Steve Sax

What Happened to Kerouac? The Beat Goes On -- What Happened to Kerouac? The Beat Goes On, the extras to the acclaimed 1986 documentary, is composed of interviews taken from the original footage shot at the 25th anniversary celebration of the publication of On the Road, held at The Naropa Institute in 1982. It features fellow Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and others. The film starts off with an all-star line-up of Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul Krassner debating whether the Beat Generation was a political or cultural movement. Then Abbie Hoffman, activist extraordinaire, gives a passionate, funny speech praising the Beats. Other scenes reveal Kerouac's only daughter Jan's incestuous dream of her father, Edie Parker's marriage to Jack in jail, Kerouac keeping Steve Allen up all night, Allen Ginsberg recalling Kerouac's monumental drunken humor on the William Buckley Show, actor Paul Gleason telling of Kerouac's physical confrontations in bars along with his singing and loud voice, poet Robert Creeley describing a wonderful scene of a flood from Dr. Sax, Carolyn Cassady remembering the embarrassing night Jack and Neal brought a hooker home to the Cassadys, and Ann Charters' comprehensive overview of Kerouac's books, his critics, his Buddhism, his lost friendships, and his dutiful attachment to his mother. These extras delve deeper into Kerouac, offering more intimate, personal, and contradictory views than the original documentary. His genius, his writing styles, his working-class background, and his eventual decline into alcoholism are revealed by those who knew him best.