THE
DIVINE
RASCAL
The Story of the Man Who Turned On the World with LSD and the People Who Erased Him
created by:
Jeanne Heaton &
Vanessa Hollingshead
LOGLINE:
Fueled by reckless optimism and a bottle of Scotch, a penniless British writer unleashes the world's first batch of LSD—igniting the 1960s counterculture psychedelic revolution. But when a charming Harvard professor hijacks his movement and government forces close in, he must fight to reclaim his revolution or be destroyed by it.
INTRODUCTION:
Inspired by his memoir, "The Man Who Turned on the World," THE DIVINE RASCAL is a dramatic and darkly funny TV series about my father, Michael Hollingshead—a renegade dreamer with a promise to change the world.
Armed with 5000 hits of the world's first batch of pure LSD, he tracks down Dr. Timothy Leary, Harvard’s bad-boy psychology professor turned counterculture legend, and Dr. Richard Alpert, Leary's wealthy misfit of an assistant, who becomes the famous spiritual guru, Ram Dass.
Dr. Timothy Leary
Michael hollingshead
Dr. Richard Alpert
All it takes is one Lovin’ Spoonful of Hollingshead's magic elixir—and their worlds explode. Minds blow open. Egos dissolve. Reality disintegrates.
What starts as a mind-expanding experiment ignites a full-blown psychedelic counterculture revolution—one that awakens the soul of a generation, rips through the ivory towers of academia, and burns the hollow, materialistic dream of 1950s America to the ground.
Leary -
ryan gosling
Hollingshead -
Benedict Cumberbatch
alpert -
Timothée Chalamet
But when their god-sized chemical collides with their god-sized egos, power struggles erupt. Trust erodes. Betrayals run deep.
What began as a revolution of liberation starts to collapse under the weight of the very same pride, fear, and control it promised to destroy.
As the utopian dream shows cracks, the U.S. government smells blood.
And just like that, my father—the architect of it all—is erased. Eliminated. His name, his vision, his legacy—disappeared. Not even a footnote.
A psychedelic thriller, The Divine Rascal was born out of my obsession to find out who my father really was and why he was erased from history.
IP:
"The Man Who Turned On The World"
by Michael Hollingshead
Published 1973
© All Rights Reserved
WHAT'S LSD
WHO IS HE?
WHY ME?
"My dad did so much LSD, psilocybin, blue blotter, purple haze—that we used to go on family trips together without ever leaving home. When I was five, he left a tray of acid-laced sugar cubes lying on the kitchen table. I ate nine of them. I don't have childhood memories; I have flashbacks."
Vanessa Hollingshead
That was the first joke I ever told. Because it was true.
I was born on the same day my dad tripped on LSD for the first time. His heart blew open. His mind expanded. And suddenly, I wasn’t just his daughter; I was his competition—competing with the most profound experience of his life.
For years I asked myself why LSD was more important than me.
But as I dug deeper, I realized this wasn’t just my story. It's an entire missing piece of the 1960s psychedelic revolution that's never been told, let alone dramatized.
As Leary and Alpert rose to iconic status, my father was forgotten. Why? What did he see? And who betrayed him? Leary? Alpert? The CIA? Or was it something even more sinister?
Unapologetically human and darkly hysterical, The Divine Rascal is a search for the truth about the man who tried to raise me, abandoned me, and ultimately shaped me.
A battle for the soul—this story lives in the tension between the sacred and the self-indulgent, between transcendence and addiction, between the divine and the rascal in all of us.
For me, it's a search for answers I've been seeking my whole life—and that maybe, just maybe, I was more important than LSD.
SERIES OVERVIEW:
Part One:
NEW YORK CITY - THE '60s
Haunted by a violent childhood, penniless writer Michael Hollingshead flees England’s oppressive class system and sets sail for the creative chaos of Greenwich Village.
At The White Horse Tavern, where the Beatnik poetry gods of angst hold court, Hollingshead—with his razor-sharp wit and the perfect amount of madness—earns a seat next to Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs... even Aldous Huxley.
When he meets Sophie, the sultry jazz pianist and headstrong civil rights activist trapped in a loveless marriage, they fall in love. She gets pregnant. And everything changes.
Sophie
Natalie Portman
But with no job, no money, and suffering with debilitating writer’s block, the burden of raising a family becomes too much.
Drinking around the clock, he spirals into an alcohol-soaked oblivion—ready to end it all.
Just in time, Huxley tells him about a mysterious hallucinogen that promises not only creative salvation but a rewiring of the entire soul.
If only Hollingshead can get his hands on it.
"I move to the rooftop and all is chaos. Kaleidoscopic images surge powerfully in on me. Violent, beautiful. And I am seized by a fear of going insane. My body is strange. Numb. Lifeless.
Am I dying?
The rooftop shifts. I balance on the edge of nothingness when lightning strikes. A bolt rips through me. And all of time collapses in on itself, where the primordial ooze of a childhood crushed by the monstrous fists of my violent alcoholic father grabs me by the throat and throws me off the ledge.
I am dead.
Screaming into the void, woven wings of stardust suddenly catch me. And I rise. Lifted up. Beyond thought. My ego disintegrates. Ash scattered in a cosmic wind. A heavenly realm delivers me to where the "I" of "me" no longer exists.
I am reborn.
One with the Divine. One with the Creator. One with the Universe.
I am God."
While he's busy being completely transformed and reborn, Sophie is all alone, terrified, giving birth to Vanessa.
Still tripping, he rushes to her side—eyes wild, mind on fire—with a promise of a fresh start. But not with a job. Or a finished book. He has a much bigger plan.
He will turn on the world with LSD.
Part Two:
Hard left to Harvard University
Hollingshead, possessed with his 5,000 hits sealed in a mayonnaise jar, believes he holds the cure to all of human suffering. He's got “the holy grail. The genie in the bottle. The magic ring.”
He also realizes his vision is too big for one man. He needs an ally. With credibility. Authority. Power.
Enter Dr. Timothy Leary: Harvard's psychology professor with a God complex and a genius for rebellion.
But Leary dismisses Hollingshead and his "ominous jar" as just another drug-addled zealot. Until he threatens to kill himself.
With Hollingshead's desperation, Leary rethinks, "What this poor, wretched creature needs is love and trust." And so he takes the trip.
Twelve hours of ego annihilation, LSD drags him through a terrifying void of isolation and grief—until a force so beautiful cracks him wide open.
His purpose is now clear: Join forces with Hollingshead and share this drug with the world—no matter what.
Leary & Hollingshead
But as their bond deepens, Leary sees the cracks:
"Hollingshead isn't giving us LSD out of love or glorification. It's a compulsion. He has to do it. He needs us to share in the immobilization of his own cosmic and crushing loneliness.”
To anchor Hollingshead and their fragile awakening, Leary recruits his doting assistant, Dr. Richard Alpert, a Harvard misfit with a huge trust fund and his own desperate need to matter.
Dr. Richard Alpert
The trio—a madman, a messiah and a misfit—is now complete. Leary persuades Harvard to allow them to study LSD on his grad students.
At first, it’s science: clinical, controlled, with groundbreaking results. But LSD doesn’t care about protocols. The experiments leak beyond the lab—into faculty mixers, dorm rooms, and 2 a.m. consciousness expansion debates.
Boundaries dissolve. Rules blur. Harvard is now ground zero for a radical cultural awakening.
The counterculture revolution has officially begun.
Spreading their psychedelic gospel, they become both rockstars and pariahs in equal measure.
But when they break the one cardinal rule by dosing undergrads, outrage erupts. Parents flip out. The press circles. And Harvard fires them all.
Branded "dangerous radicals" and already under government surveillance, the CIA moves in.
MK-Ultra is unleashed. And Hollingshead is placed at the top of the CIA's watchlist.
Cornered and desperate—how much is one man willing to sacrifice to save his glorious revolution?
Vanessa, his daughter
Part Three:
Which brings us to Millbrook Mansion — a 64-room dilapidated baroque castle in upstate New York
A chaotic mix of research lab, monastery, and madhouse, the "dangerous radicals"—now known as The Lords of the Revolution—move in. They can now carry on their passionate experiments with reckless abandon.
And at the center of it all: Hollingshead. Electric. Mesmerizing. Part showman, part shaman, Millbrook is where he hones his trip-guiding skills and becomes the greatest trip-guide of all time.
.
Artists, rock stars, and celebrities travel from all over the world just for him to guide their trips.
The Mansion becomes the beating heart of the massive pop-art counterculture revolution—inspiring The Beatles to go from "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to "I Am the Walrus."
McClure, Dylan & Ginsberg
Lennon & McCartney
Andy Warhol &
Edie Sedgwick
Salvador Dali
William Burroughs
But as the revolution explodes across the country, so do their egos.
Leary wants to be king. Alpert wants truth. And with the CIA and local FBI surveilling every move, Hollingshead crumbles. Drunk, high, tripping around the clock—he's barely holding on.
And with the government's “priority surveillance” he's now the Mansion's greatest liability.
And then it happens: Hollingshead leaves a tray of acid-laced sugar cubes lying on the table and five-year-old Vanessa eats nine of them.
When she almost dies, Sophie cracks. Alpert takes off for India. The FBI storms the place. And Leary goes to jail.
But mysteriously, Hollingshead is nowhere to be found. Was he taken? Did he run? Or was this the plan all along.
Alpert returns, reborn as the spiritual guru Baba Ram Dass, preaching a new gospel of transcendence—one that doesn't need LSD—or any other drugs for that matter.
He gets Leary out of jail on a technicality. And together, they revive their mission. But the constant police surveillance and raids take their toll and they're forced to abandon Millbrook.
But the promise is far from over.
Leary
Ram Dass (Alpert)
And Hollingshead, in a bizarre twist of fate, finds himself back on a passenger ship bound for England.
Hollingshead
But little does anyone know, he has over 10,000 hits of pure Czech LSD, hidden in a bar of soap. Enough to turn on London 10 times over and still have a hell of a stash left for himself.
Spy? Double agent? Scapegoat? Or just one step ahead of everyone. Whatever the truth, Hollingshead walks away a free man—his greatest trick yet.
And with London on the brink of its own cultural awakening, he's ready.
For season Two. Where the stakes are even higher as the revolution goes global—everything Hollingshead's ever dreamed of ... and promised. Only this time, the whole world is watching.
THE ANTAGONISTS:
On a parallel track, hidden in secret labs, back rooms, and safe houses, Sidney Gottlieb—the architect of the CIA’s twisted MK-Ultra drug program—is using LSD as a weapon of psychological torture.
On his orders, CIA operatives inject prisoners, addicts, and prostitutes with near-fatal doses. No warning. No mercy. No escape.
As nefarious as it is chilling, Gottlieb’s plan is simple: first, obliterate the human mind and psyche. Then, in the void, build the perfect assassin. One who kills Russian spies on command. With no remorse. And without a trace.
These morally bankrupt experiments with LSD lead to madness, death, and eventually Hollingshead.
WHY NOW:
The time is ripe for another counterculture revolution
It’s 2025, and the same civil rights my father fought for are being stripped away, one by one.
But today mind control is coded into algorithms. Anxiety is rampant. Loneliness, an epidemic. We’re medicated but not healed. Stimulated but not awake. Disillusioned. Disconnected. Desperate. We are not well.
And into the void, psychedelics have returned.
No longer fringe, therapists prescribe LSD for PTSD, addiction, and depression. Mushrooms are marketed as quick, Instagrammable wellness hacks. Microdosing in Silicon Valley is mainstream. Everyone is desperate for a way out. A cure.
Enter The Divine Rascal—a TV series that dramatizes where and how it all began: the original untold story of LSD.
But this isn't only a story about whether LSD “works." It's an examination of what happens after. When the trip ends. And you come back down. And the mountains are still the mountains, the job is still the job, your friends and family are no different than they were yesterday, but YOU ARE.
The Divine Rascal lives in that tension. In the brutal in-between. Between revelation and reintegration.
A character study wrapped in a psychedelic thriller, it asks the question that consumes our culture today:
Can a drug truly deliver lasting freedom? Real transformation? An awakening? And if it can—what’s the cost of returning to a world that's even more broken than it's ever been before? A world designed to keep us both confused and asleep.
Experiencing the Divine may be the easy part. It's the comedown that might destroy you.
Hollingshead had the right drug in the wrong decade. But he was never wrong about the power—and controversy—it would have for generations to come.
MAIN CHARACTERS:
MICHAEL HOLLINGSHEAD - THE DIVINE RASCAL
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Raised by a raging and violent alcoholic in the unforgiving North of England, Michael is wired for one thing: survival.
Beneath his magnetic charm and hilarious, razor-sharp wit lies a desperate need—to be loved. To be adored. To be seen.
Born into poverty and never college-educated, Michael is a natural born chameleon who easily slips between the worlds of the academic elite and the ultra-wealthy. But no matter if he's smartest one in the room or how far he climbs, the demons of his past are always close behind.
With Michael, you risk losing your mind, your money, or possibly both. He's the guy everyone can’t wait to get to the party and the one they can’t wait to leave.
Women, drugs, and booze fill his God-sized hole for a while till stop working and he sabotages it all, burning it to the ground.
But the greatest tragedy of all is that the enlightenment he so effortlessly guides others to find, he never finds for himself again. He spends the rest of his life chasing that first rooftop LSD trip to oblivion.
Before LSD
After LSD
DR TIMOTHY LEARY - THE HIGH PRIEST
The alpha male antithesis to Hollingshead's flamboyant peacock, Tim doesn’t ask for power; he takes it.
He’s the psychology professor that everyone wants to teach their class or take to bed. With his relentless womanizing and promiscuity with both men and women, his wife kills herself, leaving him with two kids and a guilt he can't outrun.
When everything changes with one LSD trip, he becomes obsessed with scientifically proving to the world that one twelve-hour trip does what twelve years of psychotherapy never could.
And he's not just hoping others believe it; he’s staking his soul on it. No longer content with professor or researcher, Leary declares himself prophet and needs the world follow.
When the self-appointed “High Priest” of LSD, preaches to the youth of America to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” Nixon targets him as the "Most Dangerous Man in America."
When asked if he regrets ruining a generation of 72 million people, he smirks, "Yeah, but only a hundred thousand thanked me for it."
Before LSD
After LSD
DR RICHARD ALPERT - BABA RAM DASS
A brilliant psychologist and seeker at heart, Dick brings an unrequited love to Leary. Doting and loyal, he's his right-hand man until Hollingshead shows up.
Born into extreme generational wealth, he bankrolls the revolution—from the experiments at Harvard, the expenses at the Mansion, and even Hollingshead himself—with the hopes that his devotion earns Leary's love.
But it's not easy being a gay man in the 60s. No matter how much he gives, he remains forever on the outside looking in. A longing that becomes his undoing.
The first time he trips, instead of seeing God, he spirals into a full-blown panic attack and the chains of conformity are not removed.
Disillusioned, he heads for India in search of a lasting transformation that psychedelics deny him. There, under the teachings of the Hindu Mystic, Maharaj-ji, he is transformed. Reborn. Without a single drug. And he becomes the famous spiritual guru, Baba Ram Dass.
His best-selling book, Be Here Now, cements his legacy. Yet beneath the white robes and prayer beads, he is still unable to get free. He won’t come out as gay until 1997.
Before LSD
After LSD
SOPHIE HOLLINGSHEAD - JAZZ PIANIST & ACTIVIST
A gorgeous, sexy femme fatale jazz pianist, Sophie commands the smoky clubs of the West Village with every note. But she doesn’t just play the room—she owns it.
A fierce civil rights activist, she fights for her fellow Black musicians, fearlessly standing up against racism and mob violence.
Stuck in an unhappy, joyless marriage to the owner of the Open Door jazz joint, she catches Michael's eye. Their romantic and forbidden affair—volcanic, raw, sensual—explodes. But like a moth to flame...
Michael’s writer’s block and his incessant cheating destroy her wild, untamed spirit—the very spirit that made him fall in love with her in the first place.
Now pregnant with Vanessa, she's forced into a life she never wanted: the suffocating role of a 1960s housewife.
When five-year-old Vanessa eats the nine acid-laced sugar cubes and nearly dies, Sophie must make decisions that will irreversibly change the rest of their lives.
Before Michael
After Michael
