Getting the go-ahead from AIP co-founder James H. Nicholson to make his drug odyssey, Corman hired frequent collaborator Charles B. Griffith (The Little Shop of Horrors [1960]) to write a script. Not satisfied with the 36-year-old writer's work, Corman turned to 29-year-old actor Jack Nicholson who, in addition to the occasional starring role, had written a handful of scripts, including Monte Hellman's Ride in the Whirlwind (1965). Nicholson shared Corman's conception for the LSD-fueled drama, and set about writing the script.

"Roger and I had taken acid and we were both serious on the subject," Nicholson later recalled, "I told him I didn't want to write a flat-out exploitation film. He had higher aspirations this time... I had done the Westerns but I had pretty much given up as an actor. I really didn't have much else going then, kind of a journeyman troubleshooter. He knew he couldn't get a writer as good as me through regular ways. I was happy to write it and make a more demanding picture out of it."

AIP co-founder Samuel Z. Arkoff recalled, "The first draft of Jack's script turned out to be immense -- about three inches thick. He had crammed something about nearly every social and political concern of the sixties into it. He also had included so many special effects that it would have challenged the creative talents and the budgets of George Lucas."

The epic script was no fault of Nicholson's. Corman had advised him to pull out all the stops and not worry about special effects and budgetary concerns. They knew in advance that some scenes would be impossible to shoot, but Corman wanted the screenplay to exist in a pure form before they began to cut corners.

According to Peter Collier's book The Fondas: A Hollywood Dynasty, "When he read the script, Peter was so moved he began to cry, and he said to his wife, 'I don't believe it. I don't believe that I'm really going to have a chance, that I get to be in this movie. This is going to be the greatest film ever made in America.' He told [Jack] Nicholson the script was brilliant; it reminded him of something Fellini might have done."

The Trip was shot on a fifteen-day shooting schedule, with a couple of days of pick-ups shoehorned into the post-production schedule. "Today there are people coming out of film school who don't believe that movies can be shot in fifteen days," Corman said, "Back then, fifteen days for us meant a major movie."

Not a director known for dynamic camerawork, Corman clearly intended The Trip to be a visual tour-de-force, and not only in the hallucination scenes. Early in the film are two ambitious shots, more characteristic of a Brian De Palma film of the early 1970s. In one, the camera pans a full 360 degrees as it follows a joint being handed around a circle of people. A few moments later is a 360-degree pan combined with a dolly shot, as Paul walks around the circular balcony of the hippie house.

Corman faced a hurdle when it came time to shoot the two symbolic black horses. There were not enough black horses in the AIP stable. "It just didn't seem right that this dark rider from the paranoid subconscious should be riding a bay," production assistant Sharon Compton recalled, "but a bay was what we had." According to Corman biographer Beverly Gray, it became Compton's duty to paint the brown horse black. Compton adds, "These artistic details seemed important at the time, but I realize now that it was [a] naive and unnecessary gesture. What can I say, our hearts were young and gay, and we were makers of film."

To achieve some of the film's more abstract light and color effects, Corman contacted Peter Gardiner of Charlatan Productions, "who had been responsible for many of the most noteworthy light shows to appear on TV in Los Angeles" (American Cinematographer). For a flat rate of $10,000, Gardiner agreed to provide the psychedelic color effects Corman wanted. He turned to Bob Beck's Background and Light Shows, which had become famous for the splashy color effects at some of the West Coast's more prominent rock venues.

The most memorable effects are those created by "liquid projectors," in which liquid dyes are compressed between two watch-crystal dishes, and light is shined through the crystals as they are manipulated (and the color blotches morph on-screen). Assistant cameraman Allen Daviau (later a d.p., whose credits include Empire of the Sun [1987]) recalled that "Bob used liquid light projectors. He used strobe lights. He used all kinds of devices for changing color gels in the middle of a shot." Beck also modified strobe lights so that their pulses would properly synchronize with the frame rate of the movie cameras.

The Bead Game sequence was shot in an actual L.A. club, with minor modification by the film crew. Assistant director Paul Rapp remembered shooting the Bead Game sequence, "I bought hundreds of boxes of amyl nitrate, which was then sold over the counter. I was working with dozens of extras in the scene and I needed to get their energy up to a pitch. They thought I was filming when I was only rehearsing. I wouldn't run any film through the camera and waste it on rehearsals. When I was ready to shoot, I got everybody higher and higher and brought out the poppers."

In the final shot of the film, Paul walks out onto his balcony, bathes himself in the sunlight, and (after an optical zoom) a black crack shatters the image, radiating from his head. This was another effort by AIP to give LSD use a negative spin. In his autobiography, AIP co-founder Samuel Z. Arkoff recalls, "Jim (with my approval) made the decision to put in a series of fast cuts at the end of the film, and then optically insert cracked glass over Peter's face, feeling it would leave the impression that Peter's life was still confused and shattered, and that the LSD trip didn't solve his personal problems. When Roger heard about the changes, he was not happy, feeling that the ending should leave open the question of whether Fonda had a good 'trip' or a bad one." It is said that Corman's resentment over the toning-down of The Trip was a central reason for his departure from AIP.

by Bret Wood