Psychedelic Marketing: The Trip & Om Dar-B-Dar

Detail from artwork by Aleesha Nandhra for a double bill of The Trip & Om Dar-B-Dar.

After a series of highly-stylised, feature films—adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe—filmmaker Roger Corman wanted to break free from the studio. He wanted to shoot on location. He wanted to know what the 60s American youth were up to. What they were into. Their beat.

He started with The Wild Angels starring Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern, released in 1966. American International Pictures had been making money with fun and gloriously silly beach party movies but now they slipped off their colourful bikinis and put on their leathers, kickstarting the rough biker-movie trend. This was a financial success with the working-class youth enjoying it at the drive-ins, but Corman turned next to the young professionals dropping out in urban America with The Trip in 1967. Fonda and Dern returned to star, Jack Nicholson wrote the script and Dennis Hopper both acted and directed additional scenes. These three protégés went on to make a third counterculture classic without Corman. The most influential and profitable of them all: Easy Rider in 1969.

Harvard professor and self-proclaimed prophet Timothy Leary had turned on the college youth of America to possibilities of a shortcut to enlightenment via doses of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or taking “trips”. Corman wanted to capture the LSD experience and culture around it on film. Fonda and Hopper were very much in the culture already, with Peter infamously bringing The Beatles down with talk about death during their trip in 1965 at a private screening of Cat Ballou, thereby inspiring the song She Said She Said. Bruce Dern, playing the Guide that takes Fonda’s character through his first LSD experience, was determinedly not in the scene, however. A top athlete, he refrained from drug-taking both on and off the screen and did not participate when the entire crew, including Corman himself, drove up to Big Sur and took turns tripping to a strict schedule.

Roger Corman filming on location for The Trip.

Corman thought audiences would be curious about LSD and the film could allow them to take a trip without actually taking it. Nicholson wrote what would have been a 50 million dollar movie but Corman had to keep it simple and shoot it for 300 thousand within 3 weeks.

Only 10 thousand dollars of that budget were spent on psychedelic special effects using liquid light projectors, carousel projectors, strobe lighting, special lenses, in-camera experimentation, and post-production editing. Corman couldn’t quite break free from Poe though, and Fonda’s LSD trip involved scenes with hooded and masked figures, fairytale characters and even a spooky house. This is not quite a diversion from a psychedelic experience though, as Magical Theatre Visions are described in Leary’s book as including “mythical superhuman figures. Demons, goddesses, celestial warriors, giants, angels, Boddhisattvas, dwarfs, crusaders, elves, devils, saints, and sorcerers, infernal spirits, goblins, knights and emperors.”

Detail from Danish film poster for The Trip.

“Feel Purple. Taste Green.” The marketing for The Trip explicitly sold the film as a cinematic simulation of a biochemical reaction, itself a technological hack for the modern American too impatient for a lifetime of Tibetan meditation. Yet this marketing focus on visual effects reduced the film to the equivalent of an amusement ride, a 60s equivalent of early cinema’s Bioscope shows in fairground tents, rather than the authentic exploration and record of youth culture that was intended.

50 years later, and the use of trippy and “on acid” as idiomatic shortcuts are well established in the English language. It is no surprise then that when a distributor needed to entice film festival audiences to watch the newly-restored, cult Indian film Om Dar-B-Dar, the pull quote used was “the Great Indian LSD trip”.

Corman’s The Trip sought to replicate, albeit at lower budget than Nicholson envisaged, an actual LSD trip… but did Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar inadvertently achieve it for even less money and without it even being a stated goal? No, this is no longer an invitation for mass audiences to experience a drug and be both scandalised and titillated at the exploits of the urban elites. This is a marketing shortcut to make an experimental and unclassifiable film more palatable to watch by administering it as an exotic drug to be experienced. Still, I find the juxtaposition compelling.

Om Dar-D-Bar was made in 1988 but set in a similar time to The Trip with 60s events referenced in a world that is otherwise mythical. A world of absurdities, puns and word-associations that Timothy Leary also understood were necessary to break out of groupthink, to make sense through nonsense. The film was unreleased, effectively banned, for many years with bootleg VHS copies being the only source amongst Indian film fans in the know.

Scene from Om Dar-B-Dar.

The stories of The Trip & Om Dar-B-Dar are those of metamorphosis and revelation within the modern world of brand names, advertising jingles, scientific progress and global popular culture references. Coca Cola, moon landings and James Bond.

They complement each other in more than just the marketing tactics used to promote them. And those tactics are circular: Indian philosophy and culture used by American shamans to sell biochemical joyrides and the shortcut of the trip-taking trope used to sell experimental cinema based on the same Indian philosophical traditions. The Trip is more earnest than its psychedelic marketing, groovy music and with-it nudity suggests. Given the story behind the real locations used for shooting, it is possibly a more authentic record of a very particular West-coast sub-culture than you might think. Om Dar-B-Dar is more fun than its apparent need to be sold as an acid trip suggests: satirical and bawdy whilst drawing on deep-rooted artistic traditions and fairytale logic. An example of Cinema of Prayoga. A film as much about Brahma as about diamond-enclosed frogs.

Are these both films to be administered then? Should you just turn off your mind and let them take you downstream? Perhaps it is only for the Guide to overanalyse. In Leary, Metzner & Alpert’s translation of The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, their meditative framework for being guided through a psychedelic experience, Lama Govinda is quoted as saying things are freed from their “thingness”. I suggest you seek out these films and watch them freed from their “filmness”… freed from the expectations created through their marketing and any prejudices you might have with regards to groovy American cinema and experimental Indian cinema.

You may feel confused and bewildered. Don’t hold on. Let the films carry you along.

Scene from Om Dar-B-Dar.