The Trip (1967 film)

Plot

Paul Groves (Peter Fonda), a television commercial director, takes his first dose of LSD while experiencing the heartbreak and ambivalence of divorce from his beautiful but adulterous wife (Susan Strasberg). He starts his trip with a "guide," John (Bruce Dern), but runs away and abandons him out of fear.

Experiencing repetitive visions of pursuit by dark hooded figures mounted on black horses, Paul sees himself running across a beach.

As Paul experiences his trip, he wanders around the Sunset Strip, into nightclubs, and the homes of strangers and acquaintances. Paul considers the roles played by commercialism, sex, the role of women in his life. He meets a young woman, Glenn (Salli Sachse), who is interested in people who take LSD. Having learned from Paul recently that he would be taking LSD, she has been looking out for him. Max (Dennis Hopper) plays a role as another friendly guide to his trip.

Glenn drives Paul to her Malibu beach house, where they make erotic love, interspersed in his mind with a kaleidoscopic riot of abstract images intercut with visions of pursuit on a beach, a scene that is a sly homage to Bergman's, The Seventh Seal. Driven into the surf by his pursuers, Paul turns and faces both of them, and they reveal themselves to be his wife and Glenn.

As the sun rises, Paul returns to his normal state of consciousness now transformed by the trip and steps out to the balcony to get some fresh air. Glenn asks him whether his first LSD experience was constructive. Paul defers his answer to "tomorrow." His face is frozen in close-up, and his image cracks like glass through an animation special effect.

Production

Corman wildly edited some scenes for The Trip, particularly the exterior night scenes on the Sunset Strip, to simulate the LSD user's racing mind. The Trip features photographic effects, body paint on seminude actresses to lend atmosphere, and colorful patterned lighting, during sex scenes and in a club, which imitates LSD-induced hallucinations. Finally, Corman included inscrutable fantasy sequences including one where Fonda is faced with revolving pictures of Che Guevara, Sophia Loren and Khalil Gibran in a wildly lit room. For no apparent reason, a little person riding a merry-go-round in the background blurts "Bay of Pigs!!" The story plays over a musical backdrop of improvisational jazz, blues rock of the band The Electric Flag, plus an exotic musical score with an organ and horn-drenched theme.

Roger Corman did research by taking LSD himself. Charles B. Griffith wrote the first two drafts of the script—the first one was about the social issues of the sixties, the second one was an opera. Corman then hired Jack Nicholson to write the eventual screenplay. Corman encouraged Nicholson's experimental writing style and gives between 80 and 90 percent credit to Nicholson for the shooting script in the director's commentary appearing on the DVD of this film. Corman slightly modified the story to stay within budget.

Whilst most of the music actually used in the film was by Mike Bloomfield's Electric Flag, it is interesting to note that early visuals (e.g. the band in the club at the start of the film) are of Gram Parsons and the International Submarine Band, one of the earliest country-rock bands. It had been Fonda's original intention to use the ISB's music on the soundtrack but, in the event, their contribution was deemed insufficiently "psychedelic" or trippy to warrant inclusion and the Bloomfield/Buddy Miles/Nick Gravenites Electric Flag is what is actually heard in the film.

Release

Released at the end of August 1967 at the pinnacle of the "Summer of Love," the film had a huge cultural impact and grossed six million dollars - a massive sum for a movie that cost $100 thousand.

The film encountered huge censorship problems in the UK and was refused a certificate 4 times by the BBFC. A cinema classification was rejected in 1967, 1971 and 1980, and again for video in 1988. It was eventually released on DVD fully uncut in 2004.

The movie was very popular. Corman says it took $6 million in rentals. According to Variety, $5.1 million was in North America.

Home Media

The Trip was released in a Region 1 DVD by MGM on April 15, 2003, doubled with a similar film, Psych-Out, on a double-sided disc.