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, and how their chase for transcendence will destroy them both
IP:
"The Man Who Turned On The World"
Michael Hollingshead, 1973 ©All Rights Reserved
"The Divine Rascal"
Andy Roberts, 2019 ©All Rights Reserved
THE SERIES
1960s America
As the nation shifts from black-and-white conformity into technicolor chaos, two men arrive at the edge of a radical new frontier: the human mind.
One of them—TIMOTHY LEARY—will be remembered. The prophet. The showman. His face plastered on T-shirts and coffee mugs with his slogan “Turn on, Tune in, Drop out” echoing through pop culture today.
The other—MICHAEL HOLLINGSHEAD—a British outsider, and the true instigator of the psychedelic counterculture revolution, is erased.
The man who lights the match to the most consequential cultural shift of the twentieth century is extinguished. No headlines. No icon status. No redemption arc. Just a ghost from trips past.
The Divine Rascal explores the thin line between brilliance and self-destruction and the price they pay chasing transcendence to the edge of madness.
WHY NOW:
Every era believes it’s unprecedented. Few actually are.
The 1960s didn’t just give America a counterculture, they exposed how quickly a government will go to crush one. While Nixon warned the public about acid-crazed hippies and moral collapse, his administration was feeding the press fear.
At the same time, his CIA ran MK-ULTRA, using LSD to erase identity and engineer obedience. Fear above ground. Experiments below.
Invent the threat, weaponize panic, and consolidate the power.
Fast forward to 2026. Same drugs. Different weapons.
Algorithms, A.I., corporate globalization, and media propaganda decide what we see, what we fear, and what we believe.
Mind control no longer needs secret programs—it lives in our phones, our feeds, our metrics. We are overstimulated, isolated, medicated, and still unwell. Anxiety is epidemic. Loneliness is structural. Meaning is diluted by design. The culture is unraveling in plain sight.
And into the void, psychedelics return.
Not as liberation, but as product. Prescribed, branded, monetized. Funded by venture capital. Microdosed in boardrooms. A sacrament once meant to dissolve the ego is repackaged to optimize it.
The Divine Rascal isn't nostalgia about hippies. It’s a warning.
The same system that erased Hollingshead is still deciding who controls consciousness and who disappears when the truth becomes inconvenient.
This series isn’t about whether LSD “works.” It’s about what happens when the trip ends and you come back down to a world that is still the same, but you're not.
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.
Hollingshead had the right drug in the wrong decade, but he wasn’t wrong about the power or controversy it would inspire for generations to come.
THE STORY
The country is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Civil rights erupting. Vietnam is escalating. The shiny illusion of the American Dream is coming apart at the seams, exposing a rot underneath that feels disturbingly familiar to today.
And into that chaos step two men, each unraveling, neither knowing how badly they need each other.
Hollingshead
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leary
Michael Hollingshead is a failing writer drifting through Greenwich Village and drinking too much as rejection slips pile up. His marriage to Sophie—a jazz singer and civil-rights activist—is collapsing under debt, disappointment, and a baby on the way. Staring down fatherhood, Michael is terrified of being trapped in a useless and inconsequential life.
Desperate, Michael forges a prescription for an experimental new drug called LSD. An enormous accidental dose traps him in a twelve-hour collapse of time and memory that rewires his soul; how he sees his past, his failures, his divinity. God.
When the drug finally releases him, he emerges with a single purpose: use LSD to change the world—
But he needs someone to help usher in this revolution. Armed with 5,000 hits in a mayonnaise jar, he leaves Sophie and newborn Vanessa and heads to Harvard.
Sophie
There he meets Dr. Timothy Leary, a psychology professor drifting outside the lines with research into psilocybin mushrooms. Since his wife’s suicide, he’s raising two kids alone, and barely holding it together. His reputation is fragile. Academia feels small. He needs a breakthrough big enough to justify the risks he’s already taking—something undeniable.
Then Hollingshead walks into his office.
Leary senses both danger and possibility. This manic Brit might be carrying the breakthrough he's been circling for years. But warned Hollingshead is a con-artist, Leary brings in his trusted assistant, Dr. Richard Alpert.
Dr. Richard Alpert
Despite Alpert's misgivings, Leary takes his first hit of LSD.
In that moment, Hollingshead and Leary see in each other a way out of the lives they’re trapped in.
Together, they spark a revolution the country is starving for—and one the government has spent decades trying to contain.
MICHAEL HOLLINGSHEAD — THE DIVINE RASCAL
With too much charm and too much pain, Michael believes the drug in his jar can end all suffering—including his own.
Raised by a violent alcoholic father in the coal pits of England, Michael learned early how to survive by becoming whatever the moment required. Manipulator. Chameleon. Charlatan.
Beaten and dumped into a boarding school for devious boys, those skills will save him growing up. But as a man, they are his prison.
Ostracized by England’s class divide and a string of literary failures, Michael arrives in Greenwich Village desperate to matter.
He moves effortlessly between Beatnik poetry salons, working-class bars, and Upper East Side penthouses.
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 leave.
At home his unfinished novel mocks him. He drinks. His marriage implodes. And his newborn daughter cries in his arms. His greatest fear is that he will disappear without ever meaning anything.
One trip on LSD illuminates his childhood revealing who he might have been without the violence.
At his core is a cosmic loneliness he tries to fill with women, booze, and drugs. But when they stop working, he becomes a wrecking ball and sabotages everything.
But his greatest tragedy is that the enlightenment he guides thousands of others to find he will never find for himself again.
Before LSD
After LSD
DR TIMOTHY LEARY — THE HIGH PRIEST
A handsome mess of a man, “Tim” cannot tolerate insignificance.
At Harvard, he wears power well: tailored suits, tenure, a polished smile. Students listen. Colleagues tolerate him. But inside he’s restless and angry. Psychiatry has calcified into pencil-pushing shrinks medicating patients into obedience. The field has failed the mind, and he is one who will fix it.
Then his wife kills herself.
Terrified of scandal, he runs to Italy, dragging with him his two children that he barely knows how to love. He numbs himself with wine, pills, and hookers. Richard Alpert, his devoted research assistant, is the only one who can get him back to Harvard and a life that once made Leary feel alive. But it still isn’t enough.
Then Hollingshead arrives.
Leary’s first LSD trip reveals more about the human condition than he can hold. Instead of humbling him, it crowns him LSD's interpreter, with a singular goal: to prove one twelve-hour trip can do what twelve years of psychotherapy never could.
From that conviction, a movement forms. Leary persuades a restless generation that they've been sleepwalking through their lives. Turn on, tune in, drop out becomes his rallying call—and they listen.
As the counterculture swells against the government, Leary steps into his role as its High Priest.
Leary's tragedy isn’t that he reaches too high. It’s that he never stops long enough to confront his brokenness underneath.
Before LSD
After LSD
HOLLINGSHEAD & LEARY — THE RELATIONSHIP
It begins as a genuine partnership. One wants to rewire the soul. One wants to rewire the culture.
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Two men recognize each other instantly—not as rivals—but as missing pieces. Hollingshead brings LSD and the courage to use it. Leary brings a lab, student guinea pigs, and a door that opens. Neither can move without the other.
Hollingshead guides the sessions. He set the dosage by instinct—or by how pretty they are—and keeps the participants alive as they trip through terror and breakthrough.
Leary observes, records, and translates—shaping experience into language, data, and theory. Art and science fuse together.
Then the fault lines harden.
Pressure closes in. Harvard demands structure. The press demands clarity. And the government watches. Someone has to make the work defensible. Leary steps into that role—simplifying the message, setting boundaries, taking control.
But Michael’s contribution can’t be cited or published. His artistry leaves no data. What once made the work authentic now makes it dangerous.
Hollingshead accuses Leary of stealing his vision. Leary casts Michael as unstable and compromised—possibly colluding with the government.
When a black CIA sedan arrives, Hollingshead is removed. No charges. No explanation.
The Divine Rascal is a two-hander where every victory for the revolution is a loss for the men who created it.
SOPHIE HOLLINGSHEAD — THE SKEPTICAL ACTIVIST
Sophie is the grounding force in a world spinning off its axis.
A sultry jazz singer in Greenwich Village, she commands the room. The moment her hands hit the keys, she knows exactly who she is. Offstage, that certainty is harder to keep up.
Unlike the men around her, Sophie doesn’t chase escape. She stays rooted. She fights for Black musicians, for women's rights, for a future that doesn’t require self-destruction. She is often the only adult in the room.
Then she meets Michael. Life becomes loud, dangerous, alive. But he also comes with infidelities, too much drinking, the obsession with LSD that consumes everything.
When she gets pregnant with Vanessa, she wants to be a mom but without being trapped in the suffocating role of a 1960s housewife.
When Vanessa accidentally eats the acid-laced sugar cubes and nearly dies, Sophie makes a choice for survival; hers and her little girl’s—the first domino to fall in the erasure of Michael Hollingshead.
Sophie is the conscience of The Divine Rascal, not as hero, but as victim to what revolutions cost the people forced to hold them together.
Without Sophie, the story becomes nothing but a myth—and the men are forgiven.
Before Michael
After Michael
DR RICHARD ALPERT — THE MISFIT DISCIPLE
Born into a life of privilege, private planes and fast cars, "Dick" has been groomed for success. Disciplined and impeccably credentialed he grew up to excel in every way, but he never feels like he belongs. A closeted homosexual, he hides his longing beneath intellect and materialism.
At Harvard, he falls hard for Tim academically and emotionally, and becomes Tim's protector and financial lifeline.
Dick is the bridge between Tim’s ambition and Michael’s bravado—holding the operation together.
As the movement grows and he sees his role diminished, he finds himself at a personal crossroads, ultimately leaving for India.
He's the only one who carries the movement’s lasting truth forward, a freedom that comes from discipline, not chemistry. He will return from India as Ram Dass: not cured, but closer to self-acceptance.
Before LSD
After LSD
ADDITIONAL CHARACTERS
DR. SYDNEY GOTTLIEB — THE CIA MASTERMIND OF MK-ULTRA
A methodical, clubfooted, CIA chemist with a stutter, Gottlieb believes freewill is an illusion and obedience can be engineered.
Growing up knowing he could never control the body he was given—he mastered the one thing he could: his mind.
As the architect of MK-ULTRA, he systematically overdoses people with LSD, isolates them, strips them of all identity, and files the damage away as acceptable loss.
Where others chase enlightenment, Gottlieb pursues control. His aim is not healing or awakening, it's conditioning.
He isn’t outside the system. He is exactly what the system asked for.
GEORGE WHITE — THE ENFORCER
Gottlieb's’ right-hand and MK-ULTRA’s hatchet man, White is a once failed narcotics agent shaped by organized crime, humiliation, and mob violence.
He believes shame breaks people faster than fists. And it never leaves marks.
Given immunity under the CIA’s Operation Midnight Climax, White runs safehouses where sex, drugs, and surveillance turn intimacy into psychological violence and control.
He doesn’t seek information, he seeks domination. Gottlieb designs the experiment, White makes it hurt.
JUNE BAILEY – SOPHIE’S BEST FRIEND
A Black jazz singer drifting through Greenwich Village, June’s voice is smoke and ache, shaped by lost dreams and addiction. She survives on talent, charm, and whatever the nights are willing to give. Not just a bandmate, she's Sophie's best friend, considered family . Together, they move through the Village watching each other’s backs in a scene that takes far more than it gives.
When George White targets her, she mistakes control for protection and is abducted into MK-ULTRA—drugged, erased, and discarded.
June’s murder proves what the psychedelic revolution costs people without power.
SEASON ONE—OVERVIEW
TEASER
LONDON 1966
Hollingshead's got all of Carnaby Street by the psychedelic balls.
In his raccoon coat, pink sunglasses, and Tibetan beanie he hosts another spectacular LSD party. Famous faces drift through the haze. Rock gods, filmmakers, and poets kneel at the altar of revelation...
Upstate New York, 1966
When—BANG. Scotland Yard busts in. Michael runs for the loo and flushes the drugs.
They kick down the door and cuff him—his pants still around his ankles. As they drag him away, he catches his reflection in the mirror: electric, defiant, chosen.
At the same time, at Millbrook Mansion, in upstate New York, Leary is guiding one of his own LSD sessions. Artists and acolytes hang on his every word... When—BANG. 22 Federal agents storm the place, cuff him and take him away.
The former partners now alone in their cells, an ocean between them.
EPISODES ONE / TWO
NEW YORK CITY, 1960
With no money, no job, and his marriage on rocky ground, Hollingshead's mentor Aldous Huxley, insists that he get hold of a new, untested chemical called LSD.
Hollingshead forges a prescription. The drug arrives, he takes his first dose and is reborn. Meanwhile Sophie is all alone giving birth to Vanessa. Michael rushes to her side, still vibrating with revelation. He tries to convince her he's found something bigger—a way to save the world.
Meanwhile the façade of his picturesque life comes crashing down after his wife's suicide. He flees to Italy to avoid professional embarrassment and personal responsibility. He is lifted from his lowest point when Alpert insists he come back home to Harvard.
With five thousand hits of LSD stashed in an old mayonnaise jar, Hollingshead arrives at Harvard uninvited. Desperate to convert Leary to his cause, he’s dismissed as a madman—until Hollingshead threatens to kill himself and nearly proves it. Leary relents and takes the LSD. The trip that follows breaks binds the two men with a shared revelation.
Leary makes the reckless decision: Hollingshead stays and so does the jar.
EPISODES THREE / FOUR
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Hollingshead and Leary introduce LSD into Harvard's Ivy towers. The effects are immediate. Minds open. Authority loosens. Something electric begins to spread. Harvard hums with student’s transformations. The experiment is now a revolution—one the CIA has already flagged.
Leary brings in Alpert, to further the cause. Along with his money, Alpert loyalty and a resentment towards Leary’s fascinating new companion.
When they break protocol and push beyond the limits of the law and traditional academia, they're expelled from Harvard’s hallowed grounds.
The trio disband temporarily—until Michael finds a solution to their persecution. They need a haven, far from red tape and prying eyes.
Meanwhile, Gottlieb, head of MK-ULTRA and his enforcer, George White sees Leary and Hollingshead’s public crusade as a massive liability. Their mission: silence the revolutions loudest voices.
EPISODES FIVE / SIX
MILLBOOK MANSION
Branded heretics, the trio move into a rotting 64-room mansion—bought with Alpert’s money and transformed into something unclassifiable: part commune, part research lab, part mystical madhouse.
LSD, speed, and marijuana fill the drawers. Monkeys swing from banisters. The line between science and art has completely disappeared.
Hollingshead and Leary come into their power. Hollingshead: the greatest trip guide of all time. Leary: the voice of a generation. The Mansion is now the beating heart of a revolution, inspiring The Beatles to go from
"I Want to Hold Your Hand" to "I Am the Walrus."
And the Feds watch from the trees. Phones are tapped. Files are built. The FBI knows every name on the guest list. Inside the house, the cracks widen. Leary wants control and message discipline. Alpert wants to belong. And Hollingshead, as he is slowly cast out, drinks and trips to oblivion, refusing to listen to anyone.
And then it happens: Michael 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, in the middle of the night, grabs Vanessa and leaves.
The Millbrook spell is broken. Alpert flees for India. Leary scrambles into damage control, and as the CIA tighten their grip—Michael disappears.
Days later, Michael boards the QE1, sailing to England with ten thousand 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 brink of its own awakening, Hollingshead steps into the open. His promise to turn on the world is no longer fantasy—it’s a reckoning.
Leary may think he’s erased him—but this time, Hollingshead steps into the spotlight.
Enter: Season Two.
WHO GAVE IT TO PAUL?
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
