Based on Todd Brendan Fahey’s brilliant “acid novel,” WISDOM’S MAW is a behind the scenes, non-stop, action-packed thriller of the bizarre intersection of the psychedelic world of the Sixties and Intelligence Agents clandestinely attempting to create a human superman via the use of LSD. -Ron Whitehead
WISDOM’S MAW: The Movie They Don’t Want You to See Review by Ron Whitehead Trust your government! Fear your friends! Forget comparisons to THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE or O LUCKY MAN or JFK or CITIZENFOUR or any other film made: What if Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, the Hells Angels, and President John F. Kennedy were somehow part of the CIA’s MK-Ultra LSD conspiracy to subvert free-thinking youth of America into becoming Yes People for the U.S. Government? WISDOM’S MAW
is the film the government doesn’t want you to watch. If there ever was a time for this shockingly graphic thriller, it is Now. Post World War II America birthed conformity, and rebellion. The Beat Generation consisted of “angelheaded hipsters” Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and others who did everything possible to throw off “the anxiety of influence” and “Make it New!” They rebelled against conformity against everything they were force fed to believe was true. They set out to discover what truth meant for them. They said NO to the system. They went their own way. And the government noticed. The Beat Generation inspired a revolution among young people that rippled across America. In an age of conformity this freedom movement was certainly not welcomed by Radical Right Wing Joseph McCarthyism, by the John Birch Society, by the growing KKK, by the corrupt control of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and certainly not by the ever-expanding Central Intelligence Agency. “The most diabolical experiments imaginable in a democratic society.” – Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) on the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra Based on Todd Brendan Fahey’s brilliant “acid novel,” WISDOM’S MAW is a behind the scenes, non-stop, action-packed thriller of the bizarre intersection of the psychedelic world of the Sixties and Intelligence Agents clandestinely attempting to create a human superman via the use of LSD. In WISDOM’S MAW, Generals, leaders of the military, every CIA field agent, chemist, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, magazine and newspaper publishers, socialites and celebrities, even President John F. Kennedy and others gobble the forbidden fruit. True-to-life former OSS officer “Captain” Al Hubbard runs the show, spreading LSD through university test volunteers and influential psychiatrists via Hollywood’s interest in the strange, new potion.
In October 1955 poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem “Howl” at the Gallery Six reading on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. The poem drew a line in the sand. Ginsberg and his fellow San Francisco Renaissance rebels were no longer going to abide by the commonly accepted rules and regulations enforced by American culture. Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD birthed a new rucksack generation of wandering young people, folks who refused the status quo, folks who were seeking their own truths, folks who went their own way. Jack Kerouac and The Beat Generation opened the door to a new freer way of being. Ken Kesey and The Hippie Generation, with the help of LSD, completely altered the doors of perception. By screenplay’s end, “ol’ Jack”–a husk of his former self–takes one final flight to visit a dwindling circle of friends in an extended scene that puts a very different spin on the nervous breakdown which was his final novel, BIG SUR. World-renowned author Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) has LSD injected into his veins as he dies at the same moment President Kennedy is assassinated. WISDOM’S MAW reveals the sinister extremes to which the government is willing to go in order to suppress and control the masses. WISDOM’S MAW shows how one man, The Real Captain America, survives this vile government plot and finds his way through some of the darkest days in the history of the USA to birth a new generation. 25 years in the making, WISDOM’S MAW (Far Gone Books, 1995) was rediscovered by filmmaker-producer George Elias Stephanopoulos, with whom author Fahey attended University of London-Union College in 1985. Stay Tuned! WISDOM’S MAW will be Coming Soon to a Theater Near You. ***
Ron Whitehead, Kentucky Outlaw Poet “I have long admired Ron Whitehead. He is crazy as nine loons, and his poetry is a dazzling mix of folk wisdom and pure mathematics.” Hunter S. Thompson “If life is a dream, as some suggest, sometimes beautiful sometimes desperate, then Hunter S. Thompson’s work is the terrible saga of the ending of time for The American Dream. With its action set at the heart of darkness of American materialist culture, with war as perpetual background, playing on the television, Hunter S. Thompson, like the prophets of old, shows how we, through greed and power lust, have already gone over the edge. As Jack Kerouac, through his brilliant oeuvre, breathed hope into international youth culture, Thompson shows how the ruling power elite is not about to share what it controls with idealists yearning for a world of peace, love and understanding.” (from Ron Whitehead’s induction of Hunter S. Thompson into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNy2BweCeiE