‘Saturation 70’: The lost Gram Parsons movie that updated ‘Alice in Wonderland’ for the hippies
There are a lot of things that likely come to mind when you think of Gram Parsons. You probably think of his earnest, honest songwriting, the two albums he made with the Flying Burrito Brothers, and his tragic passing of a drug overdose at 26. Depending on how much you listen to Parsons, other things might come to mind: sadness, humility, and love; however, two words that likely don’t appear as you consider his work are “science” and “fiction”.
An intergalactic presence haunts music. If you ever need more proof that good songs can be out of this world, look at the strange alien connection that links some of the Earth’s greatest musical minds. The likes of John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Lemmy, Jimi Hendrix, and Sun Ra were all convinced that at some point in their life, they were in contact with aliens.
“You got to be ready when you play with this band…when the harmonies movie in a direction that they seemingly are not supposed to move in and still fit, you got another message from another realm from somebody else,” said Sun Ra when talking about playing out of tune to his trumpeter, Ahmed Abdullah, “Superior Beings would definitely speak in other harmonic ways because they’re talking to something different […] You have to have chord against chord, melody against melody, and rhythm against rhythm. When you have that, you’re experiencing something else.”
However, Parsons’ link with science fiction is slightly different from real-world communication with otherworldly beings. Between the years of 1969 and 1970, the musician made his acting debut when he starred in the mind-boggling unreleased science fiction epic Saturation 70. If you heard of some modern musicians acting in a science fiction flick, you might consider it normal, or at least not so left field to be abnormal, but when this film was being made, science fiction wasn’t the pop culture milestone that we see it as today. Star Wars was a flicker in George Lucas’ eye, and the genre was considered an underdog in cinema.
The filming took place at Giant Rock, which isn’t far from Joshua Tree in the Mojave desert. The concept for the film was incredibly ahead of its time, as they intended to remake Alice in Wonderland but with a futuristic twist. The antagonist, a Victorian child played by Donovan Leitch (the son of Rolling Stones Brian Jones, only five years old at the time), fell through a wormhole and was transported to a dystopian future.
Leitch’s acting career started and stopped at Saturation 70, and his memories of working on the film feel like they’re a world away. “I remember meeting Tony [Foutz] out in Giant Rock and him asking me to be in the film,” he recalled, “I then said to my mom, ‘He asked me to be in the film, can I?’ They were in a black Winnebago at the flying saucer convention. I was running around and the film was made through a child’s eyes. I was that child.”
The movie never saw the light of day and was merely a rumour until a few years ago when images from the days on set were released. It’s unlikely that the movie will ever be released or that the futuristic, hippie reimagining of Alice in Wonderland will ever be discovered, but it’s funny to know it exists somewhere.
