The Academy Award-winning screenwriter’s constant clashes with Russell about the film’s rapid-fire pace during early rehearsals ultimately led to his departure from the project - he apparently refused to see the finished product, which hit cinemas just a year before his death in 1981. Warner BrosĬhayefsky would soon wish they hadn’t. Considering the Brit had made his name combining highbrow subject matter with surreal mind-bending visuals ( Women in Love, The Devils, and The Who's Tommy, to name a few), you wonder why it took so long for Warner Bros. in neuroscience would struggle to keep up with.Ģ6 directors were offered the chance to bring this verbose prose - the majority of which appears to be uttered by Charles Haid’s hilariously ever-exasperated researcher Mason - from the page to the screen before Russell was given the gig. As a result, Altered States is densely packed with the kind of psychoanalytic jargon even viewers with a Ph.D. Lilly - and his pioneering sensory tank deprivation work, in particular. Hyde as planned, though, Chayefsky spent a considerable amount of time researching the findings of countercultural brain doctor John C. Instead of rewriting the umpteenth version of Dr. Paddy Chayefsky reportedly wrote the novel it adapts following a brainstorming session with cartoonist Herb Gardner and dancer Bob Fosse in a Russian tea room. Curious about the powers of ayahuasca but don’t fancy trekking into the foothills of the Peruvian Amazon, vomiting for hours on end, and reliving every single painful memory stored in the depths of your unconscious? The hallucinatory delights of Ken Russell’s sci-fi-horror Altered States (released 40 years ago on December 25, 1980) may well be the next best thing.Įven the 1980 cult classic’s origin story sounds like the byproduct of a fever dream.
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