Years before Star Wars, a maverick director led a crew into the desert to film a psychedelic science fiction epic – starring the country singer and the five-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. The film was lost and the story went into rock legend, but now unseen photographs will go on show to tell the bizarre story

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Saturation 70: the Gram Parsons UFO film that never flew

Years before Star Wars, a maverick director led a crew into the desert to film a psychedelic science fiction epic – starring the country singer and the five-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones. The film was lost and the story went into rock legend, but now unseen photographs will go on show to tell the bizarre story

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• Chris Campion
• theguardian.com, Friday 5 September 2014 14.59 BST
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Desert fun: (left to right) Michelle Phillips, Tony Foutz, Gram Parsons, Andee Cohen and Phil Kaufman run across the Giant Rock airstrip at the 1969 UFO convention. Photograph: Permission of Tom Wilkes estate

The last thing you’d think of when you hear the name Gram Parsons — the heartbreakingly sensitive singer-songwriter who died aged 26 in 1973 — is science fiction. But between late 1969 and early 1970, towards the close of his two-album career as leader of the Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons was making his acting debut in a mind-boggling fantasy project that predated Star Wars by almost a decade.
Called Saturation 70, the film was the brainchild of an American writer-director named Tony Foutz, the son of a Walt Disney company executive and a friend to both Parsons and the Rolling Stones. The film was shot (but never completed) at a 1969 UFO convention at Giant Rock, near Joshua Tree in the Mojave desert, and in Los Angeles. It tapped into the spectrum of esoteric interests and outlandish ideas — aliens, psychedelics, time travel— of the late 60s counterculture. “The whole experience of making the film was like a technological tribal throw-down, with an energy buzz off the Richter scale,” Foutz says now. “It took on a life of its own.”READ MORE