New York in the Fifties (2001)

Steve Allen, interviewed Jack Kerouac during the 1950 and asked him he meaning of "Beat." Kerouac replied..."sympathetic. The beat movement began in New York during that romantic moment in time when non-conformity meant something.

Betsey Blankenbaker's film is based on a 1999 book by Dan Wakefield, a nice older man I met while attending a yoga retreat in the Bahamas in 1992. I sat with him over several vegetarian meals that week. We were both New Yorkers traveling alone. He mentioned that he was a writer and working on a book about New York in the 1950s. I was not overly impressed at the time since I was sure that my 1980s New York topped that. We re-lived the 1950s during that era.
Now, I truly appreciate knowing the real details of the time and events. It was all so fresh--a time of jazz music, jazz writers and jazzz painters. It was a time before JFK was shot and before The Beatles--a time of innocence with a deep questioning of the status quo.

Feminism had not quite happened yet so women were left out a bit, but literature, journalism and poetry were on fire. Dan Wakefield was a young writer from the midwest who was in the middle of the whole thing. The film is full of interviews with him and other central figures of the day--Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Ted Steeg, Gay Talese. Wakefield dedicates the film "For James." Author James Baldwin advised him that a writer should aim to write and publish a shelf of books. Wakefield has done that, along with many of the other writers interviewed for the film.

Wakefield wrote a less-than-complimentary article about Jack Kerouac for The Commentator and Kerouac was quick to make the connection when the two met at Allen Ginsberg's apartment for an evening of drug exerperimentation with Harvard professor Timothy Leary (Wakefield had opted to remain the sober observer of it all).

This film is a historical must-see for anyone who loves New York.