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Magic Trip

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Magic Trip
Promotional release poster
Directed by	Alex Gibney Alison Ellwood
Produced by	Alex Gibney Gareth Wiley
Starring	Ken Kesey Neal Cassady The Grateful Dead Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg The Merry Band of Pranksters Larry McMurtry Ken Babbs Timothy Leary
Narrated by	Stanley Tucci
Production company	History Channel Films
Distributed by	Magnolia Pictures
Release date	August 5, 2011 (2011-08-05)
Running time	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.^[1]

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".^[2]^[3]

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.

Reception[edit]

InThe 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 psychedeliainJulie Taymor's movie Across the Universe.^[4]