Doing the Beats

Thanks to excellent film blog My New Plaid Pants, I've just discovered that producer par excellence Christine Vachon has greenlit a new film called Kill You Darlings, which is based on a little known murder that helped catalyse the birth of the Beat Generation: the 1944 killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, the youth Kammerer had ardently pursued (read stalked) for several years.

Both Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were connected with the murder, indeed Kerouac was jailed as an accessory after the fact; an event which he touches on in both his first novel, The Town and the City, and many years later in The Vanity of Dulouz.

Interestingly, a novel which Burroughs and Kerouac co-wrote about that murder, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is about to be published by Grove Press next month.

Yeah, daddy-o!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey Richard, did you see the Patti Smith, Philip Glass tribute to Ginsberg? I missed out, but was wondering if it was good?
24/10/08 15:54
richardwatts said…
Sorry Sam, I didn't see it unfortunately, so I can't offer up an opinion on the show. A few of my fellow bloggers attended, however. Check out Theatre Notes and The Morning After (both are listed in my Theatre links section on the right) for two very different points of view.
26/10/08 14:26
Anonymous said…
Thanks Richard - now I'm sorry I missed it :( - the unintended/intentional errors in the reading sounds interesting (or annoying...), I remember reading that Joseph Brodsky used to tread on the toes of his translators by re-writing their translations over again, coming up with very different poems... difficult to do when your dead.
26/10/08 17:22
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