Before debuting June 9th on Showtime, Mark Kidel‘s Becoming Cary Grant will screen at the Cannes Film Festival. The title suggests a look at how the legendary film star found his professional footing or, you know, how he developed his on-screen persona. But the trailer indicates it’ll largely be about how Grant grew past his personal demons, and particularly how his LSD trips of the late ’50s and early ’60s changed his life entirely. 

In short, it appears to be a documentary version of “Cary In The Sky With Diamonds“, the July 2010 Vanity Fair piece by Carl Beauchamp and Judy Balaban that covered the same turf.

I am definitely catching this in Cannes. Because I know all about those lysergic acid realms.

From “Nirvana Flow-Through“, posted a year ago: “I would always describe what LSD did to my brain as a kind of blissful washover that freed me from everything I’d learned in school and thereby delivered radiant truths. The usual mental associations and thought patterns were rescrambled by my senses turning all tingly and Technicolored — an elevator-in-the-brain-hotel sensation leading to heightened sensitivity. Which led to the opening of Dr. Huxley‘s doors of perception and the gates of prana.”

Selected responses to “Tripping in Hollywood,” posted on 7.2.10:

“No, Mother, I have not been drinking. No, no…these two men, they put a tab of LSD on my tongue. No, they didn’t give me a glowstick.”

“That’s funny, that man’s seein’ dragons where there ain’t no dragons.”

“If you fellows can’t whip the Baba Ram Dass’s of this world without asking girls like her to turn on with them and probably never come back, perhaps you should learn to lose a few cold wars!”

“Now you listen to me, I’m an advertising man, not a red herring…. and I can hear colors.”