William S. Burroughs

Condo Painting (1999)

Cast: John McNaughton   

Tags: Biography 

Length: 84min

In this documentary, director John McNaughton, famous (or infamous) for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), draws an intimate portrait of the painter George Condo, a friend of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Born in 1957, Condo has been...

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Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles (1999)

Cast: William S. Burroughs   

Tags: Music History Music Biography 

Length: 77min

More commonly known as the expatriate author of The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles actually first made his mark on the world as a composer. This documentary sets out to rediscover this forgotten master of 1930s American music. Shot in New York, Paris,...

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Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1992)

Tags: Science Fiction Art Film Surrealist Film Psychological Sci-Fi 

Length: 85min

David Blair's Wax: Or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees is the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film (independent or otherwise) to have been re-formatted as hypertext and...

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The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (1993)

Cast: Norman Mailer Joan Baez Abbie Hoffman   

Tags: Literary Studies Language & Literature Biography 

Length: 84min

In 1955, poet Allen Ginsberg summed up the greatest fears of his generation in a landmark poem appropriately titled "Howl." As a result of that defining piece of prose, Ginsberg would become an icon of the Beat Generation. Inspired by Ginsberg's...

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The Beat Generation: An American Dream (1987)

Cast: Steve Allen Dr. Timothy Leary   

Tags: Biography History Social History Language & Literature 

Length: 90min

In the U.S., in the 1950s, contemporary jazz was becoming more and more esoteric, and a small group of writers, poets and musicians who were hip to that beat were exploring the cracks in the American dream. Meanwhile, the Cold War and insistently...

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It Don't Pay to Be an Honest Citizen (1985)

Cast: Vincent D'Onofrio   

Tags: Crime Drama 

Length: 85min

The comedy and thrills are a little anemic in this movie based on a real-life experience of director Jacob Burckhardt. Warren (Reed Bye) is accosted in Brooklyn one evening by rather unusual muggers -- they steal his can of film (this movie's first...

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Gang of Souls (1989)

Tags: Biography Social History Language & Literature Literary Studies 

Length: 60min

This documentary by filmmaker Maria Beatty explores the lives, careers, and creative inspirations of the beat poets, forging insight into the minds of such artists as Gregory Corso, Marianne Faithfull, Richard Hell, Allen Ginsberg, Lydia Lunch and...

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Heavy Petting (1989)

Cast: Sandra Bernhard Ann Magnuson Spalding Gray David Byrne   

Tags: Sexuality Social History Gender Issues Culture & Society 

Length: 75min

Those of us who had to suffer such "instructional" films as Dating Do's and Don'ts in high school will be especially entertained by Heavy Petting. In the visually sarcastic manner of the nuclear-age documentary The Atomic Cafe, the film assembles...

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What Happened to Kerouac? (1985)

Tags: Biography History Language & Literature 

Length: 96min

This biographical documentary tackles the legend of Jack Kerouac, one of the foremost writers of the Beat Generation. Kerouac started a beat that goes on; he's still a major influence in contemporary literature and poetry. The author first broke into...

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