Back in 2002, the one and only time I attended the Cannes Film Festival, I was at dinner with D. A. Pennebaker, his wife and film partner Chris Hegedus, and my friend Roger Friedman who had made a film with the documentary team called Only the Strong Survive, an important historical exploration of R&B and soul music that was premiering at the festival. I was attending as a journalist, but Pennebaker knew I was a scholar of the beat generation literati, and as he did with every subject you
could mention, he had a story to tell.

On this occasion, he recounted his having talked to Kerouac about doing a film of On the Road, that is, Kerouac asked him to do it, just as he imagined Marlon Brando starring. Penny, as he is known, was going to start the film with the character of Dean, the legendary “son of a Denver wino” stealing cars, maneuvering them around a parking lot. It was Penny who gave me a new window into the subject I thought, after having written several books on Kerouac, I knew very well: how the newly created highway system in America promoted the fantasy of fast car escapes from the restrictions of society: Huck Finn’s raft supplanted by the automobile. The film never left their machinations.

Of course, Only the Strong Survive was not the only music film of Pennebaker’s remarkable career. He became well known after his pioneering film on Bob Dylan, Don’t Look Back. In summer 2016, at a beat show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a clip from the film featured Dylan in the foreground famously flipping cue cards, and in the background stands poet Allen Ginsberg looking rabbinical. Pennebaker had a hand in Norman Mailer’s messy Maidstone, a movie monument of beat spontaneity. Pennebaker was part of many substantial cultural moments of the 20^th century.

And he had stories about all of it. Last fall we shared a banquette at a swank reception for Roma; Penny said he was working on his memoir, and according to his family, he’s gotten through 600 or so pages. That evening he told me a bit about his boyhood, and how he was raised. For sure his book will have anecdotes galore about all the people he knew and filmed, famous and other. Reading them eventually, I will picture his boyish face, even at 94, telling all with glee.