constructed a document both fascinating and entertaining, one likely to reach a broad swatch of audiences, serious scholars and baby hipsters alike. Working with the Film Foundation, HISTORY, and UCLA Archives and given full access to source material by the Kesey estate, Gibney and Ellwood still had their work cut out for them, painstakingly synching video with audio before crafting the narrative arc. The film of this infamous trip has been long-time coming. Kesey had planned a film titled The Merry Pranksters Search for a Kool Place from the trip, bringing camera and 16 mm color film; in 1999, a 50-minute edit was released, and in 2002 another excerpt was distributed. Magic Trip, coming in at 107 minutes and narrated by Stanley Tucci, constructs a largely happy version of the infamous trip, avoiding much critique or close consideration of the motivations or legacy of Kesey and his followers.
The film has two individual, sometimes competing stars, supported by an essential cast of supporting characters. Training for the Olympics, clean-cut and earnest, Ken Kesey had signed up for psychology experiments while a student at Stanford that involved LSD. He was not the same person again. Kesey had become a household name after the publication of One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest. The film picks up after his affiliation with the Merry Pranksters had begun, a collaboration that strove to redefine America, “we hoped . . . we could stop the coming end of the world.” Kesey and friends drape themselves, sometimes literally, in the America flag, acting as patriots reinvigorating America’s founding ideals. Older than the crew, Kesey mostly leaves wife and child at home to take the helm on the journey East.
But sometimes more dynamic is Neal Cassady. Seeking out Kesey after the publication of Cuckoo, Cassady was Furthur’s driver, the crew taking shifts up front to keep him company and listen to the benezdrine-driven chanting commentary as he flung the bus through America’s margins, first from California to Texas, Texas to New Orleans, New Orleans to Carolina, then straight north to New York, where Cassady stays behind, taken in by O’Leary and any one else who had read On the Road and wanted their own taste of Cassady’s beatific vision. Cassady is striking, captivating on film, moving on fast forward while the band spins and twirls in blissed-out perception. He seldom offers direct address to the camera, but serves as an omnipresent voice whenever on screen.
The two never fight; in fact, they seldom seem in competition. But the makers of Magic Trip, like anyone else who has laid eyes on him, can’t turn away from Cassady. His screen time and sheer charisma position him as Kesey’s near-equal for the journey’s first half.
The Merry Pranksters, are of course, critical players throughout, a somewhat shifting band of mostly men who film, record, follow, and stage the trip. The film shows the dynamic as largely cooperative, admitting to some sexual tensions but predominantly focusing on group cohesion, sharing space and resources but more importantly a vision for what their lives could be, at least for these few weeks. They pile out of the bus time and time again, bedraggled but polite, tripping while addressing cops, farmers, mechanics, and random bystanders.
The film takes an episodic structure, making notorious stops in Texas, then New Orleans, before turning north. (Like in Huckleberry Finn and Apocalypse Now, the rules of the vessel cannot be maintained when on the shore; disaster often lurks just beyond docking. A similar pattern emerges here.) Texas results in the loss of Cathy Casamo, a striking actress who went by the moniker "Stark Naked," and was coaxed aboard as the female lead in Kesey’s film. Burned out from days of tripping, she is picked up by Houston police wandering the streets in the middle of the night and held for several days in the psych ward before being released to the custody of a companion who flew in from California. The Pranksters seem largely unconcerned by or about her state of mind, and leave for New Orleans before her fate is clearly resolved. Magic Trip doesn’t linger for long on the possible implications her fate might have for their own or for the entire generations, something perhaps difficult for the audience to ignore. She was one of the first “fallen comrades” (as Philip K. Dick might’ve called her), and her fellow Pranksters don’t look back in their trip East.
Outside of New Orleans, Furthur pulls over to give the Pranksters a break from the heat. Not looking left or right, the crew piles out of the bus and straight into Lake Pontchartrain, not noticing that the beach is segregated and they’re in the wrong section. The film shows the episode as another accidental? coincidental? rethinking of America by the Pranksters, who look around, realize something ain’t right, and pile back into the bus, departing in a cloud of dust without looking back. Historical accounts not included in the film suggest the event may have been a bit more menacing, with African-American vacationers none too thrilled to have their beach desegregated by West Coast weirdoes. But Magic Trip again leaves the scene with more of a shrug and a laugh, with places to go and people to see.
The rest of the trip eastward is more of the same, very entertaining and interesting to watch, particularly when the Pranksters make it past the World’s Fair and to Timothy Leary’s New York estate. The two groups look each other up and down, and realize that while they may both be on a trip, their paths and destinations are most definitely not the same.
Turning back west, the Pranksters embark on the next phase of their careers, developing further when landing back in California. After a month of screening film segments at his La Honda ranch, Kesey is ready for some return to normalcy, writing and family. The Pranksters (Kesey still participating, but no longer hosting) stage more and more large-scale Acid Tests. Magic Trip loses its focus in the last segment, directors not seeming altogether sure of what they want to make of the experiments and their document. Resisting the tendency towards camp and nostalgia, Magic Trip perhaps needs to allow for the lack of definitive conclusions, closing on an uplifting note with Kesey leading a much-older crowd in a spoken word piece, "Truckin’": “Sometimes the lights all shinin' on me;/ Other times I can barely see./ Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it’s been.”
