The LSD decade

If you partied with Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love in the 1960s, documentary filmmaker William A. Kirkley would like to talk to you.

A colorful piece of Laguna Beach’s history — involving drugs, hippies and radical underground culture in the 1960s — is the subject of a documentary Kirkley is working on.

Kirkley was the featured director at the Newport Beach Film Festival’s Directors Dinner and gave the diners a 10-minute preview of his new film, “Orange Sunshine,” which is still about a year away from being completed.

The documentary gets its name from the LSD manufactured in Laguna Beach in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The film focuses on the notorious Brotherhood of Eternal Love, known as the “hippie mafia,” which is often called one of the world’s largest LSD manufacturers in that period.

At the center of the group is the famous and controversial psychologist and psychedelic philosopher Timothy Leary.

Kirkley, a Newport Beach native, said the subject is compelling for him because it’s such a notorious time period in Orange County, yet has been so underexposed.

“You have these mythic qualities. It’s almost like an urban legend,” Kirkley said.

The reception Kirkley has received in Laguna Beach as he roots around for evidence has been mixed.

Kirkley said there are many who are glad to have him investigating and prodding, hoping he will get the story right. On the other hand, he said, some folks would just rather forget that the LSD manufacturers and dealers were once cozily situated in Laguna Canyon.

“I’ve had a little bit of opposition from some people who don’t want to talk about the Brotherhood. Maybe it’s a little too close to home or they had negative experiences. But overall, everyone’s been as helpful as they can be.

“It was a big deal, but you kind of move on. A conservative element — which Orange County definitely has — doesn’t want to look at that,” Kirkley said.

Kirkley has spent hours poring over microfilm in the Laguna Beach Public Library and has expended extensive efforts trying to get original footage and photos of Laguna Beach from that era instead of using generic “hippie” footage.

Kirkley said he hopes he’ll be able to recover more from home movies or photos of Laguna at the time.

“Ideally, I’m not using stock footage of hippies in Berkeley,” he said.

Kirkley faces logistical problems in not only getting footage but also of getting reliable sources for interviews.

Nick Schou, an investigative journalist for the OC Weekly who is doing research for a book on the Brotherhood, said many people who were part of the Brotherhood aren’t willing to step forward and speak about it.

He also said many of those who do want to talk about it weren’t really involved at all.

“There were a lot of people that were involved that quite frankly disappeared — sometimes on purpose,” Schou said. “One guy told me ‘If you remember it, you weren’t there.’ ”

Kirkley has traveled to Mexico, Hawaii and Arizona to conduct interviews for the piece and says there are still about a year’s worth of interviews to complete.

The original idea for the documentary was pitched to Kirkley by his father-in-law. Kirkley’s wife, Emmy, was raised in Laguna Beach, and her father suggested the subject when the couple returned to Southern California after five years in New York.

It wasn’t until he read Schou’s in-depth story about Leary and the Brotherhood, which appeared in the OC Weekly in July 2005, that Kirkley’s interest was really piqued.

While Schou isn’t involved with the film, he and Kirkley are sharing information and research for their individual projects. “I just think it’s probably the strangest thing to happen in Orange County and that most people don’t really know anything about it,” Schou said.

The drug-dealing activities of the Brotherhood in the 1960s and ‘70s had lasting effects on Laguna Beach, Schou said.

The 1968 arrest of Leary in Laguna Beach on a marijuana charge gave Neil Purcell, the arresting officer, enough notoriety to be named a “Super Cop” and to serve as Laguna Beach’s chief of police from 1981 until 1997.

Purcell has written his own, unpublished account of his experiences with Leary.

Some of the left-leaning hippie culture that still reverberates in Laguna Beach stems from the Brotherhood and its influence, Kirkley says. Schou suggested some businesses influenced by the period still dot the town.

Schou maintains that many who founded the Sawdust Art Festival in Laguna Canyon — which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year — weren’t necessarily Brotherhood members but ran in the same crowd.

“The canyon still has a little bit of that going on. You see people that are virtually unchanged from the 1960s,” Schou said. The filmmaker said he hopes the documentary will reconnect Laguna Beach with its countercultural roots from that era.

“It’s going to remind people of what Laguna was not that long ago,” Kirkley said.

His first documentary was a five-year project focusing on beat writer and filmmaker Taylor Mead. “Excavating Taylor Mead” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film, shot on video while Kirkley worked as a bartender in New York City, was well-received by many major film critics.

Kirkley never attended film school, instead getting his start by shooting music videos for bands in the Los Angeles area.

The director hopes to get his film released in local theaters after it’s finished.

“With filmmaking, it’s all about storytelling and just hoping you open someone’s eyes for a couple hours, put them in somebody else’s shoes,” he said.

Kirkley can be contacted at [email protected].