Title: Magic Trip

Opens: August 5, 2011

By way of introduction: When John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960, we sensed that change was in the air. His was the first such election of a fellow who was not a Protestant, indicating a loosening up of national prejudices. He was young, vigorous, and full of ideals realized in part by his forming of the Peace Corps. At the same time, though, he increased the number of American advisers in Vietnam, an error compounded greatly by his successor. The changes through which America was going would lead to a counter-culture against the Vietnam War and in favor of a non-materialistic, more idealistic population, at least among college students and the young in general. The Beat Generation, an underground literary group that began in New York in 1948 and was superficially represented by beatniks in the early sixties, was to flow into the hippie movement. Bearded bums, as their detractors considered beaniks, were to morph into hippies—from the Black term “hip” meaning “those who are aware.” Hippies would “experiment” with psychedelic drugs, hippies marched against the Vietnam War, and they embraced a sexual revolution, the last item furthered by the invention of birth control pills and the view that women could and should demand the same pleasures as men. They invented new clothing fashions, attended music festivals, played guitar, got hip to Eastern philosophies and religions, hated the bourgeois life styles that allowed them to “drop out,” dug health foods, and changed the folk melodies of the Weavers, Pete Seeger and others into rock. In other words, the sixties through the early seventies were not at all like the opening years of our own century.

Ken Kesey and his so-called Merry Pranksters were a bridge between the conformist fifties and early sixties and the psychedelic age that brought in Free Love, exotic music, drugs and rock. Some of the Pranksters on the cross-country trip from the West Coast to the New York World’s Fair in 1964 are well know to this day while others have faded into obscurity. The idea of the bus trip, wherein the group painted a 1939 International Harvester school bus with psychedelic colors, was both to have fun and to alert others on the street who gawked, took pictures and smiled that they should be having fun as well because, as Ken Kesey said, “There’s only one movie” (meaning life). In other words in this age of anxiety when a well-known commercial in Lyndon Johnson’s election campaign featured an nuclear explosion, we should all forget about the bomb, take off our shirts and ties and jackets, and live.

The film of the trip is coming out only now because after trying for forty years to edit the 16mm work down from one hundred hours including audiotape, the reels were simply put away. Now, thanks to the work largely of the UCLA Film Archives, we have the 107-minute record on exhibit today.

The aim of the trip aside from having fun was to “seek truth,” and on this the travelers were helped by LSD—which strangely enough was used by the CIA to help in its interrogations. Through the use of animation, we in the audience et to see the colors that the users witnessed without the risk of a “bad trip,” one that could land a user into the hospital. Amid a lively soundtrack of the time by Dion, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane rather than of the psychedelic rock that because fashionable years later, directors Alex Gibney and Alison Elwood show us that the Pranksters are bonded, getting along without much conflict, though some would grouse at the motor-mouth reverberations of Neal Cassady who did most of the night driving, chattering away while the busload of passengers are asleep. The spiritual leader of the ensemble, Ken Kesey, was famous for his novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” later performed on Broadway with Kirk Douglas in the starring role and on the screen with Jack Nicholson.

Thankfully we don’t go on this trip in real time but witness the key experiences that break up the tedium, the weirdest being the time that the group went to take a swim in Louisiana but accidentally wound up with the “colored section” in the bad old days of segregation and were escorted out. There is hardly any footage of the New York World’s Fair, which did not impress the Pranksters who, we might say, had seen the future and it does not work.

The archival film, some taken when the Pranksters were high as kites on LSD, is shaky at points, the entire project aside from the cool animation, movie covering some bright spots amid the general tedium which might have some of us ask before a long 107 minutes, “Are we there yet?”

Rated R. 107 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Story: B

Overall: B