Magic Trip

In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair – a trip made famous in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Kesey was joined on his Magic Bus by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers that included Neal Cassady, the Beat Generation icon immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” This trip ignited the beginning of the 1960s psychedelic revolution. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney (Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson) and Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They restored over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history.