Corman Took Lsd To Research Nicholson's The Trip

Cult movie director Roger Corman took hallucinogenic drug LSD for the first time in a bid to understand Jack Nicholson's storyline in THE TRIP.

The movie star wrote the 1967 counterculture B-movie about a man who takes an LSD trip after divorcing his wife and Corman decided he had to get high in order to properly research the project.

He says, "As a conscientious director you do research on what you're going to do and I thought, 'I can't very well do a picture about LSD without trying it.

"I was the squarest guy in a very fast crowd, so when everybody heard that I was gonna take LSD - I wanted to take it in Big Sur (California) because I'd read you take it in a beautiful place it ended up there was a caravan of cars going up to Big Sur.

"(There was) the equivalent of a production board, a production schedule as to who was going to be taking LSD and who was going to be watching them.

"The net result when I took it was I realised it was so overwhelming that you could not reproduce it."

Corman eventually made the druggie movie with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern, who he insists was the only cast member not on drugs at the time.

He recalls, "Bruce played the guru and he was the only one who wasn't on drugs... He told me he used to get letters from people, asking him what his opinion was about different drugs."