Movies evidently take a long time to get made. In 1995 I went to the open casting for American Zoetrope's version of Jack Kerouac's On The Road and did not get a part. Finally 17 years later I find out who did. At the open casting I attended we were told it was going to be Johnny Depp as Sal Paradise. He's played three writers since then: William Blake, JM Barrie and Hunter Thompson (twice) but not Kerouac.
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My own Kerouacian connections aren't deep but they do exist. When I used to live in Newburyport Mass I'd occasionally drive out to Lowell to join the motely collection of drifters, pseuds and lunatics at Kerouacs grave. When I lived in Denver, we'd often go to the bar of the Colburn where Ginsburg, Kerouac and Burroughs used to hang. And of course I went to see the scroll when it came to the Denver Public Library. The DPL also used to do a Beatnik tour of Denver which was pretty good but I don't know if that still runs now or not. Anyway here's the trailer:
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26 comments:
Random observation.
It's been years since I read On the Road and went through my Beat Generation phase. Hearing the narrator in the trailer say the roman candles quote:
"and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles"
it strikes me that he has a kind of excited energy when saying it. But I always felt that passage was filled with more sadness. Sal isn't excited to be a part of these great peoples lives but is sad that he can't be one of them. Like he knows something in him is missing and is aware of it. He *is* in awe of them but knows that he is different. Observing the moment is different then living the moment.
Maybe I'm misreading/mis-reading the text but that 's my take.
One of those was supposed to be misremembering
On the Road was one of those moments when I really felt out of step with the world. Just didn't get it.
But a buddy of mine wrote a novel about Kerouc looking for his Quebecois roots:
http://www.rayrobertson.com/whl.html
and at the launch there was an exibit of covers of On the Road from around the world and I figured, yeah, it's just me. I guess I better read it again.
Maybe I'll just see the movie ;)
I read it not that long ago for the first time. I didn't like it for a whole lot of reasons. I'd say it's because I'm a woman, but a lot of women seem to have been inspired by it too. But in the book, women do seem to represent all the values of staying in place and continuity that our protagonists despise.
Santa Cruz is in some ways the end of the road for On the Road. Metaphorically, but also literally. We had an event at the store a month or so ago--Gerald Nicosia for his book One and Only, which is a book abou Lu Anne Henderson, said to be the inspiration for much of the road trip. I didn't go, but the next day the staff was abuzz because Neal Cassady's daughter had shown up. She apparently lives up in the Santa Cruz mountains.
On The Road is one of the few books I have been unable to finish. Utter guff and a waste of ink and paper.
All that said, though, the movie does look kind of interesting.
And I will say that once I got over my initial distaste, I do see how this and all the road trip books and movies have worked to unify Americans' sense of America as a whole and not just a lot of different regions, while still celebrating the idiosyncratic in those places.
I, too, had my Kerouac phase. I once lent my paperback copy of "On the Road" to a drug-addled friend who dropped it in Walden Pond.
Re: Movies
Agreed, it's crazy. Four years ago we were told that the Coen Brothers were about to make an adaptation of Michael Chabon's tribute to Raymond Chandler, THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION.
Several of us who had read it, in a thread at the Cormac McCarthy Society, were delighted at the news and discussed the issues touched on in the novel: How the Holocaust wouldn't have happened had Churchill and Roosevelt not turned the Jews away when they were offered to them by Hitler, and what obligation, if any at all, we have to Israel's status quo today.
According to Scott Rudin, the movie was supposed to be the Coen Brothers' next protect after SERIOUS MAN, but apparently it has been sidetracked indefinitely.
It could be a timely and funny movie. Quirky, but a movie that might easily attain classic potential, a;ternate history sci-fi and a detective yarn with humor and a sense of humanity. But where the hell is it?
Re: ON THE ROAD
I too read it way back when, along with THE DHARMA BUMS and books on the beats in general. When the SCROLL was published recently, I read that too, with a harder look at the historical footnotes and a number of peripheral memoirs that have surfaced.
Kerouac himself wrote wiser but more obscure works as he himself matured. ON THE ROAD is a book about youth for youth, with its embedded addictions. It was written during a time of severe sexual repression, and thus it seemed liberating then but most of today's readers have no idea about that kind of atmospheric Puritianism.
And today we more clearly see the addictions and rationalizations of the historical players.
What lasts is their Walt Whitman-like sense of humanity.
Brian
I always felt that way when reading the book. Here's this great party going on that somehow I'm always missing out on.
John
It depends when you read it. Its probably the sort of thing you should read when very young.
Seana
Yes we've have this convo before. I think a useful antidote to On The Road is Rabbit Run. Maybe they should be read together or one after the other.
Remy
It just might not be for you. But millions of readers disagree. There's a nice bit in Gore Vidal's book Palimpsest about how he just didnt get Kerouac until one day he did.
There's a few nice vignettes about Vidal and Kerouac's complicated r'ship.
Peter
Funny.
Richard
That Yiddish Policeman film is clearly going to take decades to happen. Fortunately there is a new Michael Chabon film in cinemas right now: John Carter!
I liked Yiddish Policeman's U but my wife a Yiddish scholar felt that it might have helped if Chabon had actually learned Yiddish before embarking on the enterprise of writing a novel with Yiddish speaking characters.
I haven't read much Kerouac, but I did read a biography simply because the author, Tom Clark, also wrote a terrific book on the 70s Oakland A's called Champagne and Baloney. I didn't exactly get it but I would like to make those drives.
Matt
On a side note, I'm 100 pages into The Art Of Fielding and so far I'm pretty impressed and enjoying the book.
You're right that we went these rounds before and yet I still haven't read Rabbit Run. Maybe I should make it my Easter read.
I like this idea of On the Road and Rabbit Run being read together. When they both fall into the public domain I'm going to publish them together like those old Ace Double sci fi books.
I'll buy one when you do, John. Well, if I'm still around.
I read On The Road at the age of about 17 and was just mad about it. When you're young, occasionally something will come along that you'll just click with and love and it will just take over your whole brain and your whole life for a while. The same thing happened to me at various times as a youngster with The Pogues, and with Catcher In The Rye, and with Ernest Hemingway, and with the album Pills 'n' Thrills 'n' Bellyaches by Happy Mondays.
I went around raving to everyone I knew about On The Road, forcing my copy on them, making them read it, quoting from it, affecting or attempting to affect a Dean Moriarty way of speaking and acting, wearing a Kerouac t-shirt, writing my own execrable stream-of-consciousness prose, carrying (Christ!) a writer's notebook everywhere with me - the whole box and dice.
I have never gone back and re-read it. Can't quite put my finger on why. Possibly I don't want my fat, jaded 43 year old current self to find out that it is possibly no good, hence taking the gloss off my skinny, optimistic 17 year old self's love of it.
That's also, incidentally, why I haven't joined Facebook. Who wants to track down their teenage dream and find out that she's a chunky admin assistant with a bad haircut, married to a plumber and living in Wagga Wagga? Not me.
Adrian, you left out that you taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics....
I have a fondness for stories on the road like Their Eyes Were Watching God, or Canterbury Tales. I myself spent many years on the road meeting casts of characters. I was famous for my trips in certain circles.
I liked On the Road the first go-round because I was in Denver when I'd read it and I was on an adventure. Nothing as mad as the characters, mind you.
I recently tried re-reading it because there aren't a lot of bookstores in my neck of the woods that have english books. I couldn't finish it because it struck me as a manual on identifying bi-polar disorder. A little goes a long way.
Or perhaps it wasn't the right time for me. There was a prescient passage about Arabs blowing up buildings in New York City. Were Arabs always known as being destructive even in the 1950s??
John, Seana
A Rabbit Run/On The Road fusion in alternate chapters? Both authors arguing their point of view?
I think Kerouac would win but thats just me.
Macca
I think I was about 24 when I read it. Would it stand up all these years later? Its a good question. I think it might. I remember reading a selection of Kerouac's travel writing a few years ago and being impressed by it. I tried to read And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks in the library a year or so ago and hated it but thats an odd book, almost juvenalia.
Sheiler
I did teach at the Jack Kerouac School For Disembodied Poetics. Three different times actually. But my approach was very much the opposite of the school philosophy. I expected the students to have done the reading, I was really strict and pretty square and old school about the whole business. In a way that was a kind of counterculture at Naropa.
Or Updike and Kerouac could have used a common chapter and included it a book by each, the way Westlake would do with Joe Gores.
Back at my first newspaper, which would have staff members publish their picks for the week's football games and do so under an alias, my alias was Sal Paradise.
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