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Taking the cinematic plunge is Francis Ford Coppola. His production company, American Zoetrope, has owned the rights to On the Road since 1979. After several false starts, he appears finally to have given the film the green light with casting and pre-production set to begin early next year. The book is a thinly disguised autobiographical account of Kerouac’s boozy hitch-hiking adventures across the US and Mexico in the early fifties. It is narrated by his alter-ego, Sal Paradise, who travels with his womanising and irrepressible friend, Dean Moriarty — in real life Neal Cassady. Excitement about the film is growing with the Coppola’s final choice of director and writer. Respectively they will be Walter Salles and Jose Rivera, who recently both created another road movie of considerable success — The Motorcycle Diaries, chronicling the journeys of a young Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara through South America, also in the 1950s, before he became the leftist revolutionary icon of Cuba. The rumour now is that the lead role will go instead to stage and film actor Billy Crudup. Born in 1922, Kerouac died, allegedly from alcoholism, in 1969, by then the acclaimed leader of the Beat Generation, but always a reluctant one. "He never wanted to be part of a cultural movement," Garry Snyder, a poet who shared his home with Kerouc, commented recently. "He wanted to be a writer". Others in Kerouac’s
entourage of West Coast, counter-culture friends included Allen Ginsberg,
the poet of Howl fame, and William S. — The Independent |
Nearly
half a century after it was written by Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation
classic On the Road is finally headed for the cinema. The long
wait has only heightened the expectations of a project that will always
run the risk of disappointing the millions of Kerouac disciples for whom
the book, published in 1957, was an almost sacred text of rebellious
self-discovery and literary exuberance.