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

A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' fabled road trip across America. A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' fabled road trip across America. A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' fabled road trip across America.

• Alison Ellwood
• Alex Gibney
• Stanley Tucci
• Timothy Leary
• 8 User reviews
• 50 Critic reviews
• 59 Metascore
• 1 nomination

• (archive footage)

• Jane Burton

• Gretchen Fetchen

• (as The Warlocks)
• Self - Interviewer

• Stark Naked

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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Martin Scorsese 's film foundation helped fund the repair of the damaged Kesey footage by technicians from UCLA, who labored for over a year. Synching up the film to its separate snippets of audio track proved so daunting that director Alison Ellwood resorted to hiring a lip reader to determine what words people were mouthing.

Ken Kesey : What it meant, was that everybody had to consider a new way for things to be. Don't you know that we're all one? The deeper I got into it, the more I realized it was a different force working. The only big mistake we made, as a force, was thinking for a while that we were going to win. We developed vested interests in the victory to come. We begin to parcel off into little groups, whether it's feminism or politics. For money, religion, whatever it is; everybody is jumping up and down in front of it. Until nobody can see it clear anymore. There's something about what we're doing; is that we're meant to lose, every time. You make these forays, you write these books and you perform this music; but the big juggernaut of civilization continues, and you get kind of brushed to the side. But, I think all through history there's been these kind of divine losers that just take a deep breath and go ahead, knowing that society's not going to understand it. Not even caring, 'cause they're having a good time.

• Connections Featured in The Roth Show: The New York City Way (2014)
• Soundtracks Let's Go Trippin' Written by Dick Dale (as D. Dale) Published by Surf Beat Music Performed by Dick Dale & His Del-Tones (as Dick Dale and the Del-tones) Courtesy of Dick Dale Records

User reviews 8

• Dec 19, 2011
• How long is Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place? Powered by Alexa
• August 5, 2011 (United States)
• United States
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• Magnolia Pictures
• History Films
• Optimum Releasing
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Aug 7, 2011

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• Runtime 1 hour 47 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

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STORY In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Oscar®-winning director Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage to create a documentary of this extraordinary piece of American history.

STARRING Ken Kesey Neal Cassady The Merry Band of Pranksters The Grateful Dead

DIRECTED BY Alison Ellwood Alex Gibney

PRODUCED BY Will Clarke Alex Gibney Alexandra Johnes

• © 2013 Magnolia Pictures. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place

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Watch Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place with a subscription on Prime Video, rent on Fandango at Home, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Apple TV.

What to Know

Magic Trip is overall unenlightening, though there's an inherent novelty and joy in seeing the unearthed footage of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters.

Audience Reviews

Cast & crew.

Alex Gibney

Alison Ellwood

Stanley Tucci

Will Clarke

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Movie news & guides, this movie is featured in the following articles., critics reviews.

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'Magic Trip': High Times With The Merry Pranksters

Mark Jenkins

Road Warriors: Timothy Leary (left) and Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road , were two of the Merry Pranksters onboard the psychedelic "Further" bus in 1964. Magic Trip tries to immortalize their journey to a larger extent than the film is able to support. Allen Ginsberg/Corbis hide caption

• Directors: Alex Gibney, Alison Ellwood
• Genre: Documentary
• Running Time: 107 minutes

Rated R for drug content, language and some nudity

With: Stanley Tucci, Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, The Merry Pranksters, The Grateful Dead

Watch Clips

Credit: Magnolia Pictures

'John Babbs'

'Once I Hit The Pond'

In the beginning was the word: Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , published in 1968, evocatively reconstructed Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters' cross-country bus trip of four years earlier. The book remains one of the seminal accounts of the decade's social, artistic and hallucinogenic experiments.

Now come the images: Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood have built a documentary, Magic Trip , from the 16mm color film the Pranksters shot along the way. The rarely seen (and carefully restored) footage looks good, although the lack of synchronized sound gives it a home-movie feel. The travelers did record sound, but it rarely matched the film. So the directors rely on audio interviews with the participants, recorded a decade after the excursion.

For those already somewhat familiar with the subject, the directors' distillation of these 40 hours of film will expand their knowledge — if not their consciousness. But other viewers may spend the whole movie wondering exactly when the merry magic is going to kick in.

The sparse narration, voiced by Stanley Tucci, oversells the significance of what's on-screen. The movie's prologue claims that the Pranksters' journey "changed everything." But surely the tie-dyed escapade was a symptom, not a cause, of the era's burgeoning youth culture.

As Wolfe detailed, Kesey moved through multiple worlds. He was an all-American, small-town boy who became an acclaimed novelist at 27 with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . He was an early advocate of LSD and other psychedelics, and a patron of the Grateful Dead. And though he considered himself "too young to be a beat," he knew Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and most of the rest. Indeed, the Pranksters' bus driver was Neal Cassady, the Kerouac pal lightly fictionalized as Dean Moriarty in On the Road .

The Pranksters' own on-the-road venture was roundabout, wandering through Southern climes that within a few years would be considered inhospitable to hippies. Yet the local cops were bemused rather than threatened by the strangers, whose bus was decorated in psychedelic swirls but whose hair and dress wasn't that unusual. At the time, some of the travelers' favorite drugs weren't even illegal; LSD wouldn't be prohibited nationwide until 1968. (Cassady preferred speed, which fueled both his long hours at the wheel and his manic raps.)

Ken Kesey's bus, "Further," was an emblem of '60s counterculture. Painted by hand (and foot), the vehicle served as a temporary home for Kesey and his fellow hippies. Ted Streshinsky/Corbis hide caption

Ken Kesey's bus, "Further," was an emblem of '60s counterculture. Painted by hand (and foot), the vehicle served as a temporary home for Kesey and his fellow hippies.

Many of the Pranksters acquired nicknames that pretty much tell their whole story: Stark Naked, for example, got really stoned and stood nude on the moving bus' back platform, to the delight of truck drivers. Other members of the troupe are similarly one-dimensional. To judge from this account, Kesey wasn't first among equals: He was basically the whole show.

Gibney (whose best documentary is the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side ) and Ellwood (his longtime editor) attempt to get inside the heads' heads with acid-simulating animations. They also interject clips from an LSD-peril episode of Dragnet and Hollywood's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and illustrate the period's pop-culture shift with music that moves from silly ("Love Potion No. 9") to trippy ("Timothy's Leary's Dead").

It takes more such allusions, however, to conjure a fresh vision of the much-pondered 1960s. In the Pranksters' footage, Magic Trip does have something new. But the movie fails to make the cross-country jaunt function as a metaphor for the country's mid-century passage. Minus that, the Pranksters' everything-changing adventure looks a lot like just another road trip.

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Movie Review | 'Magic Trip'

Stoned Archive: Wild Ride Of the Merry Pranksters

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By Stephen Holden

• Aug. 4, 2011

If you have ever agreed to baby-sit for a friend who needed a sympathetic watchdog while experimenting with psychedelics, you know how boring it can be to observe someone else in the throes of an acid trip. Unless, heaven forbid, the friend freaks out and has to be carted off to a psych ward, there is nothing interesting about it, not even the addled oh-wow remarks of the person under the influence. Meaningful communication is possible only if you’ve also ingested hallucinogens and are flying side by side. Then you might share the clammy fantasy of crawling around inside each other’s heads.

That unbridgeable distance between the stoned and the sober is the problem with Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s documentary “Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place.” This distillation of home movies shot by the author Ken Kesey and his friends, known as the Merry Pranksters, chronicles their acid-fueled cross-country bus trip in 1964 from California to New York to visit the World’s Fair. Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture.

Compiled from more than 40 hours of 16-millimeter footage shot during the journey and stored in a barn near Eugene, Ore., “Magic Trip” is the cinematic equivalent of a yellowed scrapbook whose pictures are accompanied by sketchy captions created after the fact.

Because the Pranksters were too careless to synch the images with the sound, many of the movie’s voice-over reminiscences come from audiotapes recorded 10 years later, with the speakers haphazardly identified. Their accounts are supplemented with sparse narration by Stanley Tucci. None of the storytellers could be described as transfixing yarn spinners. Any philosophical afterthoughts are resoundingly banal.

With nicknames like Stark Naked, Intrepid Traveler, Mal Function, Gretchen Fetchin, Generally Famished and Zonker, the Pranksters suggest nothing so much as a group of attractive, preppy-looking partygoers, outfitted in red, white and blue, whose traveling bacchanal zigzags across the country, with each stop identified by a postcard.

In those more relaxed times, the Pranksters encountered only sporadic harassment. Their psychedelically painted vehicle, a 1939 International Harvester school bus that they christened Further, was an object more of curiosity than of hostility. In downtown Phoenix they mocked the presidential aspirations of Senator Barry Goldwater by driving the bus backward. Outside New Orleans they accidentally visited a beach for black people and fled in fear and embarrassment.

There is a minor uproar in Houston, where they visited the author Larry McMurtry in his staid, middle-class neighborhood, and the mentally unstable Stark Naked went missing. The Pranksters are also shown dancing around in a circle and playing instruments (badly) while imagining that they sound like John Coltrane, as well as splashing around in an Arizona pond while spontaneously inventing tie-dye (or so the movie suggests).

The World’s Fair proves to be a disappointment, as does a visit to the Millbrook, N.Y., estate where Timothy Leary reigned as the East Coast acid guru. This was not the euphoric, proto-hippie summit meeting they had anticipated, and Leary’s West Coast counterparts found themselves looked down on as frivolous.

The film begins with a biography of Kesey, a glamorous, blondish roughneck writer known for his novels “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion.” His college dreams of being an Olympic wrestler ended with a serious shoulder injury. The documentary includes a history of LSD and a re-creation of Kesey’s participation in a 1959 government study in which his moment-by-moment remarks after taking LSD were tape-recorded. (We hear his voice over a faked re-enactment.) The cheesy visual effects accompanying the sequence are meager compared with the full-blown psychedelia in Julie Taymor’s movie “Across the Universe.”

Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place

Opens on Friday in New York and San Francisco.

Written and directed by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, based on the words and recordings of Ken Kesey; voice of the interviewer, Stanley Tucci; edited by Ms. Ellwood; music by David Kahne; design and animated sequences by Imaginary Forces; produced by Will Clarke, Mr. Gibney and Alexandra Johnes; released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

Besides Kesey, the most famous Prankster was Neal Cassady, the speed-fueled motormouth who was the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and the principal driver for the journey’s West-to-East-Coast lap. Then in his late 30s, he was already a visibly ravaged shadow of Kerouac’s heroically defiant rebel and well on his way to becoming the kind of babbling burnout you don’t want to sit next to on any bus trip, magical or not.

“Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has nudity and drug taking.

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A drug-fuelled road trip in the 60s

A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. 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. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus.

Alex Gibney

Director, Writer

Alison Ellwood

Top Billed Cast

Jerry Garcia

Self (archive footage)

Neal Cassady

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Original Language English

• based on true story
• woman director

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Currently you are able to watch "Magic Trip" streaming on Amazon Prime Video or for free with ads on The Roku Channel, Tubi TV, Freevee, Amazon Prime Video with Ads. It is also possible to rent "Magic Trip" on Amazon Video, Vudu, FlixFling, Apple TV, Microsoft Store online and to download it on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Vudu, Microsoft Store, FlixFling, Google Play Movies, YouTube.

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Streaming charts last updated: 1:19:49 AM, 04/28/2024

Magic Trip is 2194 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 842 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than A Dark Song but less popular than Between the Lines.

A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. 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. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus.

Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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How Ken Kesey's LSD-fuelled bus trip created the psychedelic 60s

F lush with funds from the success of his debut novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Ken Kesey, then 29, drew up plans in 1963 to drive a bus across the US to the World's Fair in New York. In June 1964, an exotically painted 1939 Harvester school bus rolled out of his ranch in La Honda, California. This was to be no ordinary journey. Kesey's Beat Generation associate Neal Cassady – the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road – was driving the bus they called Further. On board were half a dozen travellers who called themselves the Merry Pranksters and a jar of orange juice laced with LSD. The trip, immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , would become the mythologised starting point of the psychedelic 60s.

"The trip had a dual purpose," said Wolfe. "One was to turn America on to this particular form of enlightenment, the other was to publicise [Kesey's] new book, Sometimes A Great Notion . Kesey was a great writer. It was too bad he abandoned writing but I think he meant it when he said, 'I'm tired of waiting for an echo, I want to be a lightning rod'."

The footage shot on the cross-country odyssey was considered unusable and duly forgotten. But in a new documentary, Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place , released in America last Friday, film-makers Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney have constructed a coherent film from it. "It's like watching a fuse being lit," says Gibney, who won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side , a 2007 documentary about America's use of torture during interrogation. "The be-ins hadn't happened yet, but you can see they're filled with idealism, playfulness and curiosity. You can see them making it up – or at least Ken Kesey is making it up. He's already myth-making."

The durability of that myth, of course, is rooted in American ideals of freedom. Carolyn Garcia, aka Mountain Girl, the prankster who would later marry Jerry Garcia of the rock band the Grateful Dead, says Kesey felt that a film of the bus trip would spread the gospel of freedom through LSD. "They didn't know they were starting the 60s, obviously, but they knew they had a big secret and they were going to exploit it to the full."

While the bus trip became the stuff of legend, the film record of it languished at Kesey's ranch, rotting and disordered, until Ellwood and Gibney discovered it existed from a New Yorker article by former prankster Robert Stone in 2004. The film-makers contacted Kesey's widow and son Zane and struck a deal.

After restoration at the University of California , funded in part by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation, Ellwood and Gibney set to work. "Considering none of those guys knew how to use cameras, it was pretty amazing when it started to come together," Ellwood says. Unlike most historical documentaries, Magic Trip does not cut away to the reminiscences of ageing participants. Instead, it uses interviews Kesey made a decade after the trip. "It was a way to get on the bus and stay on the bus," says Ellwood.

At the centre of the action is Kesey, a former wrestler and amateur puppeteer who had signed up for research into the effects of LSD. Whereas the LSD-advocating psychologist Timothy Leary (whom the pranksters visited, tripping) gave them a cool reception, believing that it should be restricted to an elite, Kesey wanted the drug – then still legal – to be widely available. Under the effects of LSD, he had discovered the world was a hole filled with jewellery. It was a vision he wished everyone might share.

"Kesey was all about fun and freedom that comes out of the great American tradition," Gibney says. "That's why they were all dressed up in red, white and blue shirts." From a creative standpoint, Kesey later explained, his use of film was in part to find out if people talk in life as they do in novels. "They don't," he concluded.

Nearly half a century later, the Merry Pranksters' exploits look endearingly innocent. In one scene, Cassady, high on amphetamines and speaking in the stream-of-consciousness hipster jive that so impressed his fellow Beats, drives the bus through Phoenix backwards while the pranksters blow their trumpets and horns in mock support of the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. "It was more haphazard than planned," says Ellwood. "Kesey knew something had to shift." He set about equipping the pranksters, none of whom had any experience with cinematography, with 16mm cameras and tape recorders that ran off the bus's unpredictable voltage.

"He had firm ideas about what he wanted his group of helpers to be doing and he knew he wanted to make films," Garcia says. "I think he hoped to re-create visions he'd had while he was in the psychedelic research project at the hospital. He wanted to re-create those experiences with film without having to resort to words. This was not a short-term thing for him. But making films in those days was expensive and difficult to pull off if you didn't have actors or a script to follow. So things didn't always work out the way he wanted them to."

Kesey's son, Zane, was four at the time and recalls the terror of travelling atop the bus on the mountainous coast road from Oregon to California as Cassady steered it wildly. "They had ambitions as performing artists," he says. "Dad knew he and the pranksters were doing something fun and something the world could enjoy if they could document it well enough. But they were absolute amateurs and they were high. At best, the footage is hard to wade through."

The task of assembling the footage into a film eluded Kesey, who died in 2001. But even incomplete, the "miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film" that Wolfe recalled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was still significant in establishing the counterculture, although Wolfe disputes the idea that the 60s started with the bus trip. "It actually started with the arrival of the Beatles in New York. When they arrived at Kennedy [airport] I could see all the boys running down the halls combing their hair forward. That's when the 60s really began," he says.

"When they came home they showed the movie and that became a party," explains Zane. "They did it again and it became an Acid Test. Then too many people started coming so they rented a place and bands [the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane] started to come and play. So it was very much a part of how the 60s were born ."

After Cassady drove the bus off the road in Arizona, Kesey dosed the party with LSD. They tipped model paint into a stream, then dipped a T-shirt in it to create the tie-dyed effect that would become associated with San Francisco's incipient Haight-Ashbury hippy scene. Throughout, Kesey guides the action like a ringmaster, participating but also directing. "Dad would say acid is not for everybody but if you can handle it there are things to be learnt," says Zane.

Garcia, who joined the pranksters after being picked up by Cassady in Palo Alto in California, and later had a daughter with Kesey, says that the Magic Trip also marked the start of a remarkable period of creativity. "Music just poured out of the different scenes," Garcia recalls. "We couldn't see what was going on in London but we knew fashion was going wild and people were having these things they called 'happenings'."

For Kesey, though, the role of prophet began to take its toll. "It was not what he planned," says Garcia. "He was thinking of one summer and suddenly it turned into a lifestyle. People didn't want to leave. He had to deal with the aftermath of the bus trip for a long time."

When the authorities woke up to the counterculture movement, Kesey became a target of police harassment. In 1966, he fled to Mexico to avoid trial on marijuana charges.

Though he may have distanced himself, Kesey never rejected the psychedelic 60s outright. He would say he would accept all the negative aspects of the 60s if he could also take the positive.

Carolyn Garcia echoes that sentiment. "For all the harsh realities – we didn't have any money, the bus was always breaking down, there was a lot of foolishness, and sometimes people would triple-dose and have a really hard time – I'd like people to recognise the unbridled, goofy joy of the times. We had a heck of a lot of fun."

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The harsh reality behind the Merry Pranksters 'Magic Trip'

So much has been written about the sixties, sometimes it's hard to tell myth from reality. Such is the case with the story of Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters.

In 1964 they took a storied bus trip from California to New York and back. Some see it as the launching point of the psychedelic era. A new documentary opening in the Twin Cities this weekend uses the Pranksters' own film to reveal the trip's disappointing reality.

"Magic Trip" opens with a question: "When did the sixties begin?" intones the narrator.

As an answer, it shows a young man beside a large cherry bomb, striking a match.

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"In 1964, this man, Ken Kesey lit the fuse for the explosion that started the sixties."

Author Ken Kesey was riding high after the publication of his novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", but he and some friends were restless. They wanted to rediscover America.

"We weren't old enough to be beatniks, and we were a little too old to be hippies," Kesey says in the film. "Everybody I knew had read "On the Road." It stirred us up, so we decided to travel across the country. Because there were so many of us we decided to buy a bus."

The self-named Merry Band of Pranksters painted the bus with garish colors, equipped it with a public address system, and set out to drive from California to the Worlds Fair in New York.

They were particularly excited to have Neal Cassady as their driver, the real-life model for the "On the Road" character Dean Moriarty. They also brought a supply of mind-altering drugs, including LSD.

Tom Wolfe wrote about the trip in his book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", and it attained mythic status as a pivotal moment in the cultural changes rocking the United States.

"I was interested in the sort of reality from which the myth was created, I mean from a long time all we had was the myth, 'Magic Trip,' " co-director Alex Gibney said.

Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney says the Pranksters filmed and audio taped much of what happened on the bus.

"And what is interesting about the film is you can see the more prosaic reality from whence it came," he said.

Gibney got the entire archive which had been found in a barn in Oregon. But he and his co-director Alison Ellwood faced a huge challenge.

They had 50 priceless hours of film and 150 hours of audio tapes, captured by very good cameras and microphones. But that thing filmmakers do with the clapperboard at the beginning of a shot to synchronize images and sounds — well, the Pranksters felt that was unnecessary.

"They didn't do the clap. Ever," Gibney said.

"Once!" interjects Ellwood.

"Sorry, they did it once," Gibney corrects himself. "And that was when they brought in a professional soundman for the day, who promptly quit when he saw how disorganized everything was."

They went to great efforts to find places where the sound matched up with the images.

"We hired a lip-reader to come in and spent half a day and they gave up," Ellwood said.

They found some synch points, including a wild sequence where Cassady drove the bus while high on speed. Listening to music on huge headphones Cassady raps into the on-board public address system, waving his arms and howling into the microphone, only occasionally looking at the road. Gibney admits it's quite frightening.

"Yeah, and what's even more terrifying is how comfortable the Pranksters were with him driving. I mean they felt completely safe," he laughs.

"And ironically, he didn't even legitimate drivers license," Ellwood adds.

Cassady drove for three days straight at one point, stopping only for gas.

Others on the trip fared less well as a diet of psychedelic drugs brought them to the edge of madness. There were other strange encounters along the way, with famous people such as Jack Kerouac, and LSD guru Timothy Leary. Neither went terribly well. The World's Fair disappointed the Pranksters too.

Gibney says "Magic Trip" is a window on a moment in history and despite the rough spots, the ideals Kesey espoused which came to inspire a generation still shine through.

"Kesey's ideas about freedom, about play, about magic are still very important and interesting," he says.

In 1964 people were scared after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy, Alison Elwood said.

"Ken was about, and the Pranksters were about, 'Leave the fear behind and explore. You've got to get out of the shelter and explore,' Elwood said. "And I think that that is relevant today. Very much so."

There have been previous attempts to make a movie from the footage. The Pranksters edited a version that was 30 hours long. Only Neal Cassady stayed awake for the whole of it.

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