Their collaboration on the forthcoming Milk is already hotly tipped to be one of the major contenders for Oscar next February, and so it comes as no great surprise that director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black - he of that massive credit on the film's trailer - are set to team up again.
They’re set to work together on The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 novel, after Fox Searchlight today picked up the project, which has been shopped around Hollywood for around a year.
That was when Black and Van Sant were recruited onto the project by producer Richard Gladstein, who will oversee the project through his Film Colony company.
The Wolfe novel tells the story of Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and a group of friends who drove across the States in a Dayglo-painted school bus (which they called Furthur), while experimenting and expanding their minds with LSD and other psychedelic drugs. The group called themselves The Merry Pranksters.
No word on casting yet, but this would seem to be right up Van Sant’s street, given that he already has road movies and drug movies on his CV and, with Drugstore Cowboy, a movie that combines the genres.
We’ll keep a close eye on this one.