Psych-Out

Psych-Out (1968)

The Ultimate Head Trip

Jenny, a deaf runaway who has just arrived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to find her long-lost brother, a mysterious bearded sculptor known around town as The Seeker. She falls in with a psychedelic band, Mumblin' Jim, whose members include Stoney, Ben, and Elwood. They hide her from the fuzz in their crash pad, a Victorian house crowded with love beads and necking couples. Mumblin' Jim's truth-seeking friend Dave considers the band's pursuit of success "playing games," but he agrees to help Jennie anyway.

Date of release
1968-03-06
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (41)
Runtime
1h 41m
Genres
Drama, Thriller, Music
Director
Richard Rush

Casting

Interesting facts

Psych-Out is a 1968 American psychedelic film about hippies, psychedelic music and recreational drugs starring Susan Strasberg, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Adam Roarke, and Max Julien. It was produced and released by American International Pictures. The film was directed by Richard Rush, and the cinematographer was László Kovács. The bands Strawberry Alarm Clock and The Seeds can be seen playing within the music and dance scenes throughout the film.

Production

Dick Clark, who produced the film, wrote in his memoirs that he insisted that the film have an anti-drug message:

"... because I'd seen the kids in the hippie commune living in awful squalor. In the film you see scenes where it’s all wonderful, they’re all stoned-out having a great time. Then there’s the morning-after scene — the garbage lying around, a roach crawling through the food, a half-eaten orange crawling with maggots... If you saw it [the film] today you’d say it was a reasonably accurate view of what was going on then."

The film was originally titled The Love Children, but was changed at the request of distributors who worried that audiences might think it was "a film about bastards." Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff came up with the new title of Psych-Out based on a recent successful reissue of Psycho.

Filming took place between October and November 1967 on a 22 day schedule.

The film's special effects were created by stunt coordinator Gary Kent.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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