A long-lost sci-fi film starring Gram Parsons is the subject of a new book. Called Saturation 70, the project also starred Julian Jones-Leitch, son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones, Michelle Phillips, tailor Nudie Cohn and Prince Stanislas Klossowski De Rola, the aristocrat and Stones’ confidant. The music was by Parsons and Roger McGuinn while the film’s special effects were due to be handled by Douglas Trumbull, who’d then just completed Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
You can read more about this astonishing story below, while a Kickstarter page here provides more information about the book.
You can watch a trailer for the book here:
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The project began life in 1969, when writer-director Anthony Foutz was prepping a film written in collaboration with playwright Sam Shepard, called Maxagasm, intended as a vehicle for the Rolling Stones.
Foutz attended a UFO convention in the desert at Giant Rock, near Joshua Tree with a group of friends, including Parsons, Phillips, and 5-year-old Julian Jones-Leitch, to film test footage for Maxagasm; however, the footage gave rise instead to another film: Saturation 70.
According to the Kickstarter page for the book, the plot for Saturation 70 was this.
“A Victorian star child (Julian Jones-Leitch) who falls through a wormhole into smog-ridden, dystopian, present day Los Angeles, is compelled to embark on a hazardous quest to reunite with his mother (Marsia Holzer). He is helped in this endeavor by a Nudie-suit wearing Fairy Godmother (Ida Random), Nudie Cohn himself, and a group of aliens in hazmat suits: the Kosmic Kiddies (Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips, Andee Nathanson, and Stash Klossowski de Rola), who have landed on Earth with a mission: to rid it of poisonous toxins and pollution.”
The film was shot but never completed after financing fell apart. Most of the footage subsequently disappeared. The full story for Saturation 70 – and Maxagasm – has now been documented in a new book, Saturation 70: A Vision Past of the Future Foretold, by Chris Campion, which features never-before-seen imagery, on-set photographs, production stills and script fragments.