The untold story of a lost classic: What ever happened to Gram Parsons’ sci-fi film Saturation 70?

In the late 1960s, shortly after leaving The Byrds and becoming friends with The Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons signed on to star in a science fiction film. Saturation 70.

The film was shot in Joshua Tree and Los Angeles by Anthony Foutz, who worked with the likes of Orson Welles and Richard Lyford and was the son of a very early Walt Disney executive.

But Saturation 70It also features the work of Douglas Trumbull, the special effects pioneer behind it 2001: A Space Odyssey And Blade Runnerwas never completed and the images subsequently disappeared.

But a new book tells the wild story of a possibly lost classic.

Chris Campion, who rediscovered the film while working on a book about The Mamas & The Papas, compiles Saturation 70: A vision from the past of the predicted futurewhich will raise money via Kickstarter for the project, which will be released via Wolf+Salmon next spring.

Foutz spoke to Deadline about the film, how he got involved with Parsons and the Stones, why the film fell apart and what happened to the footage.

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Foutz was living in Italy in the 1960s, after working briefly with Welles and more extensively with Marco Ferreri, when he met Sam Shepard. During this time he also became friends with Anita Pallenberg, who started dating Keith Richards. Foutz and Shepard set to work on it Maximuma science fiction western starring Richards, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones.

Maximum, considered one of the most popular unproduced screenplays of the late 1960s and early 1970s, was written in Redlands, Richards’ home in West Sussex, after Foutz met Parsons at Jagger’s flat in London. Foutz’s agent, Michael Gruskoff, who worked at Creative Management Associates (where he also represented artists such as Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Robert Redford and Steve McQueen), recommended that he and Trumbull go to Giant Rock near Joshua Tree, where there a big UFO in the conference. Funded with $5,000 from Universal Studios, which was on board MaximumFoutz sent a group into the desert to take test shots with various cameras.

Maximum fell apart, Foutz said, because Universal wanted all the Stones’ music rights, “which wasn’t going to happen.” But the trip, in turn, inspired another story: Saturation 70.

“It was a moment of spontaneous combustion,” Foutz told Deadline. “I always said that Maximum was the mother of Saturation 70.”

Foutz, who lived with Parsons in the Chateau Marmont, returned to LA and spent the next three weeks writing Saturation 70.

The film that has been described as counterculture The Wizard of Oz and a psychedelic Alice in Wonderlandfollows a Victorian star child, played by Julian Jones-Leich, the son of Brian Jones, who falls through a wormhole into smog-ridden, dystopian present-day Los Angeles and must embark on a perilous quest to reunite with his mother.

He is assisted in this quest by a Nudie suit wearing “The Fairy Godmother”, played by Ida Random, who later became an Oscar-nominated production designer for films such as “Fairy Godmother”. Rain man And The Great Cold; Nudie Cohn, who designed the infamous Parsons suit on the Flying Burrito Brothers cover The gilded palace of sin; and a group of aliens in protective suits known as the “Cosmic Kiddies” who have landed on Earth to rid it of toxic toxins and pollution. The Kosmic Kiddies were played by Parsons; Michelle Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas; photographer Andee Nathanson; and Stash Klossowski de Rola, a close confidant of the Stones.

“It was a movie about all the world’s problems,” Foutz said.

The film featured effects designed by Trumbull using an early computer, including sequences of black-and-white images not previously seen on screen, as well as news reports on the latest environmental and social issues. “That was the saturation we were talking about,” Foutz said.

It’s a message that was incredibly forward-thinking.

“We talked about the environment, guns and privacy, all these social issues that are the problems today,” he said. “That was the motivation for me to do it [book] because it’s not just about nostalgia and the good old days.”

The film, with a budget of just under $1 million, would be produced by Dimension V, a new film from CMA’s Perry Leff. However, the company was backed by investment funds and soon failed due to financial problems.

When the plug was suddenly pulled, Foutz said, he felt as if he “must have been Attila the Hun in my last incarnation.”

“You never have a movie until you express the answer,” he added.

The film’s footage was later lost and all that remains is a short showcase reel of scenes shot for the film and a promo reel, mostly shot at Trumbull’s studio Trumbull Film Effects. The book includes photographs from it, as well as footage shot by A&M art director Tom Wilkes during the filming of the 1969 Space Convention at Giant Rock, black-and-white production photos; and some Polaroids that cinematographer Bruce Logan took on set and later worked on Star Wars: A New Hope And Throne.

“Perry took over everything. He paid for it, he owned it,” Foutz said. “I actually forgot about it Saturation 70 to Chris [Campion] I found out. He found Perry Leff and asked him what happened to all this footage, and Perry had just moved from Beverly Hills to Bel-Air a year or two before Chris interviewed him, and when he moved, they threw it all away.

Campion told Deadline he believes there may be more footage in Trumbull’s archive and hopes to find it if it still exists.

At the time, Foutz was relatively optimistic towards the end of the film Saturation 70 Instead, he embarked on an odyssey around the world to make a film inspired by a drag racer in Long Beach.

“There was so much more going on in terms of music and everything else, there were other things we were thinking about,” he said. “I moved on; You can’t sit there at the stop sign.”