This fall, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” will finally hit the big screen, directed by Walter Salles and written by Jose Rivera, both of whom worked on The Motorcycle Diaries. Sam Riley stars as Sal Paradise and Garrett Hedlund is Dean Moriarty. Viggo Mortensen took on the William Burroughs-inspired character Old Bull Lee. Over at the Bay Citizen, Scott James updates us on the undertaking, including efforts the cast and crew are making not to fuck up this iconic work of the counterculture. Indeed, the actors and crew even went through a Kerouac “boot camp” led by the likes of Gerald Nicosia, author of the definitive Kerouac bio “Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac.” From the Bay Citizen:
None of the cast and crew were old enough to remember the Beat era, so Nicosia, of Corte Madera, approached the sessions as if he were teaching ancient history, “like I was bringing them the Holy Grail.”
He said the actors were especially intense, knowing they would upset a lot of people if they didn’t portray the characters accurately.
At the camp, Nicosia played an audio interview that he recorded in 1978 with Lu Anne Henderson, Neal Cassady’s young wife, on whom the book’s character Marylou is based. That conversation is also the basis of “One and Only: The Untold Story of ‘On The Road,’” a new book by Nicosia out this fall.
Could the cast and crew dig, er, relate?
“They’re all very unconventional in their own lives,” Nicosia said of the actors. “If you’re an outsider, you understand what counterculture is about.”
“‘On the Road’ Becomes a Movie at Last”