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Magic Trip: Alison Ellwood Directs Hippie Epic
by Doniphan Blair
After editing 'My Trip to Al Qaeda" and "The Smartest Guy in the Room," Alison Ellwood decided to tackle the almost as enigmatic story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. photo courtesy: Jigsaw ProductionsFinally, a hippie film that doesn't pander, interpret, whitewash or gloss the mythical characters of the 60s but presents them not only in their own words but in their own images.
Alison Ellwood, a slightly built editor and now director, with a not slight resume, has finally succeeded where three other editorial teams have failed. She and her intrepid producers and assistants have pieced together the epic footage—that we knew existed from Tom Wolfe's masterful chronicle, "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test"—added a couple of reenactments and some tasty animation, and now we have it. Featured at the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, "Magic Trip" stars Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the bus "Further" but also Neal Cassidy, Alan Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and the sad Jack Kerouac.
Born in 1961 in Australia, by coincidence due to her peripatetic family, Ms. Ellwood wanted to be photojournalist as a kid. Alas, "I just fell in love with movies and ended up in film school at NYU," graduating in 1983, just after the big class of Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. and started editing in NY in 1984, often working on fairly edgy topics: gang wars, prisoner wars, war on drugs, that kind of a thing.
By the '90s, she got into producing with "Brett Killed Mom: A Sister's Diary" (1996) and in the 2000's edited some very high profile projects like "My Trip to Al Qaeda," featuring Lawrence Wright (2010), and "The Smartest Guy in the Room" about Enron (2005, narrated by Peter Coyote). Her presentation at the SF International Film Festival was lovely and we interviewed her by phone from her home on Plum Island, Maine.
CineSource: How does Ken Kesey and the hippies rate in comparison to al Qaeda and Enron? As complicated, simpler?
Alison Ellwood: I would have to say 'Magic Trip' was the hardest film I have ever worked on. It was a lot of fun but it was very difficult to figure out how to tell that story, what the subtext would be. They are just running around the country having a good time...
We decided not do traditional interviews, with people looking back 40 years. We used the audio interviews that had been done with the Pranksters about ten years after the trip, so it felt kind of fresh, more immersive. Hopefully we succeeded in that.
The loose, sweet graphics that Alison Ellwood used to embellish and highlight the images she found in the vast archives of the Merry Pranksters. photo courtesy: Jigsaw ProductionsYou definitely did. It looks like this is your show you wrote directed and edited.
Yeah, Alex [Gibney who also did 'The Smartest Guys'], we collaborate really well. He and Ali [Johnes] produced the hell out of the project. It was a very difficult producing film because of the estates and the rights.
It was really an editing project because it was all archival, whether Prankster or news footage. Alex and I collaborated fully on the whole thing. He really drove the bus [as it were] on the animation stuff, made the deal with Imaginary Forces [animation house]. They did a terrific job. Lindy Jankura, my co-editor, was instrumental in helping me figure out early on how to put this thing together. It was a struggle, a big challenge.
Did you start with five by seven cards?
Ken's son, Zane Kesey, had DVD copies of the footage, shot off the Steinbeck or some early transfers to Betacam. Ken continued working on this project when video tape came along. I believe he even had an early AVID before they finally gave up on it.
There were the individual scenes: they would go from one place to the next. So we blocked it all. Then the big job was figuring out all these interviews. Ken was interviewed multiple times at various ages and stages. How to weave his philosophy, which was beyond the actual bus trip that you are seeing [was the question].
We started breaking stuff down. We tried different ideas over different footage. At one point we had a whole Vietnam thing cut into the scene in Pensacola [FL] when Babs goes to visit his old marine buddy and they do the little dance around the trees with the instruments. Eventually we said. 'No, too off the wall.' A lot of trial and error to get it to the point where it flows.
Unfortunately, the film was poorly shot. So Ken had a bear of a job on his hands.
Yup. We had a great screening in Eugene Oregon almost three weeks ago and Zane came out with the second bus—the first bus, as you see [in the film], is in ruins, but they did make another bus. People were packed in, coming to the theater, all in Prankster regalia. George Walker and Mountain Girl and Gretchen Fetchen—who had come to Sundance with us—all of them said to me, they themselves had tried to edit the material but it was overwhelming.
I think they were too close to the material. Coming from the outside, we could look at it in a different way. I didn't experience it, my job was to make it make sense.
The woman, whose nom-de-hip was 'Stark Naked,' invented the famous hippie and largely female performance art of the same name on the back of Prankster bus as it rolled down Interstate 10 in Texas, backing up traffic for miles. photo courtesy: Jigsaw ProductionsRight but they were also very disadvantaged. I also made a commune film and feel a deep sympathy for that out-of-focus footage—because we were not professionals. It was hard to get well-exposed stuff, synch sound, etc. To solve that, you had actors reading from the transcripts?
In a few cases where the actual recording was unusable—Jane Burton, she has laryngitis the day she did the recording so I had an actor come in and read through the entire transcript. With Stark Naked, we had her transcript but there was no audio. Zonker we had to rerecord and Gretchen [Fetchen]: so there were four.
You also did three little reenactments, like of Stark Naked on the back of the bus?
And the LSD trip that Ken takes at the V.A. hospital, which we had audio but no visual. Then there were the little maps of the bus travelling from one place to another.
You did a marvelous job of shaping what was largely out of focus footage. It goes back to the ancient problem of romantic artist being technical on the one hand and visionary on the other. If the balance is lost, you are screwed.
Ken didn't trust experts and he wanted to keep it an intimate thing. I look at the footage, honestly, and I think it is beautiful despite being out of focus. It was really frustrating when we realized we were hardly ever going to find synch [sound]. We thought we would find a lot more synch. I think they did one [synch sound] clapper—once, the entire time, just some one clapping their hands—and then they cut the camera! [laughs]
That is so funny—like a ritualistic single clap—symbolic of your whole project. Getting back to the philosophy, do we need to know about this?
I think it is about individual expression, doing something out of the box, having the courage to do something. Ken really believed this was whole new art form. I love his quote about Shakespeare, 'If Shakespeare was around today he wouldn't be using a quill pen.' He was trying to do something completely unique and original. He succeeded but he didn't understand how to get it out there.
I think it is important to look at this moment in history when the opportunities were so great. Had things gone a little differently what might have happened? Had the meeting [between Dr. Timothy] Leary and Kesey happened, what would have happened? They had a very different approach to what they thought LSD was all about. [Leary] didn't want LSD to explode on the scene; he wanted it to be very controlled. Ken was like, 'No, this is for the people, let them have it.'
And the whole thing exploded. Just a few short years later, it had gone from this idealistic dream into chaos. One interview we didn't end up using [was about] the Haight-Ashbury scene, [when] the vultures descended, the dealers, this and that. What started as something romantic and beautiful turned into this dark thing, and of course the CIA involvement—
That might have been a slight exaggeration because Leary was paid for his research by the CIA, but you are absolutely right, the darkness of the Haight is a story yet to be told. I happened to hitchhike down from Portland in 1971 and the place was annihilated, looked like a war zone. But your story is not that story. Ken Kesey is the best and the brightest of the hippies.
He wouldn't have called himself a hippie, he bridged the hippies and the beats but he was neither. He was very clean cut, never wore his hair long, always wore red white and blue, was very patriotic.
He was also a very responsible family man, running his farm, not to mention published author, superstar writer and certified by Tom Woolf, who is obsessed with status. Kesey was the only guy Woolf could not put into his status machine. You mentioned this earlier, the problem of hipster films: 'What is the story?' Viewers don’t like to see people having so much fun and not paying their dues.
[Kesey] was always looking for what was next. He was an explorer. They reached the edge of the water, the West Coast, you go into the mind now, that is the next place to go. That was where it started for him, it wasn't about just getting screwed up as it became for most people. For him, it truly was an attempt at enlightenment.
They were having fun, there was no doubt. Frankly, they were lucky that bus didn't kill everyone onboard or other people around because they were often out of control. Ultimately, the story is about growing up.
Growing up from being a cornfed American to being an intellectual and then a mystic?
Yeah. I think of it even less philosophically: literally, these guys grew up together. When you are young you have these idealistic goals and dreams and reality hits and you can't quite get to where you want to go and they kept the dream alive as best they could. I believe they all had some hard knocks along the way. We sort of stop the story around Woodstock because there were a lot of tragedies that happened after that Ken's son died in a horrible car accident.
Did they loose quite a few in the 70s and 80s to drug addiction and cocaine?
Not the original Prankster gang but some of the others. Ken, once he came back from Woodstock, said, 'No more, enough.' At that point they were sixty something people considering themselves Pranksters. The originals, the guys on the bus and a few others who came—obviously Mountain Girl the Grateful Dead—they all stuck around but the rest drifted way.
And he ran his farm and gave up writing. He had written two great books and had done this great social movement and BOOM now he was just going to raise his kids.
He did try to write and one thing he did get into—which I love—these children's books. Something about a squirrel [“Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear,” 1992]. It is fabulous. He also gets in front of the kids and, wearing this crazy top hat, acts it out.
He is a little like Wavy Gravy, he pushed towards the light against the dark and towards kids, life and love. And he remained married to his wife.
He did. That is not to say he didn't have his dark side, I'm sure he did—everyone does— but he was about light and love and life and promoting good things. After 'Sometimes a Great Notion' [the literary establishment] just didn't know what to make of him, I don't know why. He did keep writing but not much was published, that is for sure.
Was there a tragic side to that writer's block or did he accept that with good humor?
I didn’t know him so I can't answer that but my guess is that he believed the bus represented a new form of art, that art should jump off the page and that writing was too staid and too East Coast.
We don't have much or any of this in the film but a lot of the stuff he would talk about 'The East Coast is very blocked, even the architecture is blocked and the West is much freer. He believed this is a new form of expression and he wanted to explore it.
They rebuilt another bus and they would drive it around Eugene all the time and they took it took England, went on tour in England with it, You know I don't think he was terribly focused. He was a big environmentalist later in his life.
So he didn’t have regrets?
[Well] Ken was originally hired to write the screenplay for 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.' He wrote it and wrote the bus into the screenplay and the producers—I don't know if [Michael] Douglass was involved then or not, I presume he was cause his dad was on Broadway with [the play of] 'One Flew Over,' The producers looked at [his screenplay] and they said, 'What is this?' [laugh]
So he ended up not writing the final version and he was upset with the film. He said they didn’t tell the story from the Chief's Perspective. [But] I frankly look at that film and I think it is a wonderful film and understand exactly why they did what they did.
It is very hard to write a screenplay, as you know. Drama often has to stay somewhat in the dark. That is why the book and film were so fantastic and why the Douglasses were involved. You can say he was not a hippie but he invented all the hippie arts: the experiential acid test, bus art, graffiti art of the hippie style, performance art of various kinds, wearing his top hat. The Grateful Dead went on to become the greatest touring band ever. You go up to Northern California and the hippies won, George Bush didn't win.
I hope they do eventually, I don't know.
Getting back to hippie decadence. Ken's story is so full of light and beauty. I don't think you soft-pedaled it, you had some freak outs. But why did it collapse into the final decadence of the Haight?
We have him talking about it at the end. I love his speech at the end, when he says 'Everybody got in the way of their own thing. Everyone was jumping up and down in front of it so they couldn't see it any more. We are always meant to loose.'
You take people to the edge, where they haven't been, and ultimately people retract back. It’s too scary out there, for a lot of reasons, some right and some wrong. I think Ken understood that, understood his role.
Again I didn't know him so I can't answer this but at least my idea is he was very much at peace with who he was and what he did and I don't think he sat around worrying about whether he had published twenty books or this and that. I think he lived a life he believed in. I could be wrong, I didn't know him, I wish I did.
He seems quite Buddha natured so I think your right but there was also this odd side to him If you like at him seems like a westward, life loving romantic and rebellious guy but he had the dark side of the romanticism where he would say "Never trust a Prankster.'
Right.
And 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is dark so he seemed to integrate light joyousness with this other side. I can't under this first rule Never Trust a Prankster on the other hand he said 'I was very responsible, I never got drunk?'
Right.
That was the sort of hippie ethos that came to me as a young man: the hippie had work harder to do the job right as well as have a good time, which Kesey personified whereas Leary and Jagger were more diabolical heroes.
You forget, he was also a control freak. He says in the film I want to be the quarterback I want to control the ball and he did he was almost like the puppeteer. Then he would sit back and look at the scene and then jump back into it and let it play out.
I am sure there was a lot of mellow drama in the time with all the mixing, not wife-swapping per se but having kids with different people. There was lot of stuff that was hard to go through. I talk to Sunshine, Ken and Mountain Girl's daughter, at the screening in Eugene and she explained to me that growing up for her was at times confusing. All this love and joy is fine but I am sure it wasn't at that time. I am sure it was extremely complicated for them to maneuver through some of this stuff.
Sure when ever you have two or three women in a household structure it is going to be difficult but often with these gurus, no matter how saintly they supposedly are, you have really terrific problems and control freaks and Jim Jones. [Considering that] I think Kesey is a very mellow guru figure.
Oh yes, I am sure. And the fact that everyone was still was around and a peace with one another, actually there is still quite bit of squabbling amongst some of the Pranksters which is too bad but whatever. They were kids, they went off on this great journey and thought they were going to discover something that was cool and different and realized they were what was cool and different and you know. It was self-indulgent certainly but I am glad they did it.
It really affected their lives and the Pranksters became a community that lasted to today. Did any of the community put any pressure on you to whitewash things?
No, it was really great actually. Fey [Kesey's wife] had watched the film earlier before we finished and she asked us to take out a couple of very minor comments, couple of audio bits. They didn't have final cut on it, we had final cut, so any changes we made were courtesy, changes we felt did not impact the film so why not make them happy.
George and Mountain Girl saw the film for the first time in Eugene a few weeks and we did a Q and A after wards and they didn't come up on to the stage afterwards and I am thinking, 'Oh my god they hated it this is a disaster!' but five minutes later they hobbled up on stage and George was sitting next to me and he had this crazy hat on and said. 'I just have to lift me hat to you guys. We tried to do this for 40 years and you guys did it. [laugh]
It was a great moment because that was a wonderful comment on that but also I am thinking: 'Oh, phew they don't hate it!'
Right that is a very difficult moment, at those screening. Obviously documentaries have a hard time making money but do any funds go back them, did they ask for rights.
The estate owns all the footage, I am not sure, there was money paid to use the footage. I don't know the answer to that question.
And who put up the funds and if you don't mind me asking what was the budget.
It was around 1.5 million. The funds came from a variety of sources: I believe that Optimum Releasing in the UK put up the first funds, and the A&E/History Channel came in next, you'd have to ask the producers about the specifics.
I guess it will tour the festivals and then you will be shopping it around.
Yeah, well, documentaries notoriously do not make money. I hope this is one kids want to see. Early on I did a screening at NYU, I was a guest speaker in a master class, and showed the film in a pretty rough stage and I wanted to see how young kids would react to it—we had been screening for professionals most part.
They loved it, the were riveted, they had all sorts of questions: ‘This is an era which is just this mythology for us, we will never experience it we are so curious and this is the first time we have seen it were it feels like it takes you into it and isn't just looking back at.’
That is the magic of the footage that they shot. No matter how out of focus, how ever shaky, that is magic, you are there with them, that is how I first reacted to seeing that footage. It felt like I was there.
It is an important film. Like any event, WWII, these are big events and what did it mean? Looking at the footage, there is no intermediary.
Right.
And you also tell a few other stories, like Jack Kerouac—who I think is a tragic figure—and Neal Cassidy, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary. It puts the constellation into a place where you can walk out and go, 'Uh, yeah, now I get it.'
Yeah, that is what we were hoping. It was both a lot of fun and very hard to get to that place. The first three minutes of the film were probably recut no less then two hundred times [laugh] And completely recut—like a totally different direction.
At one point I had Ken and his dummy doing a lot of ventriloquism [Kesey is an expert ventriloquist!] through out the film. For a while we thought it was going work but people were looking at it and saying, 'This is really too out there.' [laugh]
The film is going to be on Video on Demand in July. They are going to theatrical but after the VOD release. That is the new model it makes me nervous honestly because I think it has a tendency to kill theatrical. However, if it enables the distributers to make their money back, thus continue making films, I think that's important. Hopefully this is one that kids will want to see on the big screen because I think it is a different experience.
I think you did a great job—I don't want to be on the record denigrating the out of focus film: some of it was beautiful. You pulled it together, it tells the story and gives the vibe.
Hopefully everyone will think so.
Any thing you are working on now ?
Just getting started on film about the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmene Sembene that will be a challenging film as well. And there are a couple of things in the hopper. We will see what materializes.
Posted on May 11, 2011 - 08:23 PM
by Doniphan Blair
After editing 'My Trip to Al Qaeda" and "The Smartest Guy in the Room," Alison Ellwood decided to tackle the almost as enigmatic story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. photo courtesy: Jigsaw ProductionsAlison Ellwood, a slightly built editor and now director, with a not slight resume, has finally succeeded where three other editorial teams have failed. She and her intrepid producers and assistants have pieced together the epic footage—that we knew existed from Tom Wolfe's masterful chronicle, "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test"—added a couple of reenactments and some tasty animation, and now we have it. Featured at the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, "Magic Trip" stars Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the bus "Further" but also Neal Cassidy, Alan Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and the sad Jack Kerouac.
Born in 1961 in Australia, by coincidence due to her peripatetic family, Ms. Ellwood wanted to be photojournalist as a kid. Alas, "I just fell in love with movies and ended up in film school at NYU," graduating in 1983, just after the big class of Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. and started editing in NY in 1984, often working on fairly edgy topics: gang wars, prisoner wars, war on drugs, that kind of a thing.
By the '90s, she got into producing with "Brett Killed Mom: A Sister's Diary" (1996) and in the 2000's edited some very high profile projects like "My Trip to Al Qaeda," featuring Lawrence Wright (2010), and "The Smartest Guy in the Room" about Enron (2005, narrated by Peter Coyote). Her presentation at the SF International Film Festival was lovely and we interviewed her by phone from her home on Plum Island, Maine.
CineSource: How does Ken Kesey and the hippies rate in comparison to al Qaeda and Enron? As complicated, simpler?
Alison Ellwood: I would have to say 'Magic Trip' was the hardest film I have ever worked on. It was a lot of fun but it was very difficult to figure out how to tell that story, what the subtext would be. They are just running around the country having a good time...
We decided not do traditional interviews, with people looking back 40 years. We used the audio interviews that had been done with the Pranksters about ten years after the trip, so it felt kind of fresh, more immersive. Hopefully we succeeded in that.
The loose, sweet graphics that Alison Ellwood used to embellish and highlight the images she found in the vast archives of the Merry Pranksters. photo courtesy: Jigsaw ProductionsYeah, Alex [Gibney who also did 'The Smartest Guys'], we collaborate really well. He and Ali [Johnes] produced the hell out of the project. It was a very difficult producing film because of the estates and the rights.
It was really an editing project because it was all archival, whether Prankster or news footage. Alex and I collaborated fully on the whole thing. He really drove the bus [as it were] on the animation stuff, made the deal with Imaginary Forces [animation house]. They did a terrific job. Lindy Jankura, my co-editor, was instrumental in helping me figure out early on how to put this thing together. It was a struggle, a big challenge.
Did you start with five by seven cards?
Ken's son, Zane Kesey, had DVD copies of the footage, shot off the Steinbeck or some early transfers to Betacam. Ken continued working on this project when video tape came along. I believe he even had an early AVID before they finally gave up on it.
There were the individual scenes: they would go from one place to the next. So we blocked it all. Then the big job was figuring out all these interviews. Ken was interviewed multiple times at various ages and stages. How to weave his philosophy, which was beyond the actual bus trip that you are seeing [was the question].
We started breaking stuff down. We tried different ideas over different footage. At one point we had a whole Vietnam thing cut into the scene in Pensacola [FL] when Babs goes to visit his old marine buddy and they do the little dance around the trees with the instruments. Eventually we said. 'No, too off the wall.' A lot of trial and error to get it to the point where it flows.
Unfortunately, the film was poorly shot. So Ken had a bear of a job on his hands.
Yup. We had a great screening in Eugene Oregon almost three weeks ago and Zane came out with the second bus—the first bus, as you see [in the film], is in ruins, but they did make another bus. People were packed in, coming to the theater, all in Prankster regalia. George Walker and Mountain Girl and Gretchen Fetchen—who had come to Sundance with us—all of them said to me, they themselves had tried to edit the material but it was overwhelming.
I think they were too close to the material. Coming from the outside, we could look at it in a different way. I didn't experience it, my job was to make it make sense.
The woman, whose nom-de-hip was 'Stark Naked,' invented the famous hippie and largely female performance art of the same name on the back of Prankster bus as it rolled down Interstate 10 in Texas, backing up traffic for miles. photo courtesy: Jigsaw ProductionsIn a few cases where the actual recording was unusable—Jane Burton, she has laryngitis the day she did the recording so I had an actor come in and read through the entire transcript. With Stark Naked, we had her transcript but there was no audio. Zonker we had to rerecord and Gretchen [Fetchen]: so there were four.
You also did three little reenactments, like of Stark Naked on the back of the bus?
And the LSD trip that Ken takes at the V.A. hospital, which we had audio but no visual. Then there were the little maps of the bus travelling from one place to another.
You did a marvelous job of shaping what was largely out of focus footage. It goes back to the ancient problem of romantic artist being technical on the one hand and visionary on the other. If the balance is lost, you are screwed.
Ken didn't trust experts and he wanted to keep it an intimate thing. I look at the footage, honestly, and I think it is beautiful despite being out of focus. It was really frustrating when we realized we were hardly ever going to find synch [sound]. We thought we would find a lot more synch. I think they did one [synch sound] clapper—once, the entire time, just some one clapping their hands—and then they cut the camera! [laughs]
That is so funny—like a ritualistic single clap—symbolic of your whole project. Getting back to the philosophy, do we need to know about this?
I think it is about individual expression, doing something out of the box, having the courage to do something. Ken really believed this was whole new art form. I love his quote about Shakespeare, 'If Shakespeare was around today he wouldn't be using a quill pen.' He was trying to do something completely unique and original. He succeeded but he didn't understand how to get it out there.
I think it is important to look at this moment in history when the opportunities were so great. Had things gone a little differently what might have happened? Had the meeting [between Dr. Timothy] Leary and Kesey happened, what would have happened? They had a very different approach to what they thought LSD was all about. [Leary] didn't want LSD to explode on the scene; he wanted it to be very controlled. Ken was like, 'No, this is for the people, let them have it.'
And the whole thing exploded. Just a few short years later, it had gone from this idealistic dream into chaos. One interview we didn't end up using [was about] the Haight-Ashbury scene, [when] the vultures descended, the dealers, this and that. What started as something romantic and beautiful turned into this dark thing, and of course the CIA involvement—
That might have been a slight exaggeration because Leary was paid for his research by the CIA, but you are absolutely right, the darkness of the Haight is a story yet to be told. I happened to hitchhike down from Portland in 1971 and the place was annihilated, looked like a war zone. But your story is not that story. Ken Kesey is the best and the brightest of the hippies.
He wouldn't have called himself a hippie, he bridged the hippies and the beats but he was neither. He was very clean cut, never wore his hair long, always wore red white and blue, was very patriotic.
He was also a very responsible family man, running his farm, not to mention published author, superstar writer and certified by Tom Woolf, who is obsessed with status. Kesey was the only guy Woolf could not put into his status machine. You mentioned this earlier, the problem of hipster films: 'What is the story?' Viewers don’t like to see people having so much fun and not paying their dues.
[Kesey] was always looking for what was next. He was an explorer. They reached the edge of the water, the West Coast, you go into the mind now, that is the next place to go. That was where it started for him, it wasn't about just getting screwed up as it became for most people. For him, it truly was an attempt at enlightenment.
They were having fun, there was no doubt. Frankly, they were lucky that bus didn't kill everyone onboard or other people around because they were often out of control. Ultimately, the story is about growing up.
Growing up from being a cornfed American to being an intellectual and then a mystic?
Yeah. I think of it even less philosophically: literally, these guys grew up together. When you are young you have these idealistic goals and dreams and reality hits and you can't quite get to where you want to go and they kept the dream alive as best they could. I believe they all had some hard knocks along the way. We sort of stop the story around Woodstock because there were a lot of tragedies that happened after that Ken's son died in a horrible car accident.
Did they loose quite a few in the 70s and 80s to drug addiction and cocaine?
Not the original Prankster gang but some of the others. Ken, once he came back from Woodstock, said, 'No more, enough.' At that point they were sixty something people considering themselves Pranksters. The originals, the guys on the bus and a few others who came—obviously Mountain Girl the Grateful Dead—they all stuck around but the rest drifted way.
And he ran his farm and gave up writing. He had written two great books and had done this great social movement and BOOM now he was just going to raise his kids.
He did try to write and one thing he did get into—which I love—these children's books. Something about a squirrel [“Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear,” 1992]. It is fabulous. He also gets in front of the kids and, wearing this crazy top hat, acts it out.
He is a little like Wavy Gravy, he pushed towards the light against the dark and towards kids, life and love. And he remained married to his wife.
He did. That is not to say he didn't have his dark side, I'm sure he did—everyone does— but he was about light and love and life and promoting good things. After 'Sometimes a Great Notion' [the literary establishment] just didn't know what to make of him, I don't know why. He did keep writing but not much was published, that is for sure.
Was there a tragic side to that writer's block or did he accept that with good humor?
I didn’t know him so I can't answer that but my guess is that he believed the bus represented a new form of art, that art should jump off the page and that writing was too staid and too East Coast.
We don't have much or any of this in the film but a lot of the stuff he would talk about 'The East Coast is very blocked, even the architecture is blocked and the West is much freer. He believed this is a new form of expression and he wanted to explore it.
They rebuilt another bus and they would drive it around Eugene all the time and they took it took England, went on tour in England with it, You know I don't think he was terribly focused. He was a big environmentalist later in his life.
So he didn’t have regrets?
[Well] Ken was originally hired to write the screenplay for 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.' He wrote it and wrote the bus into the screenplay and the producers—I don't know if [Michael] Douglass was involved then or not, I presume he was cause his dad was on Broadway with [the play of] 'One Flew Over,' The producers looked at [his screenplay] and they said, 'What is this?' [laugh]
So he ended up not writing the final version and he was upset with the film. He said they didn’t tell the story from the Chief's Perspective. [But] I frankly look at that film and I think it is a wonderful film and understand exactly why they did what they did.
It is very hard to write a screenplay, as you know. Drama often has to stay somewhat in the dark. That is why the book and film were so fantastic and why the Douglasses were involved. You can say he was not a hippie but he invented all the hippie arts: the experiential acid test, bus art, graffiti art of the hippie style, performance art of various kinds, wearing his top hat. The Grateful Dead went on to become the greatest touring band ever. You go up to Northern California and the hippies won, George Bush didn't win.
I hope they do eventually, I don't know.
Getting back to hippie decadence. Ken's story is so full of light and beauty. I don't think you soft-pedaled it, you had some freak outs. But why did it collapse into the final decadence of the Haight?
We have him talking about it at the end. I love his speech at the end, when he says 'Everybody got in the way of their own thing. Everyone was jumping up and down in front of it so they couldn't see it any more. We are always meant to loose.'
You take people to the edge, where they haven't been, and ultimately people retract back. It’s too scary out there, for a lot of reasons, some right and some wrong. I think Ken understood that, understood his role.
Again I didn't know him so I can't answer this but at least my idea is he was very much at peace with who he was and what he did and I don't think he sat around worrying about whether he had published twenty books or this and that. I think he lived a life he believed in. I could be wrong, I didn't know him, I wish I did.
He seems quite Buddha natured so I think your right but there was also this odd side to him If you like at him seems like a westward, life loving romantic and rebellious guy but he had the dark side of the romanticism where he would say "Never trust a Prankster.'
Right.
And 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is dark so he seemed to integrate light joyousness with this other side. I can't under this first rule Never Trust a Prankster on the other hand he said 'I was very responsible, I never got drunk?'
Right.
That was the sort of hippie ethos that came to me as a young man: the hippie had work harder to do the job right as well as have a good time, which Kesey personified whereas Leary and Jagger were more diabolical heroes.
You forget, he was also a control freak. He says in the film I want to be the quarterback I want to control the ball and he did he was almost like the puppeteer. Then he would sit back and look at the scene and then jump back into it and let it play out.
I am sure there was a lot of mellow drama in the time with all the mixing, not wife-swapping per se but having kids with different people. There was lot of stuff that was hard to go through. I talk to Sunshine, Ken and Mountain Girl's daughter, at the screening in Eugene and she explained to me that growing up for her was at times confusing. All this love and joy is fine but I am sure it wasn't at that time. I am sure it was extremely complicated for them to maneuver through some of this stuff.
Sure when ever you have two or three women in a household structure it is going to be difficult but often with these gurus, no matter how saintly they supposedly are, you have really terrific problems and control freaks and Jim Jones. [Considering that] I think Kesey is a very mellow guru figure.
Oh yes, I am sure. And the fact that everyone was still was around and a peace with one another, actually there is still quite bit of squabbling amongst some of the Pranksters which is too bad but whatever. They were kids, they went off on this great journey and thought they were going to discover something that was cool and different and realized they were what was cool and different and you know. It was self-indulgent certainly but I am glad they did it.
It really affected their lives and the Pranksters became a community that lasted to today. Did any of the community put any pressure on you to whitewash things?
No, it was really great actually. Fey [Kesey's wife] had watched the film earlier before we finished and she asked us to take out a couple of very minor comments, couple of audio bits. They didn't have final cut on it, we had final cut, so any changes we made were courtesy, changes we felt did not impact the film so why not make them happy.
George and Mountain Girl saw the film for the first time in Eugene a few weeks and we did a Q and A after wards and they didn't come up on to the stage afterwards and I am thinking, 'Oh my god they hated it this is a disaster!' but five minutes later they hobbled up on stage and George was sitting next to me and he had this crazy hat on and said. 'I just have to lift me hat to you guys. We tried to do this for 40 years and you guys did it. [laugh]
It was a great moment because that was a wonderful comment on that but also I am thinking: 'Oh, phew they don't hate it!'
Right that is a very difficult moment, at those screening. Obviously documentaries have a hard time making money but do any funds go back them, did they ask for rights.
The estate owns all the footage, I am not sure, there was money paid to use the footage. I don't know the answer to that question.
And who put up the funds and if you don't mind me asking what was the budget.
It was around 1.5 million. The funds came from a variety of sources: I believe that Optimum Releasing in the UK put up the first funds, and the A&E/History Channel came in next, you'd have to ask the producers about the specifics.
I guess it will tour the festivals and then you will be shopping it around.
Yeah, well, documentaries notoriously do not make money. I hope this is one kids want to see. Early on I did a screening at NYU, I was a guest speaker in a master class, and showed the film in a pretty rough stage and I wanted to see how young kids would react to it—we had been screening for professionals most part.
They loved it, the were riveted, they had all sorts of questions: ‘This is an era which is just this mythology for us, we will never experience it we are so curious and this is the first time we have seen it were it feels like it takes you into it and isn't just looking back at.’
That is the magic of the footage that they shot. No matter how out of focus, how ever shaky, that is magic, you are there with them, that is how I first reacted to seeing that footage. It felt like I was there.
It is an important film. Like any event, WWII, these are big events and what did it mean? Looking at the footage, there is no intermediary.
Right.
And you also tell a few other stories, like Jack Kerouac—who I think is a tragic figure—and Neal Cassidy, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary. It puts the constellation into a place where you can walk out and go, 'Uh, yeah, now I get it.'
Yeah, that is what we were hoping. It was both a lot of fun and very hard to get to that place. The first three minutes of the film were probably recut no less then two hundred times [laugh] And completely recut—like a totally different direction.
At one point I had Ken and his dummy doing a lot of ventriloquism [Kesey is an expert ventriloquist!] through out the film. For a while we thought it was going work but people were looking at it and saying, 'This is really too out there.' [laugh]
The film is going to be on Video on Demand in July. They are going to theatrical but after the VOD release. That is the new model it makes me nervous honestly because I think it has a tendency to kill theatrical. However, if it enables the distributers to make their money back, thus continue making films, I think that's important. Hopefully this is one that kids will want to see on the big screen because I think it is a different experience.
I think you did a great job—I don't want to be on the record denigrating the out of focus film: some of it was beautiful. You pulled it together, it tells the story and gives the vibe.
Hopefully everyone will think so.
Any thing you are working on now ?
Just getting started on film about the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmene Sembene that will be a challenging film as well. And there are a couple of things in the hopper. We will see what materializes.
Posted on May 11, 2011 - 08:23 PM
