Pull My Daisy

Pull My Daisy (1959)

Is Holy Holy?

Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation; Kerouac also provided improvised narration.

Date of release
1959-11-11
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (30)
Runtime
26m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie

Casting

Interesting facts

Pull My Daisy is a 1959 American black and white short film directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie and starring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky. It was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of his play, Beat Generation.

Production

The plot of the film was originally conceived as the third act of Kerouac's stage play Beat Generation. In a 1957 letter to Cassady, Kerouac outlines his original idea for the play:"[...] it's the story of ACT ONE You and Al Hinkle walk in Al Sublette's kitchen play chess while Al and I toast Khayyam tokay and Charley Mew figures horses, Connie standing around, finally you and Charley and me play flute solos straight off that Visions of Neal tape…

In an interview with American Legends website, David Amram recalled of the chaotic production: "It was at Jerry Newman’s studio. I played the piano. Jack just sat down, saw the massacring of what he had written and did this phenomenal narration to make it look like what it was supposed to be. When you see Pull My Daisy, close your eyes and just listen to Jack talking. That’s the whole value of it right there.

It was filmed in Alfred Leslie's loft at Fourth Ave. & 12th St. in Manhattan.

Leslie and Frank discuss the film at length in Jack Sargeant's book Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. An illustrated transcript of the film's narration was also published in 1961 by Grove Press.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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