Film recalls area travels of Beat Generation
by Steve Block, trinidad-times.com
Jack Kerouac was a writer whose book On the Road was an inspiration to many
young Americans during the Beat Generation of the 1950s. A new documentary
film, The Night of the Wolfeans, not yet completed but scheduled for release in
September, profiles the travels of Kerouac and his friends as they traveled
through the Trinidad and Raton area.
The Beat Generation and what it meant to American society will be the subject
of an event to be held at the A.R. Mitchell Gallery and Museum Tuesday, May 17.
The event, “On (and off) the Road,” will be held simultaneously in two states,
with presentations in Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Trinidad, Raton and Clayton.
One of the film’s producers, Joe Tarabino of Trinidad, is coordinating the
event and held a press conference Tuesday. Tarabino said the point of the
documentary film project is to depict the locations Kerouac and his friends
experienced while traveling through here in the pre-interstate highway days of
the post-World War II era. The group was traveling from Denver to San Antonio
and stopped at a restaurant named Reno’s in Raton. Reno’s was located where the
Visitors Center is today, at the junction of Second Avenue and Clayton Road.
Kerouac stopped for a meal late at night and Reno’s was the only 24 hour-a-day
restaurant in Raton at that time, Tarabino said.
The Beat Generation was typified by counter-culture thought and alternative
lifestyles. It’s adherents, including Kerouac and his friends Hal Chase and
poet Allen Ginsburg, rejected the conventions and mores of the 1950s in favor
of more introspective yet freewheeling lifestyle. These attitudes led the
“beatniks,” as they were often called, to take off on long road trips across
North America. The idea was to get in touch with a more authentic America than
the staid and sober one they left behind.
Kerouac’s legendary work On the Road was actually written in the early 1950s,
Tarabino said, though it was not published until 1957. The book became an
instant classic and inspired many of the young people who would take part in
the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.
Film producer and director Francis Ford Coppola owns the movie rights to
Kerouac’s book, and in 2008 Coppola’s production company, American Zoetrope,
began looking for locations where the movie version of the book might be
filmed. Film location scout Greg Chiodo contacted the Trinidad/Las Animas
County Film Commission, for which Tarabino is community liaison contact. He
helped Chiodo scout 18 locations in Trinidad during a three-day visit.
Then nothing happened. The film project was dropped.
It was revived in 2010, though without filming in the area locations that
Tarabino had helped scout. The movie, with the same title as the book is
scheduled for release in November.
Meanwhile, the locally produced The Night of the Wolfeans depicts many of the
sites Tarabino helped scout. He didn’t want to waste all the work and research
that had gone into the earlier scouting, and the idea of creating a documentary
film. Blogs will be posted in association with the film. The release of the
documentary is being timed to coincide with the expected media blitz for the
release of the movie version of On the Road. Tarabino said he and the other
members of the documentary’s production team wanted to include what would be
left out of Coppola’s movie.
“We have a theory that the book is more of an archeologist’s field journal than
it is a novel,” Tarabino said. “He was writing as he was doing these things. If
he were writing On the Road today it would be blogged. He had the immediate
response to what was going on, so he was doing something like what an
archeologist does when he’s observing everything around him and saying, ‘Wow,
look at all this stuff.’ He’s also learning to understand himself in the
process.
“What he would have seen coming through is a change from an urban environment
to a rural environment. He would have been going from a modern world to an
older world. As he was coming down Highway 85/87, he would have seen Huerfano
Butte. He would have seen old farms and ranches. It would have been like
entering a new world for a kid from New York. This would be the real Wild West.
By the time he got to Capulin Mesa he would have been way back, in his mind, in
history, probably imagining ‘Wow, this is before the Indians. This is
creation.’ So in a way he travels back in time until he gets to Mexico, and
when he gets to Mexico, he’s among the Native Americans, the early primitives.
His book is not about the nation of America; it’s about the continent of North
America. Kerouac was French-Canadian, so he had Canadian sensibilities,
American sensibilities and Mexican sensibilities. This is a cultural tour back
in time to primitive Mexico. We treated it almost like an anthropological
journal.”
Tarabino said he traveled through the area Kerouac had visited, along with Kim
Krisco and Doug Holdred, his collaborators on the film project. They talked
about Kerouac’s book as they traveled, trying to imagine how Kerouac would have
felt on the journey. In following the great writer’s path, they found the
inspiration to create The Night of the Wolfeans.
Original Page:
http://trinidad-times.com/film-recalls-area-travels-of-beat-generation-p1907-1.htm
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