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The Beats go on >> Cue the violins for Music of the Heart
by MATTHEW HAYS
"For 20 years, essentially they were made fun of. In the last decade they've certainly been taken more seriously." Workman, who works primarily as a film editor (he cut the original Star Wars trailer), has created what many are calling the definitive doc on the Beats, after a four-and-a-half year epic info-gathering journey. The Source includes interviews with most of the major players in the Beat movement (including both Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, who died during the making) and hundreds of clips of pop culture, indicating the group's considerable and lasting influence on the zeitgeist.
"Ginsberg really inspired the movie," says Workman, from his Los Angeles editing studio. "He was quite selfless, insisting that the film not be dedicated to him. Never self-serving, he was occasionally crotchety. But he was very compassionate, and got us into many doors we wouldn't have been able to get through otherwise."
Workman won an Oscar for his short film Precious Images in 1987. He has also edited 10 of those compilation shorts which open the Oscar ceremonies, filled with scenes from Oscar-nominated work. As might be expected, his editing skills can be felt throughout The Source. "A lot of filmmaking comes together in the editing room. I use montage heavily to drive my points home in The Source."
And some of those points have proven somewhat controversial. Workman makes the argument--I would contend quite convincingly--that the peace movement, the civil rights movement, feminism and gay liberation all owe a rather massive debt to groundwork laid by the Beats. With clips and photos peering all the way back to the first meeting of Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, the film goes on to detail their relationships and features clips of Dennis Hopper, Johnny Depp and John Turturro performing Beat poetry.
And there are sequences of spoken-word work that is clearly Beat-influenced, like that of Henry Rollins, Marlon Riggs and John Leguizamo. Workman also includes clips of various mockeries of the Beat style, from The Flintstones to Happy Days.
Despite gaps in funding, The Source made its way to a final cut precisely because Workman believed so strongly in the Beat legacy and saw the need to chronicle it properly.
"It could have fallen apart on many occasions," recalls Workman. "But, for example, I wanted Johnny Depp to do some of the readings very badly. I wasn't going to take no for an answer. After a while I really started to like the film too much to compromise."
The Source opens Friday, November 5 |
"I caught it at just the right moment," says filmmaker Chuck Workman, of the stuff of his latest film, The Source. In it, Workman exhaustively chronicles the life, times and influence of the Beat poets and novelists.