(Credits: Far Out / Tom Wilkes / Anthony Foutz archive)
Sat 10 January 2026 21:30, UK
Amid the creative clash of the film underground and the musical counterculture, country folk star Gram Parsons found himself the leading man in an ill-fated science fiction feature.
For years, such a venture existed as little more than a minor piece of Parsons’ mythos to longtime fans, but after 40-off years of ambiguity, an official exhibition was held at London’s Horse Hospital arts venue, displaying previously unseen production stills, excerpts of the original script, and a showreel of the existing footage set to The Flying Burrito Brothers’ version of ‘Wild Horses’, the country rock outfit Parsons fronted.
A psychedelic reimaging of The Wizard of Oz, Saturation 70 tells the far-out tale of a lost star child who falls through a wormhole to contemporary Los Angeles and seeks to find his way back home, assisted by four alien entities, the Kosmic Kiddies, who wear suits to protect from the noxious pollution of the city. The film’s title allegedly derives from the level at which carbon monoxide turns fatal when in the human bloodstream.
Saturation 70 was, in fact, a reshaping of a prior project for The Rolling Stones. Conceived by Tony Foutz, a band associate who had first assistant directing experience with the likes of Orson Welles and Marco Ferrei, the initially named Maxgasm project was intended to be an experimental vehicle starring the Stones as well as boasting an original soundtrack from the band. During preparation, the word of a ‘Spaceship Convention’ at California’s Giant Rock piqued Foutz’s interest, corralling a crew to document the gathering of alien believers and purported UFO abductees to test Maxgasm’s intended special effects.
Foutz assembled quite the gang. Alongside Parsons was The Mamas and the Papas’ Michelle Phillips, minor Western star Ted Markland, the five-year-old son of Brian Jones, Julian, along with his mother and Parsons’ girlfriend Linda Lawrence, and effects gurus Douglas Trumbull and Bruce Logan, not long after their work on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey opus. It was here that the ramshackle cast was established, the child Jones playing the lost star being, with Parsons and Phillips donning the Kosmic Kiddies suits.
Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips, Ted Markland and photographer Andee Nathanson at the Giant Rock Space Convention, 1969. (Credits: Far Out / Tom Wi…
Such a barely-legit operation managed to organise some pretty exceptional, if confusing, sequences. Shot guerrilla style without any permits, the call sheets included gun battles between Viet Cong soldiers and US GIs in a Gelson’s supermarket, a mass cowboy picnic featuring Ukrainian rhinestone tailor Nudie Cohn, and a fleet of Ford Edsel cars parading in a flying-V formation through San Gabriel Valley’s City of Industry. Around such set-pieces were the Kosmic Kiddies’ wander through LA’s streets in their anti-pollution masks and suits.
The majority of Saturation 70’s promotional photography was in the can by April 1970, with special effects underway at Trumbull’s Canoga Park studio, including state of the art computer visuals depicting data clouds in the sky, a concept Trumbull would revisit for Blade Runner’s commercial airships, skyscraper television screens, and, for whatever reason, dinosaurs populating the Inglewood Oil Field.
Parsons was a big fan of the project, enthusiastically convincing his fellow Burrito Brothers members to wear the decontamination suits for that year’s Burrito Deluxe, and The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn was roped in to co-write a suitably trippy score with a Moog synthesiser.
Yet, funding collapsed, and all the material, bar its five-minute show reel, was lost. Saturation 70 would exist as a rumoured document of a time when the creative underground was flooded with healthy naivety, anything goes creativity, and when LSD was at its strongest. In the footnotes of the rock and pop story, Parsons’ leading sci-fi fancy stands as “an amalgam of weird 1970s, late-1960s experimental film production,” Trumbull told The Guardian in 2014.
“I don’t think any of us knew what we were doing.”
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