Gus, Don’t Drink The “Kool-Aid”!
The other day, director Gus Van Sant tweeted: “My next film is Dustin Lance Black’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.’ It’s going to be really funny.” (Black won an Oscar for writing “Milk.”) But this Twitter post was taken down after it appeared. As much as I loved “Milk,” I’m hoping that van Sant won’t make the Wolfe. The director has just done the 1970s; why do another period counter-culture movie right away? Of course, you could argue that most of Gus’s movies are counter-cultural in some way, so why not do “Electric Kool-Aid”? Well, unless Black has tossed out most of Wolfe’s book, here’s why: there’s almost no story there. It’s all dated posturing. We’ll see.
