Filmmakers Doug and Judi Sharples live in Wakonda, South Dakota. Seventeen years in the making, their documentary film about Jack Kerouac, Go Moan for Man, premiered in October, 1999 at the Orlando Celebrates Kerouac Festival and is now in theatrical release. This interview with Doug Sharples was conducted via e-mail in April and May of 2000.
Dan Barth (DB): As near as I can tell, the earliest footage in Go Moan for Man is from the 1982 Kerouac conference in Boulder, Colorado. Is that when you started filming, or was this project underway before that?
Doug Sharples (DS): No, it started then.
Jack Kerouac was a hero of mine from the time I first read him
in high school and college. Probably after three or four books
he was my favorite author. After he died in 1969, I starting
compiling notes on his books and a bibliography of his magazine
articles, reviews of his work and a cross reference of his character
identities and other things which I wanted to publish in a book
called A Kerouac Sourcebook. We lived in Los Angeles,
where I was trying to break into the film industry without luck,
so I had a lot of time on my hands. This was 1970, 1971, at the
height of Vietnam, Kent State, and all that. It didn't seem like
there was much hope for civilization, much less for me as a filmmaker,
so we eventually left L.A. and ended up in a great $35-a-month
farmhouse in South Dakota, where I actually did become a working
filmmaker.
I can't remember how we heard about the Jack Kerouac Conference. It might have been in a Twin Cities alternative paper. All I remember is that we had to go. We had been working 11 years as self-employed filmmakers in South Dakota, doing a lot of stuff about natural resources and public policy issues, mostly for government agencies or with humanities grants, because South Dakota doesn't have much of an industrial base or population. We had done a lot of great environmental stuff, but really what was happening was that I was reading four daily newspapers every day and clipping them on issues like water and energy development, the environment, agriculture, natural resources, Indian rights, and so on, and was running around like a nut. Art and literature, I was totally disconnected from. The Kerouac Conference was a way to reconnect to the person I had been before we got caught up in this other stuff. We just had to go, once we'd heard about it. All the surviving Beat characters were going to be there, all these characters out of American literary history, out of Kerouac. It seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity to document Kerouac characters in the flesh, so we ordered as much film as we could, dropped the film we were just finishing at our lab in Kansas City and headed to Boulder.
DB: When did you first conceive of it as a film called Go Moan for Man?
DS: I think that I probably thought of the title Go Moan for Man, and the fact the I was going to use that phrase and make the "old man with white hair," Zacatecan Jack, who utters the line, a key element or hook in the film, in 1992 or '93. The way I see it, and this is obvious if you see the film, Kerouac's existential despair as reflected in the line, "Go moan for man," is a key to understanding On the Road and all of Kerouac's work. Yet this scene is overlooked by probably ninety-nine percent of the book's readers, as some odd little detail of little import. I'm sure that I missed it or didn't think too much about the three appearances of the "old man with white hair" when I first read it as 16. And then Kerouac repeats the phrase "go moan for man" in Visions of Cody and improvises the "go moan, go groan go roll your bones" playful language, but this time it's God, not Zacatecan Jack, delivering the dictum, "Go moan for man." In Road, he sees clouds in the Utah sky having the appearance of God, with pointed finger, as if God were saying, "Pass here and go on. You're on the road to Heaven." In Cody, God says "Go Moan for man." The "old man with white hair" also appears in Pic, which, as I understand it, was one of Kerouac's abandoned early attempts to write On the Road. "Zack Jack" walks through the crowd in Time Square and delivers the line to Pic and his uncle, I think it is.
DB: Who was the most difficult person to interview?
DS: John Montgomery was exactly as described by Kerouac in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. Kerouac called him Henry Morley in Dharma Bums and Alex Fairbrother in Angels. And if anyone wants to know exactly what John Montgomery was like, all they have to do is read Kerouac. His portrait of Morley was funny, but it was also loving and kind and right on, as Kerouac's descriptions of all his characters are. That was what was so amazing at Boulder, when I first saw many of Kerouac's characters for the first time. They were exactly as described by Kerouac, the patterns of speech, the physical characteristics and peculiarities. John Montgomery's interviews didn't make it into any of the biographies very extensively because he was exactly as described by Kerouac with a crazy monologue that veered off in tremendously obscure references and learned tangents and rhetorical flights that never quite seemed to come in for a landing. Kerouac described him perfectly. So it was extremely difficult to cull from the filmed material a "sound bite" concise enough or contained enough to use. John needed and deserved something like My Dinner with Andre to be contained.
DB: Who was the most cooperative
or helpful?
DS: There have been a lot of people who have been helpful and cooperative, including John Montgomery, who gave us a whole day of his time. I don't want to leave anybody out, but probably you would have to start with Allen Ginsberg, because it was Allen who organized the Kerouac thing at Naropa and encouraged us to go ahead and do the film and not worry about how long it took, and you'd also have to credit Naropa, because they gave us permission back in 1982 and later in 1994 to film. John Sampas and Sterling Lord were also very cooperative, but there are so many others too, David Amram and Carolyn Cassady, Edie Parker, Stanley Twardowicz and John Cohen, who let us use photographs, and a whole lot of people from Lowell, including Roger Brunelle and so many others.
DB: Why did it take so long to complete the film? Why wasn't it "done" five years ago, or ten years ago?
DS: Making a film is very expensive, and we never had anybody subsidizing it, except for one five-thousand-dollar grant from Film in the Cities of St. Paul, Minnesota, which we finally got in 1986. So it took us time to process and workprint all of the film from Boulder. We didn't have the money. We had meanwhile been doing a couple industrial films, a film for the South Dakota centennial, and a documentary about stream pollution. The grant gave me the opportunity to study our Boulder footage, and the more I looked at it the more I wanted to make a larger movie about Kerouac, not just a film about an event in Boulder, historic as it was.
The importance of the material from Boulder was that it documented many of the real-life characters from the Duluoz Legend talking about Kerouac 13 years after his death. But to really use the footage extensively, especially press conferences and other scenes that needed some room to play out as sequences, I needed a film that was large enough not to be overwhelmed by the conference. Unfortunately we had no money to finance such a large undertaking or the time to do it, so basically the film sat dormant for several years until we finally found ourselves in a position to shoot more material about Kerouac in 1987.
Our film, The Rebirth of Whitewood Creek, was a finalist at the American Film Festival in New York. We scraped together enough money to attend the festival, loaded equipment, and drove straight through to the cheapest hotel we could find, just off Times Square, and spent a week alternating between the festival and filming our first Kerouac sites in New York. We then drove up to Lowell to shoot our first scenes there.
Several months later the Whitewood Creek film was selected for a big, international scientific film festival in Beijing, China, and I was asked to represent the U.S. When I came back from China, Judi drove out to California with our film equipment to meet me, and we drove back via Big Sur and San Francisco to shoot our first West Coast footage for the film and our first interview, with John Montgomery.
And that is how the film developed, organically, as situations or opportunities developed that made it expedient to shoot footage that explored the life and literature of Jack Kerouac.
While at the festival in New York, we struck up a conversation with a guy in a grocery store in Greenwich Village which led to his hiring of us to shoot a music video starring himself in his apartment on Spring Street in the winter of 1988. That gave us ten more days in Manhattan. So we shot additional New York footage and the interview with John Tytell, who lives in the Village, and went up to Lowell again also.
The city of Lowell was dedicating the Kerouac Commemorative that summer, which we felt we should document, so we drove out to New York and Lowell for our third East Coast shooting trip that year and were starting to get a lot of good documentary footage. Ann Charters gave us her first of several interviews and we also filmed Gerry Nicosia.
We had to finance the movie as we went, so sometimes we just shot the footage and kept it in the refrigerator awhile until we had the money to process and workprint it, so we could look at it. Usually I would process the original negative, so the image would be fixed, and then hold the negative awhile, sometimes a couple of years or more before making a workprint so I could look at it.
DB: You say you first read Kerouac when you were in high school. What year was that? Do you recall the immediate impact? What was it about Kerouac's writing that hit home with you?
DS: I spent the month of June, 1961, maybe into July, at a drama workshop for high school kids at the University of Iowa. It was the first time I had had the opportunity to browse in a really good bookstore in a university town, and I bought a bunch of good books that I really enjoyed, including Saroyan's The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, and The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac. I had read the article about the Beats that was published in Life magazine a year and a half earlier. I think it was in a pile of magazines in my closet, and I was fascinated by the photo layout showing a "beat pad" and the way the writer for Life hated these writers and had to put them down, and that sparked my interest in Kerouac and the Beats. But, anyway, soon after The Subterraneans, my best friend handed me a copy of On the Road as we walked into geometry class. And so I sat down and started reading it there and got about five pages into the book when suddenly the paperback was ripped from my hands, and I look up and my math teacher is giving me the evil eye as he flips On the Road into his trash basket. So that was kind of the immediate impact. And of course my friends and I were big fans of Kerouac and loved the romance of his road trips, which had crossed through our town of Atlantic, Iowa, on Highway 6, and the way he found even Iowa worthy of his romantic vision. We'd sit in the truck stops drinking coffee, talking Kerouac and Salinger, probably, and Zen, and thinking that Kerouac might wander in off the road any time.
DB: What is everyday life like in Wakonda, South Dakota?
DS: Get up, eat a blueberry muffin, work in obscurity for years on a long 16mm tribute to your favorite writer. Wakonda is a farm town of about 370 people surrounded by expanses of corn and hay. It's in southeastern South Dakota about an hour southwest of Sioux Falls, near Yankton. You can stand on the edge of town and see twenty miles. We have our offices in a concrete block building that was originally built as a car dealership and was a medical clinic when we bought it. The adjacent barn-like structure had been a livery stable once and is our studio. We have an apartment in the back of the clinic building, where the doctor lived, so there is no commuting. The post office is across the alley behind us, less than half a block. So it is pretty efficient and quiet. Most of the other residents are retired farmers, school teachers at the local school, or people who commute to jobs in Yankton or Vermillion, larger towns nearby. There is a small convenience store, a couple bars, a bank, a hardware store, the local old folks home, and a grain elevator. People mind their own business and live and let live.
DB: I thought the kids were great in the Lowell childhood scenes. Where did you find these actors?
DS: All of the kids are neighbors of ours. Jaimie Jackson is right next door. Ivan and Joseph Barnett live across the street on the corner. They were all very good.
DB: What about the adult actors? Central casting?
DS: The guy who plays Neal Cassady is our garbage man. The guy who plays Kerouac was on the same floor of the dorm as our daughter at Grinnell College in Iowa. Grinnell is located right on U.S. Highway 6 where Kerouac traveled on his first transcontinental trip in 1947. Our daughter Riva showed us a home video of her dorm, and I saw Bill Mabon in one of the scenes and said "bingo." After his graduation from Grinnell in the spring of 1995, we started shooting the hitchhiking scenes in Iowa and headed west to Denver.
The woman who plays "Terry the Mexican Girl" is a stranger who walked out of one of the two bars in Wakonda as we were going upstairs to film Kerouac hotel scenes in at the Wakonda Hotel. Our editor Krista Scholten helped us find our William S. Burroughs and Dr. Sax in Vermillion, South Dakota, which is 25 miles from here. I asked her to try to find some potential Burroughs and she came up with photos of two acquaintances of hers. Geoffrey Gray-Lobe was great for Burroughs, and is a very good actor, as well being the grandson of my film mentor in grad school at the University of South Dakota many years ago. Zacatecan Jack was a friend from Iowa City, Steve Marsden, who came all the way out to the South Dakota badlands to moan for man.
DB: Was there any pressure put on you by anyone to portray Kerouac in a certain way?
DS: No.
DB: Why did you choose to ignore the Estate controversy?
DS: Our film was about the life and literature of Jack Kerouac. I just didn't want to get into that, which is what I told John Sampas, and we were pretty much left alone.
DB: If the totals are in, how many miles did you travel, how much footage did you shoot, how much money did you spend?
DS: I don't know the total miles, but the total in the United States in our own car or van was about 50,000. We also went to Mexico twice, once by train and bus from Laredo, and another time with a friend of mine, Jerry Wilson, who was driving from Winnipeg to Panama on the Pan American Highway. I hitched a ride with him from San Antonio to Mexico City. Then we also flew to Europe and did France, England, and Morocco by plane, ferry and train. So it was a lot of miles. And a lot of film, though I have never bothered or had time yet to figure out exactly how much footage we shot. The total cost was more than $150,000.
DB: How was the film received
at its premiere in Orlando?
DS: We really wanted to premiere it in Lowell, but it was a tight schedule and we didn't give them enough notice to find a good place on their schedule. So Judi was talking to David Amram and he suggested Orlando, which was a couple weeks later and gave us a little more time. Marty Cummings and some other people in Orlando are really trying to honor Kerouac and bought the house on Clouser Street where Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums. So we agreed to premiere it as part of their fledgling "Orlando Celebrates Kerouac" weekend and had a great venue, the Enzian Theatre, and a near-capacity house. So that was a great way to start it off, with Carolyn Cassady and David Amram in attendance. Unfortunately, the film print didn't look as good as it should have. It was fresh from the lab, and it was the first time I had seen it, with the premiere audience, so I personally was shocked to see that the film didn't look as good as our earlier trial print. The audience seemed to buy it and was appreciative, but I feel that its success could have been greater. Our lab had processed the release print at outside facility, it turned out, and the all of our black-and-white scenes looked too dark. I went back to the lab after we got home and went over the printing of the film scene by scene so the next prints would look better. I also decided to cut a scene from the film that didn't work when I saw it on the big Orlando screen for the first time.
DB: How do you feel now that what could be called a life's work is complete?
DS: Unfortunately, it is not complete. We have to distribute Go Moan for Man, which we have chosen to do ourselves, and that is a very daunting project. We don't have millions to advertise, so we have to depend on word of mouth, people asking for it at their local college film series or art museum or art house. The theatres and film series are not going to book it unless they knew there is an audience, so I would encourage anybody who wants to see it to personally to ask for it at their local venues. I think that distribution is really going to be a slow process unless we can get some word of mouth. We've got a web site, www.realfilms.net. Eventually, of course, it will be on video, but I don't want to release it on video until people have had a chance to see it projected as a film.
DB: What's next?
DS: We've been shooting a film called Sacred Claim longer than Go Moan for Man. It's about the Sioux Indian claim to the Black Hills, which were taken from them in 1877 without compensation and in violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. We have been shooting Indian encampments and marches and treaty meetings on the subject since 1979, which is when the Supreme Court finally declared the taking of the Hills unconstitutional and ordered a hundred-and-five million dollars in compensation which the tribes have refused for two decades. This is a cause which Judi and I really believe in, the return of the Black Hills to the Sioux.
Another longtime project is about a jazz musician named Preston Love, who used to play for Basie and Ray Charles and Motown. He's still going strong at 79 years old and lives down in Omaha. We've been filming him over the years, since 1984, for a film we call Omaha Blues. Preston Love and Jack Kerouac both worshipped the way the Basie band played. Kerouac's essay at Horace Mann, the article about Basie in the school paper, sounds exactly like Preston Love talking about Basie. It's amazing. But Preston suddenly found himself playing in that band when he was 22 or 23.
DB: Thanks a lot Doug. Everyone I have talked to who has seen Go Moan for Man has really liked it. I hope a lot more people get a chance to see it.
DS: I hope so too.
Doug and Judi Sharples
