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The Source
U.S.A. / 1999 / English / Color, B&W / 35mm (1: 1.66) / 90 min Director, Script, Editing, Producer: Chuck Workman Photography: Tom Hurwitz, Nancy Schreiber Don Lenzer, Jose Luis Mignone, Andrew Dintenfass Music: Philip Glass and others Executive Producer: Hiro Yamagata Production Company, Source: Beat Productions 195 S. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90212, U.S.A. Phone: 1-310-271-0964 / Fax: 1-310-271-0793		Chuck Workman Born in Philadelphia, PA. His productive and varied career includes work as filmmaker, playwright, video artist, editor, and producer. He has worked in TV and has directed opera and theater. His films include the feature film, The Money (1975), a film on Andy Warhol called Superstar (1991), and dramatic shorts, Not Us and That Good Night. His widely screened Precious Images (1986) won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short in 1987 and was shown at YIDFF ' 95. He has also worked on HBO's And The Band Played On (1993), and the feature film Flubber (1997). In 1992 he was nominated for an Emmy for directing parts of that year' s Oscar Awards. Five of his films circulate in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1944, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs met each other in New York. This was the genesis of the Beat Generation, whose influence spread across the United States with their literary works and their actions. It was the beginning of youth culture, guided as it was by postwar uneasiness, and from which flowed the hippie movement, spiritualism and the political activism of the Sixties and Seventies. Chuck Workman, who received an Oscar for Precious Images (1986), adds interviews with the late Ginsberg, Burroughs, Timothy Leary and others to a host of clips from movies, television and newsreels. While following the locus of the three central figures, the film captures the changing counterculture of the past fifty years. With segments from the works of the three authors performed by John Turturro, Johnny Depp and Dennis Hopper, plus music by artists spiritually bound to the Beat Generation, from Charlie Parker to Bob Dylan and Nirvana, this colorfully-conceived film vividly portrays the age. [Inada Takaki] Director's Statement The Source began some years ago with discussions between Allen Ginsberg and the Japanese artist Hiro Yamagata on a way to tell the story of the Beat writers and artists in a documentary film. Hiro Yamagata had seen a film I made on Andy Warhol and contacted me about this new project. My interest was not just in Allen Ginsberg, but in the counterculture of the past fifty years worldwide, and how it developed through people like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs since the late forties. Hiro agreed to increase the scope of the film and agreed that the film might be a non-fiction theatrical experience and not simply a television documentary. Over the years we worked on the film we lost not only Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs but several other influential members of the Beat Generation, but hopefully through their work, and in a small way through our film, their unique and transcending spirit will endure and continue to influence us in the profound way it always has.
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