Courtney Stephens, Michael Almereyda Team For Doc On Controversial Scientist John C. Lilly
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Indie filmmakers Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda are teaming to direct a new documentary about controversial scientist John C.
Lilly, Deadline has learned. Funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the project will look at the countercultural figure’s work as the inventor of the isolation tank, as well as his pioneering studies of dolphin intelligence and support of psychedelics as a positive means for expanding consciousness.
The storytelling will be supported by interviews with Lilly’s contemporaries and colleagues, as well as extensive archival records.
Stephens was drawn to Lilly, having grown up near Marine World in the Bay Area, where the scientist worked with trained dolphins and computers in the early 1980s, hoping to teach the animals an Esperanto-like language that would allow for interspecies communication.
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