Count the New York Times among those who’ve noticed the film. Magic Trip was featured in a piece earlier this week on the front page of the Times website. The article, “Film Hitches a Weird Ride on Kesey’s Bus,” takes a look at the amazing story behind the Magic Trip documentary — including the hours of 16mm footage taken during the legendary 1964 trip:

In all Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, as his crew called themselves, shot some 40 hours of 16-millimeter film, but the project was never really finished. As [Tom] Wolfe wrote, “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.” Kesey showed all 40 hours unedited a couple of times and also hacked the footage up into various shorter versions before stowing the film cans in his barn, near Eugene, Ore., where they rusted away — until Mr. Gibney and Ms. Ellwood showed up.

Check out the article here.

Great news — Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place opens in theaters on August 5. Play dates and theater listings are below. And if you just can’t wait that long, the movie is already available on Video on Demand. For more info on the indispensable portrait of this legendary road trip, check out the official site at MagicTripMovie.com.

8/5/2011

Berkeley, CA: Shattuck Cinemas 10
San Francisco, CA: Embarcadero Center Cinema 5
New York, NY: Cinema Village

8/12/2011

West Los Angeles, CA: Nuart Theatre
Portland, OR: Hollywood Theatre

8/19/2011

Washington, DC: E Street Cinema

8/26/2011

University City, MO: Tivoli Theatre
Santa Fe, NM: The Screen

9/2/2011

Atlanta, GA: Midtown Art Cinemas 8
Cambridge, MA: Kendall Square Cinema 9
Newburyport, MA: Newburyport Screening Room
Minneapolis, MN: Lagoon Cinema

9/8/2011

Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts

9/9/2011

Denver, CO: Chez Artiste

9/16/2011

San Diego, CA: Ken Cinema

10/26/2011

Milwaukee, WI: University of WI – Union Theatre

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. MAGIC TRIP will mark the sixth collaboration between Gibney and Magnolia, who distributed three of the prolific filmmaker’s projects in 2010 alone: Client 9, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, and the Freakonomics omnibus, featuring a segment by Gibney.

“Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood have done a masterful job piecing together this incredibly amazing footage,” said Magnolia President Eamonn Bowles. “It is truly like a taking a trip in a time machine back to the cultural beginning of the sixties.”

“I’m delighted to tune in and turn on with Magnolia and MAGIC TRIP,” said director Gibney. “Magnolia has the mind-expanded consciousness to be able to make the most out of this film. We’re on the bus. Further!”

The deal was negotiated by Magnolia SVP Tom Quinn with Cinetic’s John Sloss.

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.

The following is the complete list of filmmakers nominated for the DGA award, courtesy of Deadline:

• Alex Gibney, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
• Lixin Fan, Last Train Home
• Charles Ferguson, Inside Job
• Davis Guggenheim, Waiting for “Superman”
• Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, Restrepo

The Sundance Film Festival announced three late additions to the program, including our own Magic Trip. The documentary recounts the famed cross-country road trip taken by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in 1964, drawing from hour upon hour of video taken during the journey. This footage has never before been edited into a coherent whole, so it’s easy to understand why the documentary is drawing such excitement and attention.

In a short blog item in TPM, Josh Marshall reminds us of the illustrious past of Rep. Ralph Hall (R, Tex) who is taking over as chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee.  A member of an illustrious extended lobbying family, informally known as “Team Abramoff,”  Hall was the beneficiary of a sun-and-fun junket to the Marianas Islands (CNMI).  In return, he was a good soldier for Abramoff, defending the appalling labor practices of the CNMI (Abramoff’s client at the time). Hall’s lowest moment came when he attacked, in the Congressional Record, the statement of a young Philippina, known as “Katrina,” who, at the age of 14, had been dragooned into prostitution in the CNMI.

Hall’s appalling role in the CNMI protection racket run by Abramoff is briefly seen in my film, “Casino Jack and the United States of Money.”

So let’s roll out the welcome mat for the new chairman, who will undoubtedly attack efforts to address climate change with the same vigor that he defamed a 14-year-old girl, who had the courage to try to speak up for human rights.

The list of films eligible to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature has been announced, and we’re honored again to be included in the shortlist: Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer made the cut, one of fifteen films to do so.

The complete list, courtesy of the IFC blog, is as follows:

• Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
• Enemies of the People
• Exit through the Gift Shop
• Gasland
• Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
• Inside Job
• The Lottery
• Precious Life
• Quest for Honor
• Restrepo
• This Way of Life
• The Tillman Story
• Waiting for ‘Superman’
• Waste Land
• William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe

On Fox TV and at the New York Post, a peculiar detail is the subject of endless fascination: Did Eliot Spitzer, ex-governor of New York and newly minted CNN show host, really insist on wearing knee-high black socks during his encounters with high-priced escorts? A far more important question is this: Where did the story come from and why?

The answer to that question is important because it reveals much about political bloodsport in this country and how the media are routinely manipulated by clever political operatives who are paid to attack their enemies by “leaking” damaging rumors in ways that quickly enter the mainstream media as fact.

The tale of the Luv Gov’s black socks was originally penned by Roger Stone, the amanuensis of the dark side and perhaps the Republican Party’s best-dressed and most ruthless dirty trickster. He first introduced the hosiery motif in a letter he claims his lawyer — Paul Rolf Jensen — sent to the FBI, as a story heard, second-hand, from an off-work call girl at an “adult-themed club.” (Don’t you just love the detail?)

Read more on Alex Gibney’s blog at The Atlantic >

Check out the interview in full: