Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place

Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Merry Pranksters. The Electric Koolaid Acid Test. Allen Ginsberg. Neal Cassady. Timothy Leary. These are the names that conjure up the 1960’s – for those who lived through them and for many in later generations who idealize them. These iconic figures are the subject of a new documentary, “Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place,” by the Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney.

It was the summer of 1964, when Kesey, the author of Cuckoo’s Next, bought a bus and gathered a dozen of his artsiest friends for a legendary trip from California to New York by way of Texas and the deep South.

Gibney tells me Kesey was convinced that “there was a great fear alive in the land, coming out of the assassination of JFK, and that he was going to make an epic trip across the country, from the West to the East, to see the New York World’s Fair. And one of the things that propelled this trip was a huge pitcher of orange juice that was laced with LSD.”

Amazingly, LSD was legal at the time (it wasn’t made illegal until 1966) and it definitely contributed to Kesey’s sex and drugs and rock’n’roll approach to life. Kesey saw his prankster lifestyle as offering a happy alternative to the sober conformity of the rest of American society. For Kesey, fun was revolutionary.

Fun was also something filmed. Kesey saw the trip as fodder for a new kind of movie. His fellow Pranksters passed around a 16 millimeter camera throughout the summer-long trip, eventually recording 40 hours of their spontaneity. Gibney admits a lot of the 40 hours is pretty tedious and even more of it is badly shot or out of focus but he has managed to cull the best of the stuff into a solid 107 minute movie.

All this filmed-at-the-moment material gives his documentary a real cinema verite feel. It makes the flim feel as if it’s happening now, not 50 years ago, and that’s a real plus. You’re practically a witness at the creation of what eventually became the hippie aesthetic. The bus is painted in those swoopy, psychedelic colors and many of the pranksters wore bizarre clothes, almost costumes. And their communal lifestyle was, of course, punctuated with drugs, relatively free sex, and music.

As Gibney points out, it’s important to remember the pranksters still had one foot in the 50’s. They were all short-haired, for instance. He says it was still the Mad Men era in a lot of ways. But obviously the other foot was in the future. And as with the Mad Men television show, it’s fascinating to watch a culture shift right before your eyes. Kesey and his Merry Pranksters are the bridge between the 50’s and 60’s. Or maybe better put, they built that bridge.