Friday’s Weekly Round-Up – 19

So, more On The Road movie updates. It seems now almost certain that the movie will have a Fall 2011/early 2012 debut, not a Cannes May 2011 unveiling, as had first been thought. Similarly, director Walter Salles’ original vision of a film solely in black-and-white, something, according to Indiewire, he had “valiantly campaigned for”, seems to have been jettisoned for a full-color movie.

Jose Rivera, the screenwriter, let slip on Canadian television, shortly after the wrap-up in shooting, at the end of last year, that, “there’s a lot of the original book still in the screenplay, still in the film”, “but also I brought in lots of other things, like there’s a lot of poems of Ginsberg (sic), there’s material from Bill Burroughs, there’s stuff from Neal Cassady..” Rivera’s is far from the only hand: “Before I got involved there were at least eight different screenwriters involved in On The Road including Francis Ford Coppola.. and Francis’ son Roman Coppola also wrote drafts.. ” Rivera tells City tv.  Well, we’ll see… wondering about that movie.

Meanwhile, over at NYU – “James Franco To Teach Class At NYU” – “This year’s Academy Awards co-host will offer a third-year graduate class on adapting poetry into short films at the Tisch School of the Arts”, the Hollywood Reporter reports.

So there’s the movies and there’s the real world. Poet Tom Clark has always been firmly located in the latter. Beyond the Pale (sic), his unique and extraordinary blog, juxtaposes carefully selected and always stunning visual imagery with equally carefully chosen and always provocative poetry texts (refreshed and renewed every night). Of late, he’s been following the on-going horrors in Japan with a typically unflinching eye. In this post here, he “illustrates” Allen’s “Plutonian Ode”.

Remember the Allen tattoo ? – Well, here’s another one.