Trepidations Aside, ‘On the Road’ Becomes a Movie at Last
by SCOTT JAMES, nytimes.com
April 14th 2011
Scott James writes a column for The Bay Citizen.
A nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization providing local coverage of the San
Francisco Bay Area for The New York Times. To join the conversation about this
article, go to baycitizen.org.
Many consider Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” sacred text. The novel was, after
all, originally typed on a scroll.
Translated into 40 languages, millions of copies of the Beat generation classic
have sold worldwide since the novel was published in 1957, placing it among the
20th century’s most influential books.
When it comes to the big screen, however, “On the Road” has faced a Kerouac
curse. Past efforts by Hollywood to adapt the author’s work have been failures.
Now, somewhat quietly, “On the Road” has finally been made into a movie. The
$25 million production, shot in San Francisco, Montreal and other locales, is
scheduled for release this fall.
The movie is expected to be of keen interest in San Francisco where the Beats
and their old hangouts are a cottage industry. Each year, thousands of people
flock to North Beach to visit the City Lights bookstore and the bar Vesuvio or
to gawk at Kerouac artifacts in The Beat Museum.
But with so much interest comes anxiety.
Adapting any beloved book for film is perilous and apt to irk fans, especially
when it’s a literary classic where the language itself played a starring role —
something not easily translated onto the screen. “On the Road” is particularly
daunting since the provocative ideas that defined the novel — casual sex and
drug use and a rejection of materialism — are unlikely to raise eyebrows with
today’s multiplex audience.
The creative team from another counterculture road movie is leading the
project: the director Walter Salles and the screenwriter Jose Rivera from the
award-winning Che Guevara biopic “The Motorcycle Diaries.”
The cast is peppered with actors with box-office appeal, including Kristen
Stewart of “Twilight” fame, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen. The
two male leads, characters based on Kerouac and his fellow flâneur Neal
Cassady, are played by lesser-known actors, Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund.
In July, before filming began near the primary sets in Montreal, the cast and
crew went through Beat boot camp — three weeks of immersion with Kerouac
experts.
One “drill instructor” was Gerald Nicosia, author of “Memory Babe: A Critical
Biography of Jack Kerouac,” considered by many (including William S. Burroughs)
to be the definitive Kerouac account.
None of the cast and crew were old enough to remember the Beat era, so Mr.
Nicosia, of Corte Madera, approached the sessions as if he were teaching
ancient history, “like I was bringing them the Holy Grail.”
He said the actors were especially intense, knowing they would upset a lot of
people if they didn’t portray the characters accurately.
At the camp, Mr. Nicosia played an audio interview that he recorded in 1978
with Lu Anne Henderson, Neal Cassady’s young wife, on whom the book’s character
Marylou is based. That conversation is also the basis of “One and Only: The
Untold Story of ‘On The Road,’ ” a new book by Mr. Nicosia out this fall.
Could the cast and crew dig, er, relate?
“They’re all very unconventional in their own lives,” Mr. Nicosia said of the
actors. “If you’re an outsider, you understand what counterculture is about.”
This striving for authenticity is a stark contrast to many past efforts to film
Mr. Kerouac’s work.
His novel “The Subterraneans” about an interracial love affair was turned into
a 1960 movie starring George Peppard and Leslie Caron (note: they’re both
white). And in 1980 “Heart Beat,” about Kerouac’s life, was derided by critics
as having about as much literary substance as a Tic Tac.
Mr. Nicosia said concerns that “On the Road” would be similarly botched have
thwarted past attempts to make such a movie. (The film’s producers did not
respond to requests for comments.)
Concerns remain. Joanna McClure, a Beat poet who was immortalized as a
character in Kerouac’s novel “Big Sur,” is curious about the new film, but
said: “It was the writing that was so exciting. How do you make that into a
movie?”
Ms. McClure also wondered whether today’s young movie audience, which she
described as obsessed with “trying to get into corporations,” could grasp a
story about shunning worldly possessions.
“It must make a nice fairy tale for them to think about,” she said. “People
wished they lived in a world where that could happen.”
Yet in San Francisco such wishes still resonate.
Gravity Goldberg, editor of the local literary journal Instant City, said many
of the submissions she receives today are inspired by Kerouac.
“I think his influence, consciously or not, slips into the work of all these
semi-autobiographical bar-hopping, nirvana-through-a-bottle-of-J.D.-seeking
writers,” Ms. Goldberg said.
Whether Hollywood success finally comes, or not, the beat goes on.
Scott James is an Emmy-winning television journalist and novelist who lives in
San Francisco.
[email protected]
Original Page:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/us/15bcjames.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=nicosia&st=cse
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