(photo by Thomas Hawk)

This must be the week for the movies. The Independent is reporting that On the Road may finally—after more than fifty years—see its coming of age to the big screen as early as sometime next year. And who’s behind it? Walter Salles, who directed The Motorcycle Diaries and who seems quialified, and Francis Ford Coppola, who has seen this project die in his arms more than a few times over the last thirty years.

For now, I’m leaning towards this one having a decent (at least) shot at being successful. It seems to me that everyone involved with the project has done his homework, potentially working to create something that we’ll all like and—more importantly—approve of.

From The Independent:

It’s a considerable irony that Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks: its screen adaptation has been almost 30 years in the works. Rather at odds with Kerouac’s so-called “spontaneous prose” style, attempts to film this defining novel of the Beat Generation have been mired in development hell ever since Francis Ford Coppola bought the rights in 1979. Since then, the book that William Burroughs said “sent countless kids on the road” has been left stranded at the side of Hollywood’s highway. Still, with a tentative release date of 2009, it finally seems that 52 years after its publication, On the Road , the movie, will finally be motoring.

For the past three years, the Brazilian-born Walter Salles, whose new film, Linha de Passe, is released this month, has been working on a version that he hopes to “be shooting either at the end of this year or the beginning of the next”. But will it happen? The story of two drifters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty – thinly veiled portrayals of the author and his friend, Beat icon Neal Cassady – Kerouac’s episodic account of his seven-year span of road trips across America has defied attempts to bring it to the big screen. “It doesn’t have a plot,” says poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “It was a road novel – a picaresque, like Don Quixote.”

(photo by jurek d.)

I’m personally on the fence about whether or not anyone will ever try to make another movie about the Beat Generation. But today two blogs are reporting that Howl, a movie about the life and obscene times of Allen Ginsberg, is currently underway.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

Howl won’t really be “about” the classic Allen Ginsberg poem, but a bio-pic of Ginsberg himself, the obscenity trial that the poem and poet were subjected to, and that whole Beat Generation milieu. James Franco is slated to star as Ginsberg (a bold choice, but a savvy one), with Mary-Louise Parker, Alan Alda, Paul Rudd, David Strathairn and Jeff Daniels on board. If they’re not “the best minds of my generation,” they’re close.

Gus Van Sant will produce, with a couple of documentarians currently on tap to direct the film about the 50 year old poem that sort of launched the 1960s.

Jeff Daniels and Gus Van Sant, really? I just don’t think so.

Devin Faraci, over at Chud, is reporting similar news:

Howl started life when the Allen Ginsberg Trust approached Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, directors of the documentary The Celluloid Closet, to make a film honoring the poem’s fiftieth birthday. This will be their first narrative feature.

So if the movie is about the trail surrounding Ginsberg’s obscenity charges, what about the poem itself? In a cool move, the filmmakers have hired Eric Drooker (who has illustrated Ginsberg poems before. He also designed the cover of Faith No More’s King For a Day… Fool For a Lifetime and got some acclaim with his wordless graphic novel FLOOD! A Novel In Pictures) to create an animated interpretation of the poem.

For my money this is the kind of movie news people should be getting excited about, not the most insane rumors of who will play Captain America.

He seems to have the idea that Howl will focus more on the obscenity trials surrounding the poem. And if so, I think that there is something—enough, at least—to make a decent movie out of. But maybe I’m just keeping my fingers crossed and being blindly optimistic.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

From Time:

Oregon State Hospital, the mental institution where the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was filmed, is making way for a new complex. Most of the dilapidated, 125-year-old main building will be torn down and replaced starting this fall.

Although mean Nurse Ratched was pure fiction, the Oregon State Hospital has struggled with some very real troubles over the years, including overcrowding, crumbling floors and ceilings, outbreaks of scabies and stomach flu, sexual abuse of children by staff members, and patient-on-patient assaults.

Politicians had been talking for years about the need to replace the hospital, but didn’t get serious about it until a group of legislators made a grim discovery during a 2004 tour: the cremated remains of 3,600 mental patients in corroding copper canisters in a storage room. The lawmakers were stunned.

“Nobody said anything to anybody,” said Oregon Senate President Peter Courtney, who dubbed the chamber “the room of lost souls.”

(full article)

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Prolific Beat era artist Bruce Conner dies Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Bruce Conner, a San Francisco artist renowned for working fluently across media, died at his home of natural causes on Monday. He was 74.

Mr. Conner was one of the last survivors of the Bay Area Beat era art scene that included Jay DeFeo (1929-1989), Wallace Berman (1926-1976), and Wally Hedrick (1928-2003).

“We were all anonymous artists here in the ’50s,” Mr. Conner told The Chronicle in 2000, shortly before the opening of his retrospective “2000: BC The Bruce Conner Story, Part II,” at the de Young Museum.

Despite an enviably long record of gallery and museum exhibitions, Mr. Conner met with little recognition outside the worlds of contemporary art and independent film.

Born in McPherson, Kan., in 1933, Mr. Conner arrived in San Francisco in 1957. Schooled in art at Wichita University, the University of Nebraska and Brooklyn Art School, Mr. Conner first got noticed for the short films he assembled from scavenged documentary and B-movie footage. Several of his films, including “A Movie” (1958), a sort of paean to human failure, and “Crossroads” (1977), are regarded as classics of independent filmmaking, even though Mr. Conner shot no original footage for them.

“Crossroads” replays, at ever slower speeds, official footage of a hydrogen bomb detonation on Bikini Atoll, until repetition – 27 times – and slow motion transfigure its colossal destructiveness into something hypnotically beautiful.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Conner made grotesque assemblages out of common household objects that ridicule consumer society’s attachment to personal possession, including more precious sorts of artwork. They remain some of the most powerful inventions of their kind in American art.

He went on to make obsessively detailed abstract drawings, large-scale photograms (with the help of Edmund Shea) in which his figure appears made of light, and collages of old wood engravings in the manner of Surrealist Max Ernst.

Mr. Conner never stayed with one medium for long, resisting the art world’s inclination to identify every artist with a style and a biographical myth.

Asked once by a critic to mention some artists who influenced him, Mr. Conner said, “I typed out about 250 names,” and instructed the writer to add that “limited space prevents us from printing the remaining 50,003 names on Mr. Conner’s list of influences.”

Mr. Conner announced his own death erroneously on two occasions, once sending an obituary to a national art magazine, and later writing a self-description for the biographical encyclopedia Who Was Who in America.

Mr. Conner is survived by Jean Conner, his wife of more than 50 years, and a son, Robert.

No memorial event is planned as yet.