The Beat Generation is back — at least on the silver screen. Walter Salles has finally scored the cash and the cast to make On the Road, the news breaking mere days after his rough-cut documentary about Jack Kerouac’s unfettered gypsy classic screened at the S.F. International Film Festival. And Howl, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s uncommonly literate drama about Allen Ginsberg, his seismic poem, and the 1957 obscenity trial of its U.S. publisher (Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Bookstore), closes Frameline’s LGBT festival on June 27. Before then, however, dig the period lingo and fashion with Thrillville’s Beatnik Bash, a double dip of youth-culture exploitation from 1959. Roger Corman's horror comedy, A Bucket of Blood, stars Dick Miller as a nerdy coffeehouse busboy who unexpectedly becomes a killer artist but has trouble dealing with the pressure of fans’ expectations. In Albert Zugsmith's The Beat Generation, Steve Cochrane and Jackie Coogan play detectives on the trail of a rapist, with Mamie Van Doren supplying the catnip and Louis Armstrong (!) dropping in for a cameo. Showing some love to that era’s spiritual descendants, host Will “The Thrill” Viharo makes room on the bill for a poet or two and the Oakland jazz-folk trio Smooth Toad.
Thu., June 3, 8 p.m., 2010
