A recent BBC report suggests that Francis Ford Coppola is finally ready to start production on the movie version of Kerouac’s On the Road. I’m not going to hold my breath. Coppola has had the rights for ages (the BBC says since 1979; the Telegraph says 1968) and every few years, it seems, there’s a similar announcement featuring a different combination of screenwriter, director, and actors.

This time around it is to be Walter Salles and Jose Riviera (The Motorcycle Diaries) writing and “helming” (always loved that verb), with casting to begin next year. Current rumors have Billy Crudup (Almost Famous) mentioned as Sal Paradise (the Kerouac character), and “possibly” Colin Farrell (Alexander) as Dean Moriarty. But in 2001 Russell Banks was to screenwrite and Brad Pitt was being tapped for Dean Moriarity (and a 2002 report still had the same names attached).

I remember even further back — 1982 — when I was in Boulder, Colorado attending the week of celebrations held to mark the 25th anniversary of On the Road’s publication. It was an amazing conjunction of counterculture luminaries, and to run through the list of conference participants is now a somber exercise, so many of them having passed away during the intervening years: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes, Hubert Hunke, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Creeley, Timothy Leary. Vancouver’s own Warren Tallman participated in several panels, and I remember him slotting a cassette into a portable recorder, propping it on the podium and pressing “Record” before squaring his notes to begin, remember thinking how cool it was that a fellow Vancouverite — a scrawny-looking academic to boot — was considered part of this bohemian scene.

Attendees came from all over: hitch-hiking, by bus and plane, to attend panels on “Political Fallout of the Beat Generation” (Burroughs, Ginsberg, Hoffman, Leary. Paul Krassner moderating) and on “Kerouac’s Sound” (Charters, Coolidge, Fagin, Tallman. John Tytell moderating); readings by “Micheline, Kaufman (tentative), Orlovsky” and “Bremser, Corso, [Jan] Kerouac, Orlovsky”.

What ties these recollections into the topic at hand was the puzzling (to most of us in the audience) presence of Max Gail onstage at several conference events. “What the hell is he doing up there?” (the face familiar to many as that of Det. Wojciehowicz from Barney Miller, then just ending its TV sitcom run) and the rumor quickly surfacing — confirmed as fact by someone who “knew” — that he was there as part of his preparation for the role of Dean Moriarty in the soon-to-begin-filming production of On the Road.

True or not (and I think it far more likely that he was simply there as another Kerouac-besotted fan, exploiting his 15 minutes of minor fame in order to get more firmly in the action) I recall thinking just how appallingly bad a job of casting¹ that would be: a dim-witted Polish police detective from New York playing a Beat character who had inspired a generation and more with his feverish insistence on living life to the frantic, final heartbeat. Nobody — particularly not Brad Pitt or Colin Farrell — could do that role justice. Sometimes it’s best to leave a much-loved book forever unfilmed, and let the reader’s imagination be the sole means of visualizing how a favorite character looks and sounds.

And perhaps that’s what Coppola believes as well; perhaps he’s one of us. Maybe that’s why we get these almost-annual announcements of film production starting “soon”: they’re all part of an elaborate smokescreen, a false trail for the entertainment press, intended to protect us pure-hearted fans from the corruptions of the Hollywood Babylon.

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¹ Literary Kicks founder Levi Asher wrote a great piece on his tryout during a 1995 “cattle call” audition for parts in an earlier attempt at an On the Road movie: “I’m not nearly extroverted enough to play Dean Moriarty, but I could handle being Sal Paradise. I kinda look like my mental image of Sal — well hey, he’s fictional, anybody can look like him if they want. […]”