Corso: The Last Beat
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Corso: The Last Beat is a film to be released in 2008.
[edit] Film Synopsis
The Beat Generation’s Gregory Corso, who despite dire hardship - infant abandonment, foster homes, living in the streets of Little Italy, a teenage prison term - became one of four in the inner circle of the Beats – along with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs.
This film is not meant for boomers to relive their glory days... The filmmakers clearly meant to cross-over to today’s youth audience, “Corso - the Last Beat” is a new look at the Beat Generation inner circle by following Gregory Corso their brilliant “enfant terrible” and jokester.
After Ginsberg’s death, Corso is the “Last Beat” standing… He goes “On The Road” in Europe on a madcap odyssey “searching for his muse” to revitalize himself.
Corso retraces “The Beats” early days, at the “Beat Hotel” in the Left Bank of Paris.
Then Venice, Paris, Rome, Athens, Florence and Delphi are backdrops to Corso’s hilarious international tour de force.
Corso revisits Clinton State Prison, where at 17 he spent three years in mobster “Lucky" Luciano’s old cell, educating himself. (He ended up at Harvard later).
On film, Corso finds his mother, who abandoned him 67 years ago, as an infant, to return to Italy, a "disgraced" woman. After an Italian search, the filmmaker discovers Corso's mother is not dead in Italy, but alive in Trenton New Jersey -- and not disgraced, after all. Corso discovers his father’s lies had kept him from having a mother.
Corso and his Italian mother meet on film. Corso is revitalized and returns to Greenwich Village to work again.
Then in ultimate irony Corso faces his own mortality with humor and pluck, comforted by Ethan Hawke, Patti Smith and his newfound mother, Michellina.
