![]() ![]() Locally, in March, Portland Center Stage director Aaron Posner staged a critically and commercially successful adaptation of Kesey's second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. The first biography of Kesey, by Robert Faggen, is scheduled to be published soon by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Portland director Gus Van Sant is in talks to helm a movie adaptation. 19, Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was reissued to celebrate its 40th anniversary, the first new edition of the book to appear in a decade. It's really amazing how many people have an illusion that they own a piece of it."įor a writer who's been dead since 2001, Ken Kesey's name still carries a hefty shelf life. "It's a really crazy intellectual property. "If it ever got made, the making of it would be almost as interesting as the story itself," says Los Angeles-based producer Stephen Fromkin, who briefly optioned the script from Francis in 2005. "And because the other people, namely the defendants, were claiming an interest in the copyright, that made it impossible to go forward."Īmong the producers who've shown interest in making a movie of Last Go Round, the project has acquired mythic status. "We did have people interested in doing a screenplay," Faye Kesey said in a deposition on May 8. On this point at least, there's agreement. I don't think anyone would fight over just the right to put something on a shelf and say, 'It's ours.'" "And if that interest didn't exist, or at least if both sides didn't think it existed, I don't think we'd be here. area that have some interest in this outcome," he says. And Francis' attorney, Kratville, tells WW that several Hollywood producers are still awaiting the outcome of the case before buying the movie rights. Since 2000, at least three groups of producers-one from Los Angeles, another from Seattle, and Portland's own Wieden & Kennedy ad agency-have toyed with optioning the story. But he says its allure would attract big-name actors because of Kesey's notoriety. Done deal."įor all the contentions, the case boils down to this: Faye Kesey is suing Francis and Hagen for the rights to a work of art that hasn't been made yet, a movie that one Hollywood producer estimates could be filmed on a modest budget of $10 million to $12 million. Michele Francis' lawyer, Michael Kratville, struck back: "We got the screenplay, he got paid for it. "The fact of the matter is that never acquired the rights to the screenplay," Kesey family attorney David Aronoff said as Faye Kesey sat quietly behind him. It was the latest development in a case that has already produced dozens of filings and hundreds of pages of depositions weighing more than 10 pounds. Acosta questioned attorneys for both sides to clarify their positions before he made a ruling or sent the case on to a jury trial. 25, in a Portland courtroom far from both Pendleton and Kesey's bucolic Pleasant Hill farm, U.S. They've been sued by Kesey's 71-year-old widow, Faye, and her four adult children for rights to the screenplay. Nearly 25 years after their visit-and seven years after Kesey's death-Hagen and McMindes (who changed her name sometime after 1992 to Michele Francis and who modeled, in and out of private-investigator garb, for Playboy in 19) are locked in a federal court battle in Portland. Then things got messier than a loose bronco. And nine months later, they had a Kesey script. They called the project Last Go Round.īy January 1984, McMindes and Hagen had what they thought was a deal with Kesey. A tale long familiar to Pendleton natives, it blended racial enlightenment far ahead of its time, Oregon lore and rodeo hijinks. Lee Spain competed together during the 1911 Round-Up. ![]() They came to him with the tall-but-true tale of how a Nez Percé Indian named Jackson Sundown, a popular black cowboy named George Fletcher (known in 1911 by a derogatory nickname), and a white Tennessee bronco-buster named Jonathan E. He was an Oregon literary legend and countercultural icon who knew how to spin a yarn. Kesey was a natural to tell the Round-Up story. And in the 1960s, he was one of Kesey's Merry Pranksters as well as a co-pilot on the LSD-fueled cross-country odyssey that Tom Wolfe chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Hagen had been Kesey's fraternity brother at the University of Oregon. All they needed was a screenwriter, and Hagen knew just the guy-Kesey. ![]()
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