I just watched Eric Christensen’s terrific documentary The Trips Festival Movie, and I’m here to give it an unqualified rave! It was shown at the Mill Valley Film Festival earlier this year, and then Eric hosted a panel discussion with several of the participants, including Bob Weir, Mountain Girl, Stewart Brand, and others. That talk is included on the DVD, along with Ben Van Meter’s original Trips Festival film.
Eric was a high school kid in San Francisco when all this interesting psychedelic stuff started happening, and he and his buddy (interviewed in the film) attended the festival. Eric went on to spend thirty-plus years as a filmmaker and television producer in the Bay Area, and along the way he interviewed many key figures in the counterculture and music scenes. He raided his own archive and many others while assembling this documentary; I’m pretty well-versed in the history and the available documentation, but I was impressed with a lot of the new material he has unearthed.
You can order it right now from TheTripsFestival.com.
I’ll be interviewing Eric Christensen on Dead to the World this Wednesday, December 5, from 8 to 10 pm PDT, and we’re going to see if we can get some of his talking heads to either come to the studio or call in. I’ll play audio excerpts from the film and the panel discussion, and we’ll probably take questions from the listeners. too.
Take a look at The Trips Festival Movie web site, and tune in Wednesday for what promises to be a very colorful and enlightening trip down memory lane.
(P.S. My name shows up in the credits because I assisted Eric in a very minor way with a music licensing matter.)
One simple question: Is this film commercially available?
Yes! You can order it from http://www.thetripsfestival.com