EXCLU : Interview de Gerald Nicosia par Rick Dale.

Interview par Rick Dale de Gerald Nicosia, auteur de la biographie de Kerouac MEMORY BABE. Gerald Nicosia a participé au camp Beatnik pour aider les acteurs à mieux appréhender leur rôle.

Gerald Nicosia reading poetry in San Francisco,  2008. Photographer unknown.

As readers know, The Daily Beat recently received a copy of the Official Special Issue of Trois Couleurs #8, dedicated to the upcoming Walter Salles-directed adaptation of Jack Kerouac's beloved beat generation novel, On The Road. Knowing that author Gerald Nicosia helped train the actors at Salles' "beat boot camp," I was surprised that Nicosia wasn't mentioned in the Salles interview. I was further surprised that Nicosia's Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, considered by many to be the definitive Kerouac biography, wasn't listed among the 22 entries in the issue's bibliography. To find out what's going on, I interviewed Gerald Nicosia by e-mail. That interview follows verbatim, and I've also included a number of pictures taken by Nicosia (or Anne Marie Santos) that document his involvement. Importantly, this is the first time some of these pictures have been made public.

The Daily Beat: We understand that your involvement with Walter Salles and the film goes back to 2006. Can you tell us how you came to be involved and describe your early encounters with Salles?  We also know that you were involved in Salles' "beat boot camp" in Montreal in 2010. Tell us how you got involved in that and how Salles took advantage of your extensive knowledge of Kerouac and your collection of recordings, books, etc.

Gerald Nicosia: Walter Salles had just gotten the rights to ON THE ROAD from Francis Ford Coppola. He felt, being Brazilian, that he had to familiarize himself with the Americanness of Kerouac before he could make the film, follow the same highways, talk to the people who knew Jack, or knew about him, like myself. He decided he would make a documentary of his journey, and he did, called IN SEARCH OF ON THE ROAD. It hasn’t been released yet, but I saw a rough cut of it at the San Francisco International Film Festival in May 2010. I was one of the people who was interviewed in it. That interview was done at my home, in my office upstairs, in Corte Madera. Salles and his film crew spent about four hours with me. They filmed about two hours of interview with me. I also played them dozens of tapes, which I had just gotten back from U Mass Lowell, having won that lawsuit (by settlement). These were the MEMORY BABE taped interviews, which I had put at U Mass Lowell for public study in 1987, and which were locked up because of threats from John Sampas in 1995. So I had just gotten them back, in time for Salles to hear them. He was much taken by the interviews of Lu Anne Henderson and John Clellon Holmes, among others. I also showed him hundreds of photographs, showed him footage of Jack Kerouac shooting pool at the Pawtucketville Social Club in Lowell, filmed by a Montreal TV crew—which Salles hadn’t known existed—he was blown away by it. I also played music for Salles, like Wynonie Harris’s “screaming blues” song, “I Love My Baby’s Puddin’,” which was Neal Cassady’s favorite song. Salles hadn’t heard that either.

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=> Retrouvez les photos du camp Beatnik (nouvelles photos!)  <=

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Anne Marie Santos talks about Kristen Stewart.

In One and Only, Anne Marie Santos (Lu Anne Henderson's daughter) speaks about Kristen Stewart and how the actress feels about playing Marylou in the movie. We also  learn how committed she is to the part, and more ! Let's have a look from the excerpts I took from the book...

On the way Kristen Stewart looks like Lu Anne Henderson : 

''She's totally opposite of my mother in so many ways.'' : 

Extract from One & Only,p.230, authorization given to Ontheroad-themovie by Viva Editions (C)

Anne Marie Santos : 

''I found that Kristen is very, very committed to the part, that she wants to represent my mother in her own right, not as ''a shadow of the boys'', as she put it.''

Kristen Stewart :

 ''I have the original book where I highlighted the parts of Marylou. [...] My curiosity about Lu Anne didn't just come up when Walter Salles asked me to read for the part.''

Santos on Kristen and role models :

 ''She was looking for someone ''who had already done it''- by which she meant a young woman who'd also struck out on her own at a very young age.'' ''Kristen is not just playing Marylou. She is playing Lu Anne.''

On Kristen's preparation for the part : 

''Kristen told me that when she listened to the tapes of Lu Anne telling her story, that was the moment when Marylou became Lu Anne for her.''

Santos :

 ''Kristen is a very feeling young woman. She's only a girl of 20 years, but when she is researching a part, she goes all the way into it.''

Kristen Stewart on the On The Road movie : '

'Some of the scenes are pretty rough now. Don't be shocked when you see them. You know the story, but the way we are doing it is pretty graphic and pretty rough.''

BONUS : Twilight  and Kristen's passion for cooking mention ;)

A big thanks to Viva editions for their authorization  !

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[BOOK REVIEW] One & Only: The Untold Story of On The Road.

La critique du livre  One & Only: The Untold Story of On The Road"and of Lu Anne Henderson, the Woman Who Started Jack and Neal on Their Journey" par un site américain. Vraiment très complète, et qui donne encore plus envie de se plonger dans le livre !

 (TRADUCTION A VENIR)

One & Only: The Untold Story of On The Road"and of Lu Anne Henderson, the Woman Who Started Jack and Neal on Their Journey"  

 

Review from jambands.com by Brian Robbins

She was Marylou in Jack Kerouac’s classic On The Road, the gal who drove Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) mad. He married her when she was 15; divorced her a year later; and then did what he had to do to keep her within his orbit for the rest of his life. She was either there alongside Dean/Neal for many of the miles covered in Kerouac’s book or was often the reason he was driving like a man possessed in any given chapter: to rejoin her, either on the other side of town or the other end of the country.

On The Road’s narrator, Sal Paradise (Kerouac), loved Marylou in his own way; not with the wild passion of Dean, but in a manner that was both innocent and dark/deep at the same time. It was complicated; it was simple; it was a love story; it was utter Beat madness.
It was no secret that the character Marylou was a woman named Lu Anne Henderson in real life, but her side of the miles, the towns, the blurry-eyed sundowns/sunups/moons/stars and kicks has never been told until now. Author Gerald Nicosia happened to cross paths with Henderson back in 1978: he was researching his Kerouac bio Memory Babe ; she was in San Francisco General Hospital in a period of hard life and bad health.
At that point Henderson was already weary of journalists and Beat-wannabes: “She told me that too many people wanted to learn about her life and the lives of her friends,” writes Gerald Nicosia, “but it didn’t seem like anybody really wanted to know why she and her friends had done the things they did.” But there was something about Nicosia, the questions he asked, and the manner in which he asked them, that inspired Henderson to talk: “When I met Neal, he had six books under one arm, a pool cue in the other hand, and started necking with me at the same time.”

They actually had two interview sessions: the first with Nicosia taking notes at her bedside; the second a few days later, when Henderson invited Nicosia to a friend’s house where she was recuperating. Eight hours later he left with “cassette tape after cassette tape” of true never-heard-before Beat history. By Nicosia’s own admission, “a lot of Lu Anne was beyond me then, due to my own inexperience and the limits to my understanding imposed by a Catholic, middle-class upbringing. I only knew how grateful I was for the interview, and I sensed how great it was.” No one would record the story of “Marylou” with this kind of depth again (Henderson passed away in 2008).

Nicosia’s recordings went into archived limbo for many years until recently unearthed for purposes of research for the upcoming film version of On The Road. It wasn’t until then (30 years after the original interviews took place) that Nicosia realized just what he had in terms of a document of the Beats. And, working with Henderson’s daughter Anne Marie Santos, he has produced a great read.

One And Only offers the reader the complete (I’m talking 34,000-word complete) transcription of Nicosia’s interview with Henderson, formatted as a running dialogue broken into six portions, with an intro by Nicosia to set the stage for each. Also included is an essay by the author reflecting on “Lu Anne’s Role in Beat History/Cultural History”; an interview with Al Hinkle (“Big Ed Dunkel” in the pages of On The Road ); a lovely chapter written by daughter Santos; and a copy of a letter written by Henderson to Cassady (but never sent) in 1957.
Readers may be tempted to haul out their dog-eared copies of On The Road and compare Kerouac’s narrative to Henderson’s recollections along the way. And beyond the road years, Henderson’s memories and reflections of Cassady and Kerouac later on in their lives makes for interesting reading as well. (Her last visit with Neal Cassady was in the fall of ’67, shortly before he left for Mexico. He died there in February of 1968.)

One And Only isn’t a book of dirt-dishing or corpse-poking; this is another view of a much-studied but also much misunderstood period in American culture, told by someone who was there. In the end, the point is made that Henderson provided the “necessary estrogen” that helped birth the Beats – although neither Nicosia or Santos (or Henderson herself, for that matter) try to make the trio of Cassady, Kerouac, and Lu Anne into heroes and heroine.
But they are allowed to be humans, which is a point often missed.

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