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. (Udiscovermusic)
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.
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.
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.
SATURATION 70: a deluxe art book about a lost sci-fi film
The untold story of a lost, 1970 sci-fi epic starring Gram Parsons & Michelle Phillips, shot in Joshua Tree and Los Angeles.
Before STAR WARS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, and BLADE RUNNER... there was SATURATION 70.
A groundbreaking, lost 1970 science fiction film about environmental collapse, from visionary filmmaker Anthony Foutz and legendary, special effects maestro, Douglas Trumbull, Saturation 70 starred country rock icon Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, Julian Jones-Leitch (the then-5-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones), Stash Klossowski de Rola, and rodeo tailor Nudie Cohn.
Filmed at a 1969 UFO convention near Joshua Tree and in Los Angeles, it has been described as a ‘counterculture Wizard of Oz’. The film was to feature revolutionary computer-generated effects produced at Trumbull's Studio City workshop.
