Turning the World On, the LSD Way

THE TITLE of the documentary The Sunshine Makers — about two trippy U.S. renegades who produced millions of hits of LSD and helped turn on the United States of Acid — sounds like one of those old citrus labels that growers used to slap on wooden crates. With names like Morning Glory, these crates promised a ray of sun in each juicy bite. In 1970, Florida anointed itself the Sunshine State, but this documentary suggests that way out West, where much of this acid was produced, was where the sun shone the brightest.

For Nick Sand and Tim Scully, lysergic acid diethylamide was where it, really everything, was at. Both were in their 20s when they first experimented with psychedelics, an experience they say in the movie indelibly changed each for good and, some might say, bad. A California native, Scully had been studying at Berkeley before coming under the influence of Owsley Stanley, an intimate of the Grateful Dead and fervent advocate for acid. The more voluble Sand, a Brooklynite, entered the scene through Millbrook — the estate in upstate New York where Timothy Leary and friends partied for years — eventually going west. (In the early 1960s, Leary helped oversee the Harvard Psilocybin Project, researching LSD.)

Whether together or apart, Sand and Scully seemed to be operating on a similar wavelength, and the movie gets a lot of mileage from their sometimes excellent, at times hair-raising, occasionally puckishly funny and altogether wild adventures. At least according to The Sunshine Makers, theirs is the story of two young men who found and (arguably) lost their way in the ’60s, a tale that has resonance for the bigger sociopolitical picture. Both Scully and Sand saw themselves as missionaries of a type, spreading transcendence one hit at a time. Sand says that during one early enlightened moment, a voice told him, “Your job on this planet is to make psychedelics and turn on the world.” He obeyed that voice unconditionally.

Director Cosmo Feilding Mellen fluidly knits together a lot of information, people and places, sights and sounds, including some faded, pretty far-out archival footage of Sand and Scully making acid in labs back in the day. (Editor Nick Packer deserves credit as well.) As Mellen plaits together these individual histories, he incessantly toggles between past and present. Some of the flashbacks to the ‘60s are as familiar as hippie chicks and the corner of Haight and Ashbury, but Sand and Scully are true individuals, with delightful quirks and weird tales that keep the material from genericism. (There are several scenes of Sand practicing yoga in the nude, a lifelong habit that he’s continued into his 70s.)

The Sunshine Makers isn’t exactly an advocacy movie, but Mellen’s sympathies are transparently with his subjects, even if he does check in (humorously and a touch condescendingly) with some of the cops who once chased down Sand and Scully. At times, it all seems a bit too, well, sunny, especially given what happened after Sand and Scully’s production increased and their stacks of cash grew. Still, even if you never shake the feeling that there’s more to this story, there’s no question that hanging out with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on acid has its appeal. NYT