Film recalls area travels of Beat Generation

Film recalls area travels of Beat Generation

by Steve Block, trinidad-times.com

Jack Kerouac was a writer whose book On the Road was an inspiration to many young Americans during the Beat Generation of the 1950s. A new documentary film, The Night of the Wolfeans, not yet completed but scheduled for release in September, profiles the travels of Kerouac and his friends as they traveled through the Trinidad and Raton area.

The Beat Generation and what it meant to American society will be the subject of an event to be held at the A.R. Mitchell Gallery and Museum Tuesday, May 17.

The event, “On (and off) the Road,” will be held simultaneously in two states, with presentations in Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Trinidad, Raton and Clayton.

One of the film’s producers, Joe Tarabino of Trinidad, is coordinating the event and held a press conference Tuesday. Tarabino said the point of the documentary film project is to depict the locations Kerouac and his friends experienced while traveling through here in the pre-interstate highway days of the post-World War II era. The group was traveling from Denver to San Antonio and stopped at a restaurant named Reno’s in Raton. Reno’s was located where the Visitors Center is today, at the junction of Second Avenue and Clayton Road. Kerouac stopped for a meal late at night and Reno’s was the only 24 hour-a-day restaurant in Raton at that time, Tarabino said.

The Beat Generation was typified by counter-culture thought and alternative lifestyles. It’s adherents, including Kerouac and his friends Hal Chase and poet Allen Ginsburg, rejected the conventions and mores of the 1950s in favor of more introspective yet freewheeling lifestyle. These attitudes led the “beatniks,” as they were often called, to take off on long road trips across North America. The idea was to get in touch with a more authentic America than the staid and sober one they left behind.

Kerouac’s legendary work On the Road was actually written in the early 1950s, Tarabino said, though it was not published until 1957. The book became an instant classic and inspired many of the young people who would take part in the Civil Rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.

Film producer and director Francis Ford Coppola owns the movie rights to Kerouac’s book, and in 2008 Coppola’s production company, American Zoetrope, began looking for locations where the movie version of the book might be filmed. Film location scout Greg Chiodo contacted the Trinidad/Las Animas County Film Commission, for which Tarabino is community liaison contact. He helped Chiodo scout 18 locations in Trinidad during a three-day visit.

Then nothing happened. The film project was dropped.

It was revived in 2010, though without filming in the area locations that Tarabino had helped scout. The movie, with the same title as the book is scheduled for release in November.

Meanwhile, the locally produced The Night of the Wolfeans depicts many of the sites Tarabino helped scout. He didn’t want to waste all the work and research that had gone into the earlier scouting, and the idea of creating a documentary film. Blogs will be posted in association with the film. The release of the documentary is being timed to coincide with the expected media blitz for the release of the movie version of On the Road. Tarabino said he and the other members of the documentary’s production team wanted to include what would be left out of Coppola’s movie.

“We have a theory that the book is more of an archeologist’s field journal than it is a novel,” Tarabino said. “He was writing as he was doing these things. If he were writing On the Road today it would be blogged. He had the immediate response to what was going on, so he was doing something like what an archeologist does when he’s observing everything around him and saying, ‘Wow, look at all this stuff.’ He’s also learning to understand himself in the process.

“What he would have seen coming through is a change from an urban environment to a rural environment. He would have been going from a modern world to an older world. As he was coming down Highway 85/87, he would have seen Huerfano Butte. He would have seen old farms and ranches. It would have been like entering a new world for a kid from New York. This would be the real Wild West. By the time he got to Capulin Mesa he would have been way back, in his mind, in history, probably imagining ‘Wow, this is before the Indians. This is creation.’ So in a way he travels back in time until he gets to Mexico, and when he gets to Mexico, he’s among the Native Americans, the early primitives. His book is not about the nation of America; it’s about the continent of North America. Kerouac was French-Canadian, so he had Canadian sensibilities, American sensibilities and Mexican sensibilities. This is a cultural tour back in time to primitive Mexico. We treated it almost like an anthropological journal.”

Tarabino said he traveled through the area Kerouac had visited, along with Kim Krisco and Doug Holdred, his collaborators on the film project. They talked about Kerouac’s book as they traveled, trying to imagine how Kerouac would have felt on the journey. In following the great writer’s path, they found the inspiration to create The Night of the Wolfeans.



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