The journey from scroll to screen has been an equally strange odyssey.
Since Kerouac published his sex-, drugs- and satori-searching novel in 1957, false starts and "unfilmable" rumors have lengthened its odds of adaptation.
The author once sought Marlon Brando to play Dean Moriarty, the book's infamous thief/wildman and Kerouac's trim-hipped "Western Kinsman of the Sun" (Kerouac assured he could handle the narrator/protagonist Sal Paradise, based on himself).
Two decades later, Francis Ford Coppola acquired the rights and famously struggled to bring the book to life, with actors Colin Farrell, Ethan Hawke, Brad Pitt and Billy Crudup variously attached as male leads. We were one German investment group away from On the Road as proto-slacker parable.
A decade later, aided by several European and Latin American co-financiers and Walter Salles, director of The Motorcycle Diaries, the $25 million adaptation premiered to mixed reviews at May's Cannes Film Festival.
The local unveiling occurred during November's AFI Fest at Grauman's Chinese Theatre with an afterparty at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. There was an electro-funk mash-up DJ, a shadow light projection for Shellback Caribbean Rum and the dull iridescence of a thousand iPhones and bald agent scalps. No whiskey was served.
