THE
DIVINE
RASCAL
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...
When failing British writer Michael Hollingshead turns Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary on with LSD, their explosive partnership ignites the psychedelic revolution — but as egos collide, a battle erupts over who will lead it, who will be forgotten by it, and how chasing transcendence will ultimately destroy them both
INTRODUCTION
The Divine Rascal is a dramatic and darkly funny psychedelic thriller about Michael Hollingshead; a charming, reckless provocateur who ignited the 1960s revolution ... and the man who happens to be my father.
Inspired by his memoir, "The Man Who Turned on the World," the series dramatizes the chaotic rise of a man whose idealism, opportunism, and appetite for transcendence collides with a society on the brink of cultural upheaval. What begins as an experiment in enlightenment devolves into a dangerous spiral of obsession, rebellion, rivalry, and unintended consequences.
The Divine Rascal is a gripping exploration of the beautiful madness that lives at the edge of genius.
LET'S TAKE A TRIP
1960s America is on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Set against a rapidly changing America — civil rights erupting and Vietnam looming — we follow Hollingshead, armed with 5000 hits of pure LSD stashed in a mayonnaise jar and a conviction he can change the world.
Seeking minds as bold, he heads to Harvard in search of one man: Dr. Timothy Leary —the rule-bending,boundary-pushing psychology star whose ego, curiosity, and appetite for disruption make him the perfect catalyst.
Through Leary, Hollingshead is pulled into an intoxicating intellectual crucible that includes Leary’s closet ally, Dr. Richard Alpert—a scion of old money and who eventually transform into the famous guru, 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 minds and into a new and dangerous frontier.
Now bound by a mix of purpose and chemical possibility, they ignite a revolution that rips through a restless generation hell-bent on torching the stale conformity of the 1950s to the ground.
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. Trust rots. Their once-united revolution collapses under the pursuit of fame, ambition, academics, and politics.
And in the shadows, the CIA is waiting- already watching. To them, this isn’t enlightenment, it’s a contagion infecting America's youth. And contagions must get eliminated.
And just like that, my father — the wild-eyed revolutionary who lit the match — is wiped from the story. His name. His vision. His identity. Gone. Barely a footnote.
This series evolved out of my need to find out who he really was and why the man who literally turned on the world was completely erased from the its history.
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,
all at once.
Without him, there is no Tim Leary. No cultural awakening. No spiritual insurrection. No summer of love. No psychedelic revolution that reshapes the political and cultural landscape of the twentieth century... 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. And 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, Leray 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.
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.
MAIN CHARACTERS
MICHAEL HOLLINGSHEAD - THE DIVINE RASCAL
Michael is a brilliant, chaotic, British outsider with too much charm, too much pain, and a dangerous conviction that his jar can end all suffering, and maybe even his own.
Haunted by the beatings of his alcoholic father in the unforgiving North of England, he learned to survive by becoming whatever the moment demanded: the charmer, the disruptor, the quick-witted chameleon. It saved him as a boy, but as a man this is a prison he now can’t escape.
Suffocated by England's rigid class divide and a string of failures, he flees to New York City determined to become the great writer he tells everyone he already is. In Greenwich Village he drifts, with unnerving ease, between Beatnik poetry salons, working-class bars, and East Side penthouses. He lights up a room with a joke and a story unaware that he's the one who will burn it down.
His “great novel” sits unfinished, mocking him. His marriage is collapsing, his newborn daughter feels like a stranger, and under the razor-sharp wit is a terror that he’ll disappear without ever being respected and seen.
Then, one hit is all it takes to expose his pain and reveal the vastness of the man he could become. And if LSD can do that to him, he knows it can do it for an entire American culture that's lost its way. As seismic as an Oppenheimer or Einstein breakthrough, he heads to Harvard to find Leary — the only intellectual mind huge enough to help him ignite a revolution he was born to lead.
But the demons are never far behind. At Michael’s core is a tragic cosmic loneliness that no amount of enlightenment will cure. Women, booze, and drugs fill his God-sized hole until they don’t, and he becomes a wrecking ball.
The transcendence he guides thousands to find he never finds for himself again. He will spend the rest of his life chasing that first rooftop trip — to oblivion.
Before LSD
After LSD
DR TIMOTHY LEARY - THE HIGH PRIEST
A handsome mess of a man, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary radiates the kind of intelligence that seduces as quickly as it intimidates. Academic brilliance fused with the hypnotic pull of a cult leader — he’s the sort of man people follow before they know why.
On the surface, he has everything Hollingshead was denied: legitimacy, tenure, and the full blessing of an Ivy League that once slammed its doors on Michael and his 140 IQ. But beneath the polish is a man held together by guilt, fury, and the quiet dread that his peers might be right about him.
When his wife commits suicide, whatever remains of his respectable façade collapses. Terrified of scandal — and even more terrified of raising two children he barely knows how to love — he flees to Italy, kids in tow, drowning himself in wine, lovers, and pills. Only Richard Alpert’s devotion pulls him home, back to Harvard, back to the psilocybin research that once made him feel alive.
Then Hollingshead arrives — and detonates everything.
But when he turns Leary on with LSD, Leary doesn’t find freedom. He crashes head-on into truth — the unbearable enormity of the human condition — and instead of humbling him, it anoints him. He sees a throne, a mythology, a destiny with his name on it. Overnight, he becomes obsessed with proving that one twelve-hour acid trip can do what twelve years of psychotherapy never could — and he will be the prophet to deliver that gospel, in a mayonnaise jar, to the world.
Leary wants two irreconcilable lives at once: to reinvent himself as a messiah and to outrun the broken man he cannot bear to face.It’s the contradiction that elevates him — and the one that finally destroys him.
His volatile partnership with Hollingshead mirrors the same cracks: two men who ignite 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 DISCIPLE
A brilliant psychologist and seeker at heart, Dick brings an unrequited love to Leary. He's his right-hand man until Hollingshead shows up.
Born into extreme generational wealth, he bankrolls the revolution—from the experiments at Harvard to the expenses at the Mansion and even Hollingshead himself. He hopes his devotion will win 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.
He heads for India in search of lasting transformation that psychedelics deny. There, under the teachings of the Hindu mystic Maharaj-ji, he is transformed. Reborn. And without a drug. He becomes the famous spiritual guru, Baba Ram Dass.
His best-selling book, Be Here Now, will sell over 8 million copies. Yet beneath the white robes and mala beads, he still can't get free. He won’t come out as gay until 1997.
Before LSD
After LSD
SOPHIE HOLLINGSHEAD - THE TRUTH-TELLER
The gorgeous, sultry jazz pianist with a femme fatale allure, Sophie commands the clubs of the West Village with every note. 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 to racism and mob violence.
Stuck in a joyless marriage, Michael catches her eye. Their romantic, forbidden affair—volcanic and raw—explodes. But like a moth to a flame...
Michael’s writer’s block and incessant cheating will slowly destroy her wild, untamed spirit—the very spirit he fell in love with in the first place.
When she gets 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 will make decisions that irreversibly change their lives forever.
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