Santa Cruz Film Festival 2008

American novelist and poet, leading figurehead and spokesman of the Beat Generation. Kerouac's search for spiritual liberation produced his best known work, the autobiographical novel On the Road (1957). The first beat novel was based on Kerouac's travels across America with his friend Neal Cassady. Its importance was compared to Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, generally seen as the testament of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s.
Enter Big Sur. Big Sur was Jack Kerouac’s last major work that many critics and literary scholars site as his most intimate and introspective. One Fast Move Or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur moves the audience along on a visceral ride of raw emotions and dramatic events on which the book is based.
The story is told in several ways through the narrative arc of his own prose. First-hand accounts and recollections of Kerouac’s contemporaries, whom many of the characters in the book are based on such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady and Michael McClure are interviewed. Reflections of artists, poets, actors and musicians who have been deeply influenced by Kerouac’s unique gifts like Tom Waits, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith and Donal Logue give their own interpretations of Kerouac’s cathartic writing style and fragile reality.
Special Guests