THE
RASCAL
DIVINE
The Story of the Man Who Turned on the World with LSD — and the People Who Erased him
created by:
Jeanne Heaton &
Vanessa Hollingshead
AND SO IT BEGINS...
After penniless British writer Michael Hollingshead introduces Harvard’s Timothy Leary to LSD, they ignite a psychedelic revolution that explodes into the culture — but when egos collide, a battle erupts over who will lead it, who will be forgotten by it, and how their chase for transcendence will destroy them both
INTRODUCTION
The Divine Rascal is a dramatic and darkly funny psychedelic thriller about Michael Hollingshead; a charming, reckless provocateur who's desperation started the 1960s counterculture revolution.
Inspired by his memoir, The Man Who Turned On the World, the series tracks the rise of a man whose idealism, opportunism, and hunger for escape collide with a society on the brink of upheaval. What begins as a private experiment with a drug no one’s heard of spirals into a cultural wildfire he can no longer control.
At its core, The Divine Rascal explores the thin line between brilliance and self-destruction, and the cost of living at the edge of madness.
LET'S TAKE A TRIP
1960s America is on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Civil rights are erupting. Vietnam is looming. The rigid order of the 1950s is cracking under its own weight.
And into the breach steps Michael Hollingshead, armed with five thousand hits of pure LSD hidden in a mayonnaise jar — and an unshakable belief that he can change the world.
He heads to Harvard in search of Timothy Leary, a rule-bending psychology star whose ego, curiosity with psilocybin, and appetite for disruption make him the perfect catalyst. Through Leary, he is pulled into an intoxicating intellectual crucible that includes Leary’s closest ally, Richard Alpert — a scion of old money who will later reemerge as the spiritual figure Ram Dass.
Dr. Timothy Leary
Michael hollingshead
Dr. Richard Alpert, ram Dass
One "Lovin’ Spoonful" from Hollingshead's jar is all it takes to blast Leary and Alpert out of their Ivy League certainty and into uncharted psychological territory.
Bound by chemical possibility and ambition, the trio ignite a movement that rips through a a restless generation hell-bent on torching the old world down.
ryan gosling
(leary)
jOSH O'CONNOR
(Hollingshead)
Timothée Chalamet
(Alpert - Ram Dass)
But when their god-sized egos collide with their god-sized chemical, power struggles erupt. Control slips. And in the shadows, the CIA is already watching. To them, this isn’t enlightenment — it’s contagion. And contagions must be contained.
The revolution doesn’t just consume a generation. It devours its creators.
And History makes its edit. Leary becomes prophet. And Hollingshead disappears.
Wiped from history. His name. His vision. His identity. Reduced to a mere footnote.
And that elimination is why this series evolved. Because Michael Hollingshead wasn’t just the man history forgot. He was my father.
The Divine Rascal is an attempt to uncover the truth buried beneath the man and the myth —and to tell the story of the man who lit the fuse, but didn’t survive the legend.
IP:
"The Man Who Turned On The World"
by Michael Hollingshead
Published 1973
©All Rights Reserved
WHAT'S LSD
WHO IS HE?
With a glass of scotch in one hand and a mayonnaise jar full of LSD in the other, the Divine Rascal is one of the most mysterious and overlooked figures in psychedelic history.
A zelig, a genius, a writer, a trickster, a con man, an alcoholic, a raconteur, a magician, a father—Hollingshead is all of it,
and all at once.
Without him, there's no Tim Leary. No cultural awakening. No spiritual insurrection. No summer of love. No psychedelic revolution that reshapes the entire cultural and political landscape of the twentieth century... and yet no one's ever heard of him.
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 on the kitchen table. I ate nine of them. I don't have childhood memories; I have flashbacks."
That was the first joke I ever told. Because it was true.
Born the same day my dad tripped on LSD for the first time—his heart blew open. His mind expanded. And in that moment I wasn’t just his daughter; I became his competition—competing with the most profound experience of his life.
For years I asked myself why. Why was LSD more important than me?
But as I dug deeper, I realized that this isn’t just my story. It's a missing piece of the most radical, transformational time in American history—and one that needs to be told.
While Leary and Alpert were becoming psychedelic icons, my father was being erased. Why? What did he know? And who betrayed him? Was it Leary? Alpert? The CIA? Or something even more sinister?
Unapologetically human and darkly hysterical, The Divine Rascal is a search for the man who tried to raise me, abandoned me, and ultimately shaped me.
A battle for the soul—the show lives in the tension between transcendence and addiction, the spiritual and the self-indulgent, and the divine and the rascal in all of us.
Vanessa Hollingshead
THE WORLD
SERIES OVERVIEW
NEW YORK CITY - THE '60s
Haunted by a violent and abusive childhood, penniless failed 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 the perfect amount of madness and wit, earns himself a seat next to his heroes: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Aldous Huxley.
But when he meets Sophie, a jazz pianist and civil rights activist who keeps fighting even when the world tells her to stop, he falls hard. But already married to someone else, she gets pregnant.
Sophie
Carey Mulligan
But with no job, no money, and a soul-crushing case of writer’s block, the pressure of supporting a young family becomes too much. Desperate and unraveling, he starts drinking around the clock, spiraling into oblivion.
Then, like an apparition, literary icon Aldous Huxley appears. But not with pity. With a strange suggestion: an untested hallucinogen called LSD. No science. No safety. Unclassified. Just a volatile chemical that could reignite Hollingshead’s creative genius — if he can find a way to get his hands on it...
I move to the rooftop, and all is chaos. Kaleidoscopic images surge powerfully in on me. Violent. Beautiful. Strange. My body is numb. Lifeless.
Am I dying?
Suddenly, beneath me, the rooftop shifts. Clinging to the edge of nothingness, a bolt of lightning splits me through. From the depths, a dark sludge of my childhood rises—and I am face-to-face with my violent and alcoholic father. Fists flying. Eyes drunk with rage. He grabs me by the throat and pushes me off.
I am dead.
Screaming into the void, my ego shatters—blown apart—like ash in a cosmic wind. But then—wings, woven from stardust, suddenly catch me, and I am lifted up. Beyond thought. Beyond reality. Into a realm of impossible light where the "I" of "me" no longer exists.
I am risen.
I am one with the Divine. One with the Creator. One with the Universe.
I am God.
While Hollingshead is busy being reborn, Sophie is all alone and terrified, giving birth to Vanessa.
Still reeling with revelation, he rushes to the hospital and promises her a fresh start. But not with a new job, or finishing his masterpiece. He's going to turn on the world with LSD.
HARD LEFT TO HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Erratic. Intense. Hollingshead shows up clutching a mayonnaise jar like it’s the Holy Grail.
Inside: 5,000 hits of pure LSD suspended in a sugar paste.
To pull off a mission this bold, he needs an ally. Someone with credibility, power, and a platform.
Enter Dr. Timothy Leary: Harvard's rebellious and magnetic star psychologist, dangerously convinced of his own destiny.
Leary isn’t just admired; he’s worshipped. His lectures are performances. With students ready to follow him anywhere.
For Hollingshead, Leary is key. The gatekeeper. The man who can launch his mission out of West Village obscurity and into academic world power.
But when he tells Leary about his LSD, Leary dismisses him as just another drug-addled zealot — until Hollingshead threatens to take his own life.
The threat hits a nerve Leary can’t ignore. His wife had taken her own life not long ago. So he agrees to let Hollingshead turn him on...
What follows is not enlightenment, it’s obliteration. Twelve hours of raw terror, grief, and psychic collapse. He doesn’t transcend of find God. He flatlines to his old self.
The next day, he makes the call: Hollingshead — and the jar with the power to change everything — are coming to sacred halls of Harvard University..
Leary & Hollingshead
But as their bond deepens, Leary starts to see the cracks:
"Hollingshead isn’t giving me LSD to enlighten me. It's a compulsion. He has to do it. He's needs me to carry the weight of the same tragic and cosmic loneliness he's drowning in.”
To stabilize Hollingshead and his own fragile awakening, Leary brings in his assistant, Dr. Richard Alpert:a Harvard misfit with a bottomless trust fund and an equally bottomless need to be loved.
Dr. Richard Alpert
Now complete — a madman, a messiah, and a misfit — the trio persuades the Harvard Board approving trials on Leary’s graduate students.
At first, everything is orderly. Data, notes, controlled dosing — with results that are undeniably good.
But LSD escapes the lab. Into faculty mixers and late-night dorm room debates, rewiring the campus from the inside out.
The counterculture revolution has officially begun.
As they preach their psychedelic gospel across campus, the trio become both rockstars and pariahs in equal measure.
But when they break Harvard's cardinal rule by giving LSD to undergrads, outrage erupts. Parents rage. The press circles. And they are cast out of the proverbial Garden of Eden they thought they ruled.
Now branded dangerous radicals, they land squarely in the crosshairs of the U.S. government.
MK-Ultra — the CIA’s secret program weaponizing LSD for mind control — has no patience for wildcards. And Hollingshead is both the loudest voice and the weakest link.
They put him at the top of their watchlist.
And now the real question becomes: how much is one man really willing to sacrifice to save his revolution?
His little girl, Vanessa
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 trio, now known as The Lords of the Revolution, move in.
With reckless abandon and oblivious to the Feds watching, they dive deeper into their experiments.
And at the center of it all: Hollingshead. Electric. Mesmerizing. Part showman. Part shaman. Millbrook is where he hones his skills, earning the reputation as the greatest trip guide of all time.
Artists, rockstars, and celebrities travel from all over the world just to have him guide their trips.
The Mansion becomes the beating heart of the 1960s pop-art 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
As the revolution explodes, so do the egos. Leary wants to be king. Alpert seeks truth. And with the CIA closing in on Hollingshead, he wants to drink: a bottle of booze in one hand, LSD in the other, he's wrecked, wired, dangerous.
And then it happens: one night Hollingshead leaves a tray of acid-laced sugar cubes on the kitchen table, and five-year-old Vanessa eats them all.
When she almost dies, Sophie cracks. Alpert takes off for India. The FBI storms the place. And Leary goes to jail.
Mysteriously, Hollingshead is nowhere to be found.
Spy? Double agent? Scapegoat? Or just the smartest one of them all—Hollingshead finds himself aboard the luxurious QE1, sailing for England, a free man. His greatest trick yet.
Little does anyone know: he has over 10,000 hits of Czech LSD hidden in a bar of soap—enough to turn on London ten times over and still have a hell of a stash left for himself.
And with London on the edge of its own cultural awakening, the stakes are high. Hollingshead’s promise to turn on the world is no longer fantasy; it’s reality. But this time, he’s not hiding in the shadows. This time, the whole world is watching.
Enter: Season Two.
THE ANTAGONISTS
On a parallel track and just blocks from Hollingshead’s acid-soaked "Happenings" in the West Village, another kind of trip is taking place—stripped of color, mercy, and soul.
In an unmarked brownstone, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the sadistic mastermind and director of the CIA’s top-secret MK-ULTRA drug program, is operating a covert, government-sanctioned horror show.
With muscle from the mob and federal protection, Gottlieb hunts down "the disposable"—jazz musicians, junkies, and prostitutes. He straps them to wooden gurneys and floods their veins full of massive amounts of LSD.
His mission is simple: dose them with enough LSD that it obliterates their minds erasing it entirely. With whatever's left, he plans to build them into living weapons — assassins who will kill without question and have no memory of doing it.
B&W scenes of bodies in straitjackets writhing in chemical torment cut hard against Hollingshead’s colorful world of music, love, laughter, and light. One trip chasing the higher Self. The other, state-sanctioned madness.
But when friends start disappearing, paranoia creeps in and Leary, Hollingshead, and Alpert suspect infiltration.
Rumors swirl that the CIA is inside their movement, turning their ideals against themselves. And among all the noise and chaos, no one can figure out what is going on.
And with Hollingshead's manipulation and power growing out of control, so are his mysterious connections... his eyes are different. His energy is off.
Leary isn't sure if Hollingshead is being used, under surveillance, or crossed some other kind of line no one can see.
One drug. Two experiments. One inevitable collision.
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, systematically, one by one.
Mind control is coded into algorithms. Anxiety is rampant. Loneliness is an epidemic. We’re medicated but not healed. Stimulated but not awake. Disillusioned. Disconnected. We are not well.
And into this void, psychedelics have returned.
No longer fringe, therapists prescribe LSD for PTSD, addiction, and depression. Mushrooms are marketed as quick-fix, Instagrammable wellness hacks. Microdosing in Silicon Valley has gone mainstream. Everyone is desperate for a way out. A cure.
Enter The Divine Rascal—a television series that dramatizes where and how it all began.
But this isn't just 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, but YOU are.
The Divine Rascal lives in that brutal in-between. Between knowing everything and knowing nothing. Between infinite love and unbearable loneliness. Between breakthrough and breakdown.
A character study wrapped in a psychedelic thriller, it asks the question that continues to consume our culture today: Can a drug really deliver lasting transformation? And if so, what’s the cost of waking up in a world that's more asleep and rigged against us than ever before?
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.
CHARACTERS
MICHAEL HOLLINGSHEAD - THE DIVINE RASCAL
The brilliant, chaotic outsider, Michael has too much charm, too much pain, and a dangerous belief that the drug in his jar can end all suffering, including his own.
Raised in the unforgiving North of England by a violent alcoholic father, Michael learned early how to survive by becoming whatever the moment required: manipulator, chameleon, performer. It saved him as a boy. But as a man, it's a prison he can’t escape.
Suffocated by England's class divide and a string of literary failures, he arrives in New York determined to become a great published writer. In Greenwich Village, he moves effortlessly between Beat poetry salons, working-class bars, and Upper East Side penthouses — lighting up rooms with wit and stories he half-believes himself.
With Michael, you risk losing your mind, your money, or possibly both. He’s the man everyone can’t wait to get to the party — and the one they can’t wait to see leave. Beneath the charisma lies one fear: that he will vanish without ever meaning anything. At home his unfinished novel sits unfinished, mocking him. Drinking, his marriage starts to collapse and his newborn daughter feels like a stranger.
Then, his first LSD trip drags his buried childhood into the light, revealing the truth of his soul and who he might have been without the damage. At his core lives a profound cosmic loneliness. Women, booze, and drugs fill this God-sized hole, until they don’t and he becomes a human wrecking ball.
His tragedy is that the enlightenment he guides thousands of others to find is the one thing he will never reach again. He can save everyone else — just not himself.
Before LSD
After LSD
DR TIMOTHY LEARY - THE HIGH PRIEST
A handsome mess of a man, Harvard psychologist "Tim" radiates a rare intelligence that seduces as quickly as it intimidates. Academic brilliance fused with the hypnotic pull of a cult leader in the making — he’s the kind of man people follow before they understand why.
On the surface, he has everything Michael has been denied: legitimacy, institutional protection, and the luxury of not having to invent himself from scratch. Beneath the polish, however, he is driven by guilt, buried rage, and a growing fear his colleagues may be right — that his ideas are dangerous, and that he may be too.
When his wife commits suicide, his respectable façade collapses. Terrified of scandal, he flees to Italy with his two kids that he barley knows, and numbs himself with wine, lovers, and pills. Only Richard Alpert’s devotion — and money — can get him back to Harvard to rededicate to their psilocybin mushroom research that once gave his life purpose.
Then Michael arrives with exactly what Tim's been looking for. His first trip exposes more truth about the human condition than he can contain. Instead of humbling him, he crowns himself LSD's interpreter and will prove that one twelve-hour trip can do what twelve years of psychotherapy never could.
Tim doesn’t seek to be the prophet of the counterculture to face himself; he uses it to promote himself and to stay in motion — always preaching and never stopping long enough to confront the broken man he knows he is.
His bond with Michael mirrors that same brokenness — two men amplifying each other’s brilliance while dragging each other toward ruin. Whether they can survive one another is the engine that drives the series.
Before LSD
After LSD
DR RICHARD ALPERT - THE MISFIT DISCIPLE
Born into immense privilege — private planes, fast cars, every door already opened — "Dick" has been groomed for success. Disciplined and impeccably credentialed he grew up trained to excel in every way, but was never taught how to belong. Brilliant, closeted, and emotionally starved, he hides his longing behind intellect and status.
At Harvard, he falls hard for Tim — intellectually, emotionally, and sexually. Tim awakens desires Dick has never allowed himself to feel. But unable to act on them, Dick offers devotion instead, becoming Tim's right hand, protector, and financial lifeline, bankrolling all of the psychedelic experiments, hoping his loyalty will finally earn Tim's love.
Then Michael arrives and Dick is pushed off to the side; but never the work. He becomes the intermediary between Michael and Tim — holding the movement together while quietly watching himself displaced from its emotional center. Always essential. Never chosen.
The first time Dick trips, instead of seeing God, he has a full-blown panic attack and the chains of conformity are not removed for him.
The transcendence Leary seeks will never come through chemistry alone. That realization eventually drives him to India, in search of the guru Neem Karoli Baba. There, stripped of performance and audience, he begins — for the first time — to confront who he is beneath the persona. He emerges as Ram Dass: not cured, not liberated, but closer to a hard-won internal acceptance. It will take many more years before he is fully able to live it.
Before LSD
After LSD
SOPHIE HOLLINGSHEAD - THE JAZZ PIANIST & TRUTH-TELLER
Sophie is the grounding force in a world spinning off it's axis — whether she wants to be or not. A woman of fierce talent, she's the sultry jazz pianist that commands the West Village club scene with quiet authority. The moment her hands hit the keys, she knows exactly who she is. Offstage, that certainty is harder to keep.
A civil rights activist, Sophie is the only adult in the room. While others chase escape, she stays rooted; fighting for her community, for Black musicians, for women... and then she meets Michael.
Trapped in a joyless marriage, their romantic, forbidden affair — volcanic and raw — explodes. But what draws her to him isn't his genius, its the sorrow beneath. A wound she recognizes, because she carries the same.
Then come the failures, the infidelities, and an obsession with LSD that eclipses everything else. As their home fills with seekers and trippers, she watches Michael drift, leaving her with the consequences.
When she gets pregnant with Vanessa, she's forced into the suffocating role of a 1960s housewife. When Vanessa almost dies from accidentally eating the acid-laced sugar cubes, Sophie makes a choice for survival; hers and her little girl’s.
Sophie becomes the conscience of The Divine Rascal, not as hero, but as a witness to what revolutions cost the people forces to hold them together. Without her, the story strips away consequence, and Hollingshead and Leary harden into myth and are forgiven by history.
Before Hollingshead
After Hollingshead
MILLBROOK MANSION
Jonas Mekas, the "godfather of American avant-garde cinema,"
captures Vanessa and her dad at the Mansion in 1965