Production
The documentary uses the 16 mm color footage shot with Arriflex 16M[2] by Kesey and the Merry Pranksters during their 1964 cross-country bus trip in the Furthur bus (destination sign: "FURTHER"). The hyperkinetic Cassady is seen driving the bus, only from California to New York, jabbering, and sitting next to a sign that boasts, "Neal gets things done".[3][4]
Kesey had spent 40 years attempting to edit the film footage before he abandoned the attempt.
Gibney says: "They didn't really know how to use the equipment properly, or why you had to do certain things. They shot over 40 hours of footage but by the time we got hold of it, it had been badly clawed over and was in a mess. The quality of the camerawork was pretty bad. And they recorded the sound at different speeds, without a clapperboard, so there was no way to synch it with the images. We even hired a lip-reader at one stage."[5]
Gibney and "his longtime editor"[1] Ellwood were given full access to source material by the Kesey estate, and worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY,[6] and UCLA Archives,[7] to construct this edit using the audio commentary that the participants (Merry Pranksters§On the bus) recorded while viewing the raw footage.[1]
Gibney and Ellwood also interject clips, from an "LSD-peril" TV episode of Dragnet, the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and music, silly, "Love Potion No. 9" and "trippy", "Timothy's Leary's Dead".
The Pranksters...were never proto-hippies: They were post-Beatniks, with a far greater affinity for the intellectual adventurism of the late '50s than the free-love ethos of the late '60s[1]
Indeed, there is a lot about the bus ride that really isn't anything more profound than a frat house road trip. (And, because of that, the police didn't seem to mind: they couldn't even imagine the idea of LSD and never thought to arrest Cassady even though he didn't have a valid driver's license.)[8]
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