Documenting Pranksters shines new light

August 28, 2011|By James Sullivan, Globe Correspondent

In October 1966, Ken Kesey on Harriet Street in San Francisco, and the bus… (PHOTOS BY TED STRESHINSKY/CORBIS…)

As a documentary film editor, Alison Ellwood finds the narrative thread in a chattering parade of talking heads. In her spare time, she hears more voices.

Imaginary characters pop into her head, explains Ellwood, 50, a Plum Island resident, and she obliges them by writing screenplays. “It’s like a benign manifestation of multiple personality disorder,’’ she says with a laugh. “You have these voices that talk to you, and they want you to get their story out: ‘Tell my story! Tell my story!’ ’’

The voices in Ellwood’s latest project - “Magic Trip,’’ a feature-length documentary about the infamous, LSD-fueled cross-country bus ride undertaken in 1964 by the group of pioneering hippies known as the Merry Pranksters - are the utterances of real people, but their stories are out of this world. With audacious alter egos such as Zonker, Stark Naked, and Hardly Visible, the intrepid, fun-loving, tie-dyed Pranksters almost single-handedly ushered in the lifestyle experiments of the late 1960s.

After editing several features with Academy Award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, including films about corruption (“Enron’’: The Smartest Guys in the Room,’’ “Casino Jack and the United States of Money’’) and other weirdness (“Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’’), Ellwood is credited as Gibney’s co-director on “Magic Trip.’’ The film opens Friday in the Boston area. It’s a project that came about after the filmmakers learned that the estate of the late novelist Ken Kesey (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’’), who spearheaded the bus trip, was sitting on 40 hours of 16mm color footage of the journey, which was immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.’’

The filmmakers then discovered that two of their friends had prior experience with the footage. One spent a couple of months living on Kesey’s Oregon farm, trying to make sense of the reels. Another, Joan Churchill, who had extensive experience working on rock documentaries, took a brief stab at editing the film, then declared the material a hopeless jumble of eccentric home movies.

“You guys are nuts taking this on,’’ she told Ellwood and Gibney.

But the co-directors felt otherwise. The psychedelic bus, driven by Neal Cassady - the amphetamine-stoked “Irish leprechaun,’’ in Kesey’s words, who inspired Jack Kerouac’s generational novel, “On the Road’’ - remains a powerful symbol of the counterculture. To the filmmakers, the bus represented a definitive answer to the question: “When did the ’60s begin?’’