The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - changing the story?

 I mentioned Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as a source I've been using for research, but as I've been solely making my way through the book, there has been a much heavier focus on film and filming in it than I had anticipated. In the book, Wolfe follows Ken Kesey and his group of Mery Pranksters as they navigate the 60s and try to promote their views of psychedelics and their lifestyle. As they were doing this, they recorded almost every step of the way on camera. They filmed hundreds of hours of footage, including when they talked to police, their daily interactions, and their trips. Wolfe even claims that their trip on the bus and the recording of this could have been an inspiration or influence in the Beetle's Magical Mystery Tour. 

While I did connect this movement to art in general, I did not expect that filming and recording would have played such a big part of their experimentation and lifestyle. I've included some extracts from the book that show their experimentation, using sound and image to go as far as possible to permeate the senses in every way. 

"the notes come in like drops of amethyst vibrating endlessly in the ... acid ... atmosphere and it is very nice. The right earphone is hooked into a microphone picking up the sounds inside the house [...] there is no synch. it is as if the two are fighting for his head"

There are also segments involving contact microphones, looping sounds and voices. Most overpowering though, was their experimentations in the forest. They had microphones and speakers connected all throughout the forest turning it into an entire installation in itself.

THE MOVIE

The film itself had many larger goals, trying to break convention through an experimentation that had very little planning which made its actual creation into a cohesive film almost impossible:

"it was the worlds first acid film, taken under conditions of total spontaneity barreling through the heartlands of America, recording all now, in the moment. The current fantasy was... a total breakthrough in terms of expression... but also something that could amaze and delight many multitudes, a movie that could be shown commercially as well as in the esoteric world of the heads" 

"But The Movie was a monster, as I say. The sheer labor and tedium in editing forty-five hours of film was unbelievable. And besides... much of the film was out of focus.Hagen, like everybody else, had been soaring half the time. and the bouncing of the bus hadn't helped especially - but that was the trip! Still ... Also, there were very few establishing shots, shots showing where the bus was when this took place.

 But who needs that old Hollywood thing of long shot, medium shot, closeup, and the careful cuts and wipes and pans and dolly in and dolly out, the old bullshit. Still. plunging in on those miles of bouncing, ricocheting, blazing film with a splicer was like entering a jungle where the greeny vines grew faster than you could chop them down in front of you. The film had already cost a staggering sum, about $70,000,

mostly for color processing. Kesey had put everything he had gotten from his two novels plus the play adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest into Intrepid Trips, Inc. His brother, Chuck, who had a good creamery business in Springfield, Oregon, invested to some extent. George Walker's father had set up a trust fund for him, with strings on it, but he contributed when he could. By the end of 1965, according to

Faye's bookkeeping. Intrepid Trips, Inc., had spent $103.000 on the various Prankster enterprises." 

THE ACID TESTS

The Acid Tests themselves are something I hadn't researched beforehand, and they went beyond what I expected. They were fully immersive experiences for people to come into on LSD, that would completely overtake their senses through the looping of sounds and images throughout the space, a hommmade traveling installation. 

"The mysteries of the synch! Very strange... the Acid Tests turned out, in fact, to be an art form foreseen in  a strange book, Childhood's End, a form called 'total identification'.The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First, sound, then color, then stereoscopy, thenCinerama, had made the old "'moving pictures more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the stom! Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action."

"intergalactic red science-ficlion seas to all corners did lodge, oil and water and food coloring pressed between plates of glass and projected in vast size so that the very ooze of cellular Creation seems to ectoplast into the ethers and then the Dead coming in with their immense submarine vibrato vibrating, garaging, from the Aleutian rocks to lhe baja griffin cliffs of the Gulf of California. The Dead's weind

sound! agony-in-ecstasis! submarine somehow, turbid half the time, tremendously loud but like sitting under a waterfall at the same time full of sort of ghoul-show vibrato sounds as if each string on their electric guitars is half a block longand twanging in a room full of natural gas, not to mentiontheir great Hammond electric organ, which sounds like a movie house Wurlitzer, a diathermy machine, a CitinensBand radio and an Aulo-Grind garbage truck at 4 AM all coming over the same frequency... Then suddenly another movie."

FUTURE RESEARCH

After reading this I've begun to rethink entirely the dream sequences I wanted to include in the film. I plan to in the next couple weeks recreate what they made, attempting to create an immersive experience of only lights, colours, and sounds. This would require much more advanced sound design that I'm capable of currently, but since it would be more abstract it would be a good place to start since it won't have to be "realistic." I will design this to be watched on a laptop with headphones on, but would also like to experiment with it in an installation space. This may be as simple as converting my living room with a projector or renting out a space for a test run. 

Having read this, I'mm now questioning whether a segment like this would fit into the film that I've planned, or if it would be too abstract. I'm considering cutting to parts of this throughout rather than having one longer scene at some point, but don't want it to be too jarring. 

I'm also considering whether this should be something I include or if I should change most of my plan for the film to fit into this new set of concepts that have been brought up in my research.