A packed San Francisco International Film Festival audience got a once-in-a-lifetime treat on Wednesday, April 28th as the event feted 2010 Founder's Directing Award winner Walter Salles with an onstage interview and screening. At most of these events, the screening is either an old favorite or something new, but Salles' brought something different.
The filmmaker. who for several years now has sought to bring Jack Kerouac's classic Beat Generation novel ON THE ROAD to the big screen, has collected around 100 hours of interviews, archival footage and more in preparation of his dream project. For his big night, Salles put together an hour of this material as a work-in-progress documentary, IN SEARCH OF ON THE ROAD.
Kerouac's book may well defeat Salles, as it has other directors, but at least he seems to have gotten a fantastic souvenir program out of it with the doc. True, the Kerouac and Beat Generation back story will be overly familiar to the novel's fans and observations from the likes of Johnny Depp and Sean Penn add absolutely nothing to Kerouac's legend.
What fascinates are the tales of other filmmakers who have been involved with the project over the years. Kerouac himself - impressed by the Bob Dylan doc DON'T LOOK BACK - wanted documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker to have a go at it. In the early 1980s, French New Wave provocateur Jean-Luc Godard came to Hollywood to make it, intending to cast the 40-something Dennis Hopper as "young jailkid" Moriarty. Hopper is hilarious in Salles' doc, recounting how Godard fled California and the project before even meeting his star.
Francis Ford Coppola has owned the rights to ON THE ROAD for decades now, and one assumes that he is the one who went so far as to audition actors back in the '90s. Salles' film currently opens with a selection of these auditions and it is a who's who of the up-and-coming before they arrived: Matthew McConaughey, Brendan Fraser (the best of the lot, a reminder of how good he can be when he's engaged in better material than the kid flicks that have hijacked his career), Mira Sorvino, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ashley Judd, and Russell Crowe.
It is charming seeing these fresh-faced youth in a moment before they were stars, but it also underlines what a landmine filming this particular book will be. Put faces to protagonists Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and the characters become just another actor's exercise. Rob the story of its most striking feature, Kerouac's singular way with language, and it becomes just another road movie and not unlike a movie Salles' has already made, THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES.
Salles' enthusiasm for the project was palpable at the SFIFF screening, but so were his doubts. One has to wonder, is he really wedded to the idea of adapting a novel that may prove impervious to film or is he merely in love with the romance of the road? If it is the latter and THE MOTORCYCLE DIAIRIES didn't satisfy that itch, is ON THE ROAD the right way to go or is there a better way to catch its spirit than a literal translation of the novel?
Nine years ago, SFIFF screened AMERICAN SAINT, a comedy by Joseph Castelo that distilled Kerouac's essence with a light touch in a story about a New York cabbie driving an actor across country to an audition for a Kerouac biopic. That movie, starring the late Vincent Schiavelli as the driver and Kevin Corrigan as the actor, may be as close to ON THE ROAD as anyone's likely to get.
Rudy Wurlitzer (who appears in Salles' doc) is another filmmaker who comes close with CANDY MOUNTAIN, co-directed with photographer Robert Frank (who made the 1959, Kerouac-penned short "Pull My Daisy"), a drama in which Kevin J. O'Connor hits the highway in search of a legendary guitar maker. In this year's SFIFF, Mike Ott's LITTLEROCK takes places mostly within the city limits of its titular desert town instead of on the road, but it captures Kerouac's spirit of Americana in its story of two Japanese tourists' unexpected stop over.
Before Salles spends millions of dollars making a movie that likely will never live up to its source material, he might want to consider those movies and others like them. There are ways to hit the highway without being ON THE ROAD. (Pam Grady)
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The filmmaker. who for several years now has sought to bring Jack Kerouac's classic Beat Generation novel ON THE ROAD to the big screen, has collected around 100 hours of interviews, archival footage and more in preparation of his dream project. For his big night, Salles put together an hour of this material as a work-in-progress documentary, IN SEARCH OF ON THE ROAD.
Kerouac's book may well defeat Salles, as it has other directors, but at least he seems to have gotten a fantastic souvenir program out of it with the doc. True, the Kerouac and Beat Generation back story will be overly familiar to the novel's fans and observations from the likes of Johnny Depp and Sean Penn add absolutely nothing to Kerouac's legend.
What fascinates are the tales of other filmmakers who have been involved with the project over the years. Kerouac himself - impressed by the Bob Dylan doc DON'T LOOK BACK - wanted documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker to have a go at it. In the early 1980s, French New Wave provocateur Jean-Luc Godard came to Hollywood to make it, intending to cast the 40-something Dennis Hopper as "young jailkid" Moriarty. Hopper is hilarious in Salles' doc, recounting how Godard fled California and the project before even meeting his star.
Francis Ford Coppola has owned the rights to ON THE ROAD for decades now, and one assumes that he is the one who went so far as to audition actors back in the '90s. Salles' film currently opens with a selection of these auditions and it is a who's who of the up-and-coming before they arrived: Matthew McConaughey, Brendan Fraser (the best of the lot, a reminder of how good he can be when he's engaged in better material than the kid flicks that have hijacked his career), Mira Sorvino, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Ashley Judd, and Russell Crowe.
It is charming seeing these fresh-faced youth in a moment before they were stars, but it also underlines what a landmine filming this particular book will be. Put faces to protagonists Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, and the characters become just another actor's exercise. Rob the story of its most striking feature, Kerouac's singular way with language, and it becomes just another road movie and not unlike a movie Salles' has already made, THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES.
Salles' enthusiasm for the project was palpable at the SFIFF screening, but so were his doubts. One has to wonder, is he really wedded to the idea of adapting a novel that may prove impervious to film or is he merely in love with the romance of the road? If it is the latter and THE MOTORCYCLE DIAIRIES didn't satisfy that itch, is ON THE ROAD the right way to go or is there a better way to catch its spirit than a literal translation of the novel?
Nine years ago, SFIFF screened AMERICAN SAINT, a comedy by Joseph Castelo that distilled Kerouac's essence with a light touch in a story about a New York cabbie driving an actor across country to an audition for a Kerouac biopic. That movie, starring the late Vincent Schiavelli as the driver and Kevin Corrigan as the actor, may be as close to ON THE ROAD as anyone's likely to get.
Rudy Wurlitzer (who appears in Salles' doc) is another filmmaker who comes close with CANDY MOUNTAIN, co-directed with photographer Robert Frank (who made the 1959, Kerouac-penned short "Pull My Daisy"), a drama in which Kevin J. O'Connor hits the highway in search of a legendary guitar maker. In this year's SFIFF, Mike Ott's LITTLEROCK takes places mostly within the city limits of its titular desert town instead of on the road, but it captures Kerouac's spirit of Americana in its story of two Japanese tourists' unexpected stop over.
Before Salles spends millions of dollars making a movie that likely will never live up to its source material, he might want to consider those movies and others like them. There are ways to hit the highway without being ON THE ROAD. (Pam Grady)
source
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