Outfoxed "Beat" authors
Jack Kerouac ("On the Road") and
John Clellon Holmes ("Go") to lay
claim to the term "The Beat Generation". In the early 1950s Kerouac
was disturbed that his friend Holmes managed to get his "Beat
Generation" novel "Go" into print before his own was published ("Go",
in which Kerouac is a main character, was published in 1952, while "On
the Road" was not published until 1957). Kerouac was worried that
Holmes was plagiarizing him, although Holmes was careful to credit
Kerouac with creating the term "Beat" for their generation, and much of
the material was common amongst them and other writers of their circle,
such as
Allen Ginsberg. Ironically, Zugsmith outfoxed Kerouac by copyrighting
the term "The Beat Generation", which he used as the title of his
egregious eponymous exploitation film (
Les Beatniks (1959)), which was released by
MGM in 1959. A year later the studio released a film of
Kerouac's novel "The Subterraneans" (
Les rats des caves (1960)), made by with top talent. It proved
to be a major disappointment, as it grossly misrepresented the scene (as
well as Kerouac's novel). Ironically, "The Subterraneans" probably is
the premier contemporary movie about the Beats, as so few "Beat" movies
were made ("On the Road" has never been filmed), the phenomenon
occurring during a time of strict screen censorship in the US. By the time censorship was lifted in 1967, the Beats had been
supplanted by the Hippies.
