Fox Searchlight drinks Gus Van Sant's Kool-Aid

Director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black must have made a good team on the upcoming political biopic Milk, because the two have already made a deal with Fox Searchlight to reunite.

Black will adapt Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a tale of a drug-induced cross-country road trip inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey and his band of misfits called the Merry Pranksters. Just as Van Sant seems to have given Sean Penn a powerhouse and perhaps Oscar-worthy role in Milk (as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician elected to major public office), the role of Kesey seems to be a catch for whomever lands the part.

From Wolfe's website: "Kesey was more than promising. He was a Golden Boy of the West—a scholar, actor, star athlete, and one of the outstanding novelists of his generation—when he burst forth as an experimenter with powerful new hallucinogenic drugs, leader of the Merry Pranksters, and, finally, fugitive from the FBI, the California police, and the Mexican Federales." Wolfe was a journalist at the time, documenting the strange happenings while refusing LSD from Kesey and his pals.

Milk—starring Penn, James Franco, Josh Brolin and Emile Hirsch—hits theaters in select cities Nov. 26. No word as of yet on a production date for Electric Kool-Aid. 

Related links:
YouTube: Milk trailer
News: Gus Van Sant begins production on Milk
Reviews: Paranoid Park

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