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Jazz and Jack Kerouac ...includes info about the program, a link to the entire 26-minute underground film Pull My Daisy (narrated by Kerouac, jazz score by David Amram), Larry Kart's excellent essay on the topic (which he posted here in a Kerouac thread on the board), a video clip of Kerouac reading from On the Road on The Steve Allen Show, a talk by Sam Charters about Kerouac and jazz, and more. The program will air this evening at 11:05 p.m. EST on WFIU, at 9 p.m. Central Time on WNIN, and at 10 p.m. EST Sunday evening on Michigan's Blue Lake Public Radio. The program will be posted for online listening Monday morning in the Night Lights archives. Next week: "The Incomplete Sonny Berman."

http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/MG/209674.jpg The Subterraneans, the only novel of Jack Kerouac's to be adapted to film so far, was released in 1960, when the media fever surrounding the Beat Generation (much of it inspired by the publication of Kerouac's On the Road in 1957) was still at a high pitch. Hollywood took great liberties with Kerouac's story of a romance between his narrator stand-in (Leo Percepied, played by George Peppard) and a young half-black, half-native American bohemian--for starters, the woman was played by the very white Leslie Caron. http://www.torriblezone.com/subterraneans.jpg The soundtrack, however, was composed by Andre Previn, and it features a number of West Coast jazz luminaries--Gerry Mulligan (who also appears in the film as a hip street priest), Art Pepper, Russ Freeman, Shelly Manne, and Red Mitchell. Carmen McRae also appears, singing an updated beatnik version of "Coffee Time." We'll hear both dialogue and music from the film, including some selections only recently released on a new version of the soundtrack from Film Score Monthly. http://www.screenarchives.com/fsm/images/CDL/subterraneans.jpg You can listen live Saturday night at 11:05 p.m. (9:05 California time, 12:05 a.m. NYC time) or in the Night Lights archives, where it will be posted Monday afternoon. Some tidbits that didn't make it into the program: Ranald Macdougall, the director replacement for the fired brother team of Dennis and Terry Sanders, originally opened the film with the credits rolling over a Pollock/Rothko-like painting that dissolved into Gerry Mulligan playing his saxophone, the light gleaming off his crucifix. This was replaced in the final version by a much more conventional opening showing San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge in daytime. The words that appear onscreen were originally almost an exact quote of Allen Ginsberg's description of "the subterraneans" (his character is named Adam Moorad in the book); they were altered in a manner that rendered them more neutral and cliched. The film was originally supposed to be shot in black-and-white for a more austere aesthetic; it ended up being done in Cinemascope and Metrocolor. Article on the movie version of Kerouac's SUBTERRANEANS Photograph of the real-life model for "Mardou", the love interest of Kerouac's who inspired the book: http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/mardou8.gif Next week: American jazz in French new-wave cinema.