It is not without possibility that John C. Lilly was so strange, complex, and plainly fascinating a figure that it took two of the most adventurous working filmmakers (and one of our premiere actors) to capture him. Shortly after the much-heralded Invention, Courtney Stephens debuted John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, an archival-heavy documentary co-directed with Michael Almereyda, who here adds another token to his rich portrayal of iconoclasts (Sam Shepard, William Eggleston, Blade Runner scribe Hampton Fancher). Chloë Sevigny offers narration and persuasively argues that some of Lilly’s more out-there theories—such as the supernatural intelligence of dolphins—weren’t so far-fetched. Ahead of the film’s March 27 release from Oscilloscope, we’re pleased to debut its trailer.
As Leonardo Goi said in his review out of last year’s Rotterdam premiere, “Written by Almereyda and Stephens, with voiceover from Chloë Sevigny, Earth Coincidence paints Lilly as a 20th-century polymath, a one-of-a-kind maverick hellbent on ‘getting his hands on the steering wheel of consciousness.’ Yet a hagiography this is not. Fascinated as it may be with its subject––a man bestowed with a ‘panoramic thinking’ that led him to operate at the interstice between science and sci-fi––Earth Coincidence is as keen to praise Lilly for his contributions to things like the Save the Whales movement as it is to expose some of his most barbaric theories, not least that a steady diet of LSD would prove as eye-opening to his aquatic tenants as it did to him. (Whether or not that’s true we’ll never know, though it’s safe to say the acid injections Lilly routinely administered to his dolphins didn’t make their captivity any smoother.) Where others might have played the most salacious aspects of Lilly’s saga and astonishing drug intake for shock value, Almereyda and Stephens are after something different––namely, the processes through which ideas can be absorbed into the mainstream and meaningfully shape it.”
See the preview below:
