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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, film-makers Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney have found a way to construct 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 succeeded in becoming a 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 about Kesey 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 secondary school wrestler and amateur puppeteer who had signed up for research experiments 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 mind-bending 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.
