The Trip: Corman, Fonda, and the Acid Movie

Roger Corman wanted to make a film about an LSD experience, so he took LSD. He went to Big Sur, he took the drug under supervision, and he came back and made the picture. That single production fact separates The Trip from every other entry in the 1967 psychedelic cycle, all of which were made by men working from newspaper coverage, and it is the reason the film still holds up as a document while its competitors play as costume parties.

The screenplay is by Jack Nicholson, then thirty and still years away from being a movie star, working the writing side of the AIP hustle. Peter Fonda plays Paul Groves, a director of television commercials whose marriage is collapsing and who decides to take acid for the first time. Bruce Dern is John, the guide who sits with him. Dennis Hopper is Max, the dealer. Susan Strasberg is Sally, the wife Paul is leaving. Two years later Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson would make Easy Rider and the American film industry would change shape. The rehearsal happened here, on a Corman schedule, for AIP.

What the research bought

The most striking thing about The Trip is its patience with the ordinary. Paul takes the drug and then, for a considerable stretch, very little happens. He looks at an orange. He watches light move on a wall. He finds a texture interesting for longer than a film is supposed to let anyone find anything interesting. Dern’s guide sits nearby and says almost nothing, and the film treats the silence as content.

That is the observation of somebody who has been there. The exploitation competition of 1967 understood the acid trip as a light show punctuated by screaming; Corman understood it as long stretches of absorbed attention interrupted by weather. The film’s structure follows the actual arc — onset, plateau, the bad passage, the wandering, the flat grey morning after — and the fidelity gives it a documentary authority that no amount of solarised footage could fake.

Fonda is well used. He was a limited actor with an extraordinary quality of receptiveness, a face that registered things happening to it, and Corman builds the entire film around that receptiveness. Paul is a passive protagonist for ninety minutes, which would sink almost any picture and is precisely correct here. Dern is the film’s other pillar, and his John is one of the most sympathetic performances of Dern’s early career: attentive, unfussed, quietly responsible, a man doing a job that has no name yet.

The real ancestor

Every account of The Trip reaches for the counterculture — for Leary, for the Haight, for the year. The film’s visual vocabulary comes from somewhere much less fashionable, and it is the best joke in Corman’s career: the acid sequences in The Trip are Edgar Allan Poe.

Corman had spent the first half of the decade making the AIP Poe cycle — The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, the whole run of gothic pictures that gave the AIP assembly line its prestige end. Watch what Paul hallucinates. Hooded figures on horseback riding a night beach. A dungeon. A hearing in a stone chamber before robed judges. Candles, cloaks, corridors, a woman in a shroud. That is the Poe cycle’s costume department and the Poe cycle’s imagery, wheeled out and repurposed as the contents of a mind on lysergic acid, and Corman had every one of those images already worked out because he had shot them four years earlier.

The reuse is usually reported as thrift, and Corman’s thrift is legendary enough that the explanation satisfies most people. It is more interesting than that. The Poe films were about a mind collapsing inward — premature burial, the house that is a psyche, the party that is a death. Corman had spent five years developing a visual language for interiority, and when he needed one for a chemical experience he already had it on the shelf. The Trip is the Poe cycle’s last instalment with the literature removed.

The craft: how you shoot a subjective state

The technical achievement here is worth being specific about, because “psychedelic” has become shorthand for “unwatchable”.

Corman’s method is layering rather than distortion. Instead of bending the image, he multiplies it: superimpositions, coloured light thrown directly onto bodies, painted skin, kaleidoscopic inserts, rapid intercutting between the naturalistic room and the interior imagery. The room never goes away. Corman keeps returning to Paul on the sofa, to Dern watching, to the ordinary domestic space, so the audience retains the anchor Paul retains. The bad passage works because the film has kept the room available and then, for a few minutes, takes it away.

The sound is doing as much as the picture. The film drops out ambient sound entirely at points, leaving Fonda’s breathing, and then floods back in — the sensory gating that anyone who has read a single first-person account will recognise. And the editing rhythm accelerates and decelerates against the drug’s arc rather than against the plot’s, which is the single most unusual formal choice in the picture.

There is one more thing, and it is Corman’s oldest skill. He shoots the naturalistic scenes fast and cheap and functional, and he spends the entire budget on the interior sequences. That is triage as an aesthetic. The film looks like a cheap AIP picture until Paul takes the tab, and then it looks like something else, and the disparity is the experience.

There is also the question of who else was in the room. The psychedelic inserts were assembled by a small unit working somewhat apart from the main shoot, and the accounts of exactly who shot what have never fully settled — a normal condition for a Corman production, where the credited director was frequently the only person on set with a complete picture of the schedule and everybody else was doing three jobs. Corman ran his operation as a machine for extracting a finished film from insufficient time, and the finished films kept coming out with more personality than the method should permit.

The crack in the glass

AIP did not trust the film. James Nicholson and Samuel Arkoff wanted a cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs, and what Corman handed them was a film that declined to moralise — one that shows a terrifying passage and then shows a man waking up, more or less intact, changed in ways the film refuses to score.

So the studio intervened. A prologue was attached warning the audience about the perils of LSD, over Corman’s objections. And at the very end, over the final freeze frame of Fonda, AIP optically superimposed an image of shattered glass, so that the last thing the audience sees is the hero’s face cracking apart. Corman was furious. He has been talking about it for fifty years. The tampering was one of the grievances that pushed him out of AIP and toward founding his own studio, a decision that would eventually give American cinema most of its next generation of directors through the Corman film school.

The crack is still there on most prints, and it is a perfect artefact — a studio’s terror rendered as an optical effect, glued onto the end of a film that had earned its ambiguity. The British censors went further and refused the picture a certificate for decades, which meant that for most of its life the film’s British reputation was built entirely on rumour.

The case against

It is slow, and some of the slowness is not the technique. The naturalistic scenes are thin — Strasberg’s Sally is a function rather than a person, and the marriage the film keeps citing as Paul’s wound is never dramatised well enough to carry the weight the ending puts on it. Nicholson’s script has ideas and no dialogue to speak of. Hopper’s Max is a sketch.

The film also has a fundamental problem it cannot solve: a subjective experience is not a story, and Corman’s fidelity to the arc of the trip means the picture has no engine beyond curiosity. It works as a formal exercise and as an artefact. As drama it drifts, and the drift is real.

It remains the best of its cycle by a distance, and the comparison is instructive — Psych-Out the following year had a better cast and a proper plot and no idea what it was describing. Watch The Trip for what a genuinely curious craftsman does when he decides to find out, and for the Poe imagery hiding in plain sight. It sits usefully beside Gas-s-s-s, Corman’s other and stranger counterculture film, and it is the direct ancestor of every acid sequence American cinema has shot since, including the ones in Dead Man that think they invented the vocabulary.

Spoilers below

The bad passage is the film’s centre, and it is where Corman’s research pays off hardest. Paul, wandering out of the house and into Los Angeles, becomes convinced he has killed someone — a conviction the film neither confirms nor dispels. He drifts through a laundromat, a nightclub, a stranger’s home, encountering ordinary people who have no idea what is happening to him, and the terror is entirely social rather than visual. The hooded riders and the dungeon are theatre. A man trying to have a normal conversation while certain he is a murderer is the actual horror, and Corman knows it.

The morning is where AIP lost its nerve. Paul wakes in a stranger’s bed, in daylight, and Fonda plays the aftermath as neither damage nor revelation. He is asked whether it changed him. The honest answer the film gives is that he does not know yet, and Corman freezes on Fonda’s face at exactly that moment of unresolved suspension — the correct ending, and a brave one for a 1967 exploitation picture.

Then the glass shatters over it. A studio, unable to tolerate a film that would not say drugs are bad, reached into the last four seconds and said it for them. The ending everyone has watched for half a century is a film arguing with its own distributor in the final frame, and it is the most honest thing about the entire enterprise.