Off the Beat Track: First Run Features Grab Docu on Paul Bowles

Not sure if anyone has referred to him as the Stuart Sutcliffe of the Beat Gen, but Paul Bowles will receive some posthumous affection from Docu distributor First Run Features who picked up Daniel Young’s Paul Bowles: The Cage Door is Always Open fresh from its Berlin Film Festival showing. Look for a release sometime this year.

Gist: The fact that Paul Bowles is less well known than fellow writers like William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac may be because, after pursuing a nomadic lifestyle at the beginning of the 1950s, publicity-shy Bowles decided to settle in Tangiers. There, far away from the hurly-burly of the literary world, the town became a permanent home for this homosexual writer and composer and Jane, his lesbian wife. Bowles’ austere, almost Calvinistic view of humankind and the psyche, as well as his outright refusal to subscribe to the zeitgeist, distinguished him from other Beat Generation writers throughout his life.

Worth Noting: The talking heads docu dates back to 1999 interviews with Bowles done shortly before his death.

Do We Care?: Hopefully the influx of Beat Generation film items will shed light on his docu — I’m liking the list of names collected for the talking heads portions: Jane Bowles, Gore Vidal, John Waters, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ira Cohen, Edmund White, William Burroughs and Francis Bacon.