Jack Kerouac
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Long and Winding Road
Long atop the list of the best unfilmed novels, Jack Kerouac’s totemic Beat text On the Road has, after 55 years, made it to the big screen, directed by Walter Salles and with a cast led by Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart and Kirsten Dunst. The film’s executive producer, Francis Ford Coppola, originally optioned the book in 1980 and had previously hired such writers as Russell Banks and Michael Herr to adapt it. In 2004, he saw Salles’ biopic about the young Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries — a period road movie about idealistic, politicized young men — and […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 29, 2013 -
Rob Epstein And Jeffrey Friedman, Howl
How do you make a narrative film about a long, difficult poem? Jean Cocteau’s legendary Blood of the Poet gives it a go I suppose, but its style departs from the conventions of narrative very early on for something more willfully avant-garde. Poetry just doesn’t lend itself to shot reverse shot and one hundred and eighty degree director’s lines. This clearly difficult task didn’t daunt veteran documentarians Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, however; they took up the challenge as they made the jump to narrative in Howl, a thoughtful meditation on the early life and seminal work of Allen Ginsberg. […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 22, 2010
