Magnolia Acquires North American Rights to Magic Trip
Berlin – February 14, 2011 – The Wagner/Cuban Company’s Magnolia Pictures announced today they have acquired North American rights to Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s MAGIC TRIP, a freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. Co-directed and co-written by Oscar winner Gibney and his frequent collaborator Ellwood, the film was produced under HISTORY’s feature documentary banner, HISTORY Films, and the network will follow the film’s theatrical and home video release by Magnolia with a television broadcast premiere. Gibney produced along with Will Clarke, founder of Optimum Releasing, and Alexandra Johnes, another frequent Gibney collaborator. In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Gibney and Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film Archives to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history. Magnolia will release the film this summer as part of its Ultra VOD program, premiering the film on VOD platforms a month prior to its theatrical release—a model that proved very successful last year for another Magnolia/Gibney collaboration, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer….
Michael Scanlon, Abramoff business partner, sentenced to 20 months in prison
Justice continues to be served in the Jack Abramoff lobbying case. Last year, our film Casino Jack and the United States of Money detailed the way that Abramoff and friends ripped off clients, broke the law, and interfered with democracy in their reckless pursuit of personal and political gain—an exposé that the Huffington Post said, “staggers the imagination.” Now Politico reports that another Abramoff business partner, Michael Scanlon, has been sentenced to 20 months in a federal penitentiary for his role in the crime. He’s also liable for part of $20 million of restitution, and he may have to further defend himself in a civil suit brought by Abramoff’s ex-employer, Greenberg Traurig. To his credit, Scanlon seems contrite about his role in the crime and has extensively assisted in the prosecution of others, but it should say something about the magnitude of his actions that our law is charging a higher price than that.