Magic Trip

Academy Award–winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and codirector Alison Ellwood crafted this invaluable time capsule from 100 hours of film and audiotape documenting a legendary road trip of the 1960s.

In 1964, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the Merry Band of Pranksters, a renegade group of counterculture figures including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, set off in the psychedelic Magic Bus on an LSD-fueled cross-country journey to the New York World's Fair. They intended to make a documentary about the trip and shot lots of film footage, but the project was never finished and the footage remained virtually unseen until the Kesey family gave Gibney and Ellwood unprecedented access to this raw material for Magic Trip. (107 mins., video)