Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Filmmaker Chuck Workman on "The Source," his fawning tribute to the Beat generation.
Jun 2, 1999 | By now, Jack Kerouac is almost as famous for his Gap ad as he is for his books. And William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg are, to some, just those quirky writer guys whose closely timed deaths a couple of years ago sparked a flurry of reflective eulogies about alternative lifestyles in every newspaper across the country. Today all three are icons: Their names and faces are famous and their books are still selling well (even if they're not always as well-read as they are well-bought). Everybody knows who the Beats were, and Beat culture survives and thrives in modern manifestations of poetry readings and jazz jams. But the roots of the movement and the intoxicating words that ignited a generation of writers are less familiar, especially to audiences who've struggled helplessly through "Naked Lunch" or missed their "angry person with a copy of 'Howl'" phase.
Director Chuck Workman ("Superstar: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol") wants to change that. Starting with the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs in 1944 and going up to the present, Workman's documentary "The Source" traces the rise and continuing legacy of the Beats in an affectionate, appropriately dreamy and collagelike fashion. Using the original holy trinity as his anchor, he threads in vintage clips of other Beat writers, jazz and pop music, and contemporary interviews with Burroughs, Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Phillip Glass and a host of other writers and thinkers.
And, just to remind you of what all the fuss was originally about, he offers Johnny Depp reading from "On the Road," John Turturro doing "Howl" and a hair-raising interpretation of "Naked Lunch" from Dennis Hopper. The result is a work that's both exuberant and elegiac, a high-speed journey through 50 years of driving and drugging, writing and fighting, that's also a tender testament to enduring friendships.
"The Source" is showing this Thursday at "docfest," the second annual New York International Documentary Festival, and from there, will open in major cities across the country in late August. Workman, meanwhile, is starting work on his next film, a dramatic feature called "A House on a Hill." The Beats, however, are still very much on his mind.
Workman spoke to Salon Arts & Entertainment over the phone from Los Angeles, where he is working on his next film.
Tell us a little about the genesis of "The Source," and why you chose to do a film on the Beat generation.
I'm very interested in pop culture -- serious pop culture -- poetry and theater and art, especially as it interfaces with everyday people. I'm into the sorts of things where there's serious pretense but there's connection with what's happening sociologically and historically. I feel there is a major connection between the nonintellectual consumer and fine art, and it's never given enough credit. There's a big world out there, especially in movies. So I was interested in Warhol, in the Beats, in poetry and jazz. Someone who'd seen "Superstar" called me about doing a movie about Ginsberg [executive producer Hiro Yamagata], and I said I was more into the counterculture that began in the '40s with Allen and how it changed the world, and how that was the source of so much of what we have today.
There's so much music and so many clips in the film -- how long did it take to make the movie and gain clearance for all that material?
Four years. One of the jokes about being a director is that the most important trick is to never take no for an answer. I'd just say, "I can get the Bob Dylan song; I can get the Rolling Stones song." We did have a good budget for the film, but we still couldn't spend more than a few thousand dollars for each song and each clip. But people understood and wanted to participate. They knew it was being done in a serious manner, and I tried to do that.
The music was really important. I felt an obligation to get all the right moments in there so you'd watch and think, "There's Monk, there's Gillespie." I got the Dead and Billie Holiday and "Hey, Jack Kerouac." At the end I knew I had to get them all in somehow if I wanted to show this world.
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