• By
  • Rachel Dodes
Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS
Ken Kesey, October 1966,  San Francisco, Calif.

In 1964, author Ken Kesey and an entourage known as the Merry Pranksters lit out from La Honda, Calif., bound for New York, on what would become one of the longest, strangest trips of all time. Armed with 16mm video cameras, musical instruments and copious quantities of LSD, they traveled in a 1939 International Harvester school bus painted day-glow colors and driven by beat generation icon Neal Cassady.

Filmmakers Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood unearthed the convoluted footage shot by the Pranksters on that trip, cleaned it up, and—six years later—are releasing a surprisingly cohesive documentary, “Magic Trip,” on Aug. 5. Speakeasy caught up with Ms. Ellwood, who was in New York promoting the film. Excerpts:

How did you become interested in this project?

Alex [Gibney] and I were on our way to Sundance in 2005, and we read an article in the New Yorker by [novelist] Robert Stone who was on the bus briefly. So, we contacted the Kesey estate. We saw that Ken’s son Zane was selling some DVDs with footage from the bus. I watched them and thought, “Wow, if there’s more of this there could be something here.” Sure enough there was 40 hours of footage, most of which was in really bad shape. We started a restoration project. We got a grant from Scorsese’s Film Foundation and the History Channel. And UCLA started this amazing restoration that took quite a while.

Could you talk about the choice to create a fictional interviewer who seems to be in a conversation with Ken Kesey?

We needed a device. We had lots of interviews with Ken over the years. The Pranksters were interviewed 12 years after the trip—that’s where all the voices came from. So they were talking about their reflections. We thought we would have a random interviewer asking questions so that’s what we did.

And the main interviewer is voiced by Stanley Tucci, right? How did he get involved?

We had just worked with him on “Casino Jack and the United States of Money” [a 2010 documentary about corruption among lobbyists] and he had read Jack Abramoff’s emails for us. Alex knows him.

There’s an animated segment where we hear a recording of Ken Kesey taking LSD for government tests at the VA hospital. How did you find that?

It was found in Kesey’s barn in a white little audio box labeled “VA Hospital 1960.” Alex looked at it and said, “It can’t be. Is this possible?” He must have just taken the tape with him that day.

We had Imaginary Forces do the animation for the scene. We started with very simple shots of the bed, the glass of water, the things he’s describing, and then as he starts tripping it gets more and more abstract. The tape actually goes on like that for 45 minutes. There’s going to be quite a bit more of it on the DVD extras. Listening to it, you can sense the character of Nurse Ratched [the fictional character in Mr. Kesey’s 1963 book, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”] coming out.

What was the music budget on this movie? It sounded expensive.

We have a brilliant music supervisor, John McCullough who helped make arrangements. The Grateful Dead who loved the film [and were featured in it] agreed to “favored nation” status, so it didn’t cost a lot. If the film does extremely well then they will also do well.

Could you talk about your decision not to include “The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test” in the film?

Tom Wolfe wasn’t there. He wasn’t on the bus. We thought about it, but thought, “This was their thing, and they were the ones on the bus.”

Given that Neal Cassady was on speed the whole time, it’s amazing that they didn’t get into any accidents, don’t you think?

It’s really amazing. Thankfully the bus didn’t go very fast. I can’t imagine the thing went faster than 50 miles per hour. Today, they would certainly be arrested. Could you imagine something like that barreling down the highway now? They were pulled over eight times on camera, three times we show in the film. They got no tickets, and Neal Cassady never even had a valid drivers’ license! There’s a scene where the cops came out on the New Jersey Turnpike. Neal Cassady takes out his wallet and you’ll see everybody just starts distracting the cops, and they are saying “Everybody get back on the bus!” He then hands Cassady back his license. No license, on speed, driving like a lunatic across the country.

Tell me about that scene in New York, where the Pranksters are a party attended by Jack Kerouac, who seems like he’s not having the best time.

It’s heartbreaking. He’s spent. They were desperately trying to impress him because he was their hero. I think he was probably jealous [of Ken Kesey]. He had to know Ken’s work. In addition to going to the World’s Fair they were traveling to New York for a book party for “Sometimes a Great Notion.” That footage is from the book party. Kerouac had to know that Kesey was blowing right past him.

What did you learn about this time period that you thought you knew?

It really was the ‘50s. The Sixties that we think of was really a three-year period that started in 1967. I was surprised that the Pranksters were so innocent, so patriotic. They were on more of a spiritual quest.

One of my favorite lines is when Ken Kesey says, “Basically I am just a clean-cut American guy who just happens to be an acid head.” And he was.

For the latest entertainment news