Rainbow Bridge is a 1971 film directed by Chuck Wein centering on the late 1960s counterculture on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

A documentary film, titled Music, Money, Madness ... Jimi Hendrix in Maui, about the making of Rainbow Bridge was released on November 20, 2020.

[1][2] Faced with a serious cash flow problem, Hendrix manager Michael Jeffery approached Reprise Records parent Warner Bros. with an idea for a youth film.

[3] While in Maui, Jeffery met Mike Hynson, star of The Endless Summer surf epic, and wanted to develop a film.

"[8] Harry Shapiro adds, "the idea was to shoot an antidote to Easy Rider, showing the positive side of the youth movement.

"[9] Wein and art director Melinda Merryweather "invited outrageous people to portray themselves in Rainbow Bridge.

They included dope smugglers, priests and nuns, acidheads, gays, groupies, environmentalists, and a group who claimed to be from Venus", according to Hendrix biographer Steven Roby.

Although Wein claimed that all of the usable footage of Hendrix was included in the film,[14] full-length performances of "Dolly Dagger" and "Villanova Junction" (both from the second set) have appeared on bootleg videos.

"[8] He adds that it was "so drug-addled, pseudo-mystical and stuffed with narcissistic, self-important onscreen hippies that the only hope of saving it indeed was to put Hendrix on celluloid".

[15] Writing for AllMusic, critic Bruce Eder comments, "Hendrix plays some superb music in the concert sequence that concludes this documentary—the rest is all devoted to pre-new-age mumbo-jumbo at a Hawaiian retreat".