| Magic Trip | |
| Narrator: | Stanley Tucci |
| Studio: | History Channel Films |
| Distributor: | Magnolia Pictures |
| Runtime: | 90 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
Magic Trip is a 2011 American documentary film directed by Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney, about Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and the Merry Pranksters.
The documentary uses the 16 mm color footage shot by Kesey and the Merry Pranksters during their 1964 cross-country bus trip in the Furthur bus. The hyperkinetic Cassady is frequently seen driving the bus, jabbering, and sitting next to a sign that boasts, "Neal gets things done".
Magic Trip was released in the United States on August 5, 2011, by Magnolia Pictures. The film's soundtrack includes excerpts from several songs by the Grateful Dead.
In The New York Times, critic Stephen Holden wrote:
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...
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.[1]