Audio interview: Jack Kerouac & Ben Hecht

When I stumbled upon this audio interview online, my head just about exploded: Jack Kerouac and Ben Hecht?!?! Two American icons and famed storytellers together talking for about 20 minutes, well, basically everything?!?!

Some background. Jack Kerouac has been called “the King of the beats.” His books include “The Subterraneans,” “The Dharma Bums,” and his most famous work “On The Road.” He laid out 30 essentials to his approach to writing which is sometimes called “spontaneous prose”:

• Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
• Submissive to everything, open, listening
• Try never get drunk outside your own house
• Be in love with your life
• Something that you feel will find its own form
• Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
• Blow as deep as you want to blow
• Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
• The unspeakable visions of the individual
• No time for poetry but exactly what is
• Visionary tics shivering in the chest
• In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
• Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
• Like Proust be an old teahead of time
• Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
• The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
• Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
• Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
• Accept loss forever
• Believe in the holy contour of life
• Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
• Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
• Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
• No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
• Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
• Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
• In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
• Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
• You’re a Genius all the time
• Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Then there’s Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters. On his IMDB page, there are 153 movies to which Hecht provided writing services, most of them uncredited. Credits include Wuthering Heights (1939), Angels Over Broadway (1940), and Spellbound (1945). Uncredited movies include A Star Is Born (1937), Stagecoach (1939), and Gone With The Wind (1939).

In his autobiography, Hecht claimed that he could produce a screenplay in two weeks and never spent more than eight weeks on a project, and yet his plots were sophisticated, his characters rich in texture, and his dialogue sparkled. Hecht is also the source of numerous great quotes. Here’s one about Hwood:

“In this business, there’s only one law you gotta follow to keep outta trouble. Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doin’ it.”

So our final interview of 2008 is this amazing conversation between two American icons: Jack Kerouac and Ben Hecht.

Part One

Part Two

Plus these rare video clips with Kerouac: