Carlos Castaneda: Tricking the Reader and the Filmmaker

When I attended college, Carlos Castaneda was a very big deal indeed. As a student of anthropology at my very own school, UCLA, Castaneda had published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. This 1968 book, which earned a tidy fortune for the University of California Press, was billed as a work of non-fiction, in which a budding anthropologist travels to Mexico and encounters a shaman who instructs him in how to unlock the secrets of the universe. Anyone with a mystical bent (and there were lots of those people around in the Sixties) quickly climbed onto the Castenada bandwagon. Before leaving this mortal sphere in 1998—apparently from cancer, though this was not publicly acknowledged—he published abut ten books and accumulated a large and very loyal group of followers. Some of them disappeared at the time of his demise and were never seen again.

 From the beginning, some scholars doubted the veracity of Castaneda’s claims, though the power of his storytelling was never disputed. As time passed, there was an increasing sense that his works were pure fiction—and that some of his most dramatic anecdotes were plagiarized from a variety of sources. For decades, novelist Ru Marshall has been working on a Castaneda biography with a goal of sorting out the truth of Castaneda’s eventful life. One of my favorite groups, Biographers International Organization, granted Marshall the Hazel Rowley Prize for this ambitious biography-in-progress. It’s out now, under the title American Trickster: The Hidden Lives of Carlos Castaneda. Early reviews have been stellar: Publishers Weekly has praised Marshall for combining “a colorful account of Castaneda’s sly triumphs with shrewd analysis of the toxic psychodramas by which he overawed his followers. . . . In the portrait that emerges, Castaneda appears as captivating as Don Juan himself—a principal architect, for all his chicanery, of modern pop spirituality. This enthralls."

 Marshall was kind enough to send me an advance copy of American Trickster, partly because we’d both had a regrettable history with the University of California Press and partly because of my film background. It seems Castaneda had a lifelong passion for movies, particularly vampire and sci-fi flicks like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Quite surprisingly, he chose Rosemary’s Baby as the first film he ever screened for his five-year-old adopted son. He also relished chop-socky epics, with Jackie Chan and the films of John Woo being particular favorites. Hollywood, in turn, combed his writings for inspiration. George Lucas, for one, borrowed for Star Wars some of the father/son and mentor/acolyte dynamic revealed in Castaneda’s books  

 One of the most striking chapters in American Trickster involves the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, whose most celebrated works (like La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and 81/2) appeared before 1970. By the 1980s, Fellini became obsessed with the idea of filming Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan. He finally made contact with the author in 1984, and there evolved a plan to meet in the Sonoran desert for a close encounter with the shaman himself. But after elaborate preparation, a series of mysterious warning messages scared off Fellini and his growing entourage. The film was never made.

 Regarding Fellini, whom he calls “the master fantasist,” Marshall admits “some have speculated that he was the one behind the mysterious calls, the strange messages. But all the evidence points toward Carlos.”  Marshall’s conviction is that the warnings and weird demands received by Fellini and company were dreamed up by Carlos the trickster, who had no intention of allowing his most famous book to be filmed by anyone at all.