ACHILLES PRODUCTIONS LTD: FEATURE FILM:
ANGELS STILL FALLING SYNOPSIS

‘Angels Still Falling’

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© Richard Deakin, Achilles Productions Ltd. (richard@achillesprod.demon.co.uk)


SYNOPSIS


During a campus event in the late sixties, a student catches sight of JACK KEROUAC asleep in the back seat of a camper.  The kid runs up to meet his hero and bangs on the van window shouting  “Hey, you’re Jack Kerouac aren’t you?”  But the old wino wakes up, rolls down the window and snarls:  “Fuck you you little snot.”  Why has Kerouac turned into this wrecked hulk?  Why this gulf between Jack and the lifestyle he called into being?  ANGELS STILL FALLING answers these questions as Jack, burning out, dreams his life in the back of a van.


Behind Kerouac was the spirit of Neal Cassady, behind Cassady the spirit of the father he never found, the old hobo with wine in his teeth and blood in his hair, asleep in a ditch in America.  And behind the sixties ethos lies the spirit of the American hobo and the image of the open road which Jack Kerouac used to try to save America’s soul. But after the publication of ON THE ROAD the price of supercelebrity in America takes its toll: the shy mystical Jack falls headlong into a ruinous drunken agony, the “notorious” Neal Cassady goes back to jail - the cops can read, too -  and Jack’s book changes the world to the extent that Jack himself can no longer live in it. Taking us on a  journey through twenty-odd seminal years 1944-1968, encountering a host of formative beat characters on the way,  ANGELS STILL FALLING  tells the epic story of  “Jack and Neal in America.”


THE STORY:  Columbia University during wartime.  JULIEN, the leader of Jack’s “decadent” college gang, is jailed for the self-defence murder of DAVE, who attempts to rape him.  Ebullient ex-con NEAL CASSADY replaces JULIEN as leader of JACK and ALLEN’s college gang of proto-hipsters.  JACK hitchhikes for the first time to the magical West, to join NEAL in Denver; but life in Denver is a washout.  Returning to New York JACK finishes ON THE ROAD on the famous teletype roll, but burns his boats in the publishing world by quarrelling with his editor.  Penniless, needing to escape his mother, he finds his way to the attic of NEAL and CAROLYN CASSADY in San Francisco.  NEAL even shares his wife with his “brother” JACK.  To the bewildered CAROLYN her lovers’ faces seem to blend into one man.  “Well, if it takes TWO of them to amount to one husband...” But after detecting NEAL’s adultery CAROLYN throws both of them out. 


NEAL goes mad. The boys take an epic wild Cadillac ride to the East, picking up fellow hoboes along the way -  JACK has a nightmare about their car  falling off the road into the Void.  They reach Jack’s home in the East, but MEMERE, Jack’s mother, also throws them  out, so that JACK has to return to the Cassady attic in Frisco, where he sits upstairs typing his books “while the real people carry on the living down below.”  An idyll, and the famous “3-way marriage”…  But a bitter quarrel erupts between the friends, ostensibly about a bag of pot, but really about CAROLYN.  JACK retreats into Mexican exile; NEAL observes that Jack is “with the Indians, permanent.”  Heartbroken, rejected on all fronts, JACK starts to drink.  But at last his luck turns: ON THE ROAD  is to come out.  To make money meanwhile, JACK goes FIREWATCHING on Desolation Mountain, Washington State. The motif of FALLING is reintroduced.  JACK and NEAL make up their quarrel in skidrow San Francisco over advance copies of ON THE ROAD - in an explosively emotional scene NEAL insists that “the child was father to the man” - 8 year old NEAL hoboing with his dad - so that “the road runs like a ribbon through your soul until you’re like an addict, worse than an addict, worse than being on the junk...” 


JACK returns to Mexico, but even Mexico turns sour on him.  He rebounds on ALLEN in New York.  ALLEN introduces him to a new lover, RUTH, who can perhaps save Jack from the Void that haunts him.  Horrified to discover he has a daughter he has never even tried to see, Ruth   realises the futility of their love.  JACK tries his “big trip to Europe” but panics at the pseudo-hipsterism there.  He returns to New York and RUTH for ON THE ROAD’s publication; terrified by the rush of fame, he retreats into alcohol.  Even NEAL is busted as a result of his ROAD notoriety.  NEAL, with his fellow cons in San Quentin, bleakly watches JACK drunk on a TV chat show.  Afterwards Jack is beaten up in a bar so badly that RUTH has to call in Jack’s mother MEMERE who promptly gets rid of RUTH, the rival female. Jack without Ruth is lost, a spiritual cripple imprisoned by his domineering mother and his evergrowing reliance on booze.


1960.  JACK tries to escape the bottle by retreating to his friend Ferlinghetti’s cabin near Big Sur.  But he finds a wrecked Cadillac fallen off the road overhead, an appalling realisation of his earlier nightmare. Amidst flashbacks of FALLING, the Void claims him for its own. He has a breakdown on the shore, raging at the sea like Cuchulain. A year later, trying to write about this experience at his mother’s house, coming apart, he tries to phone the women who have loved him, CAROLYN and RUTH.  But he finds himself talking to the dialtone as the Void once again has its way.                                                   


NEAL gets out of jail, goes wild, and leaves CAROLYN to join the MERRY PRANKSTERS. He introduces Jack  to KEN KESEY.  But JACK warns NEAL that he is going to die. Watched by ALLEN, the pair make their peace with each other and the American flag. To ALLEN, as to CAROLYN earlier, their faces begin to merge together, two halves of one man. Celebrating with drink and drugs at a wedding in Mexico, NEAL passes out by a train track and dies of exposure.  JACK, hearing the news, has a final talk with NEAL’s ghost, who tells him that he has only gone before JACK in order to show the way.  As ever, JACK admits.


We come full circle, to a camper van in 1968.  Returning from the campus gig, ALLEN’s friends are shocked that the piss-smelling drunk asleep in the back, near death, is JACK KEROUAC.  But ALLEN explains that Jack and Neal are in fact immortal: “When the bigshot writers of today are forgotten, in a hundred years from now people will still be reading Jack.  It’ll be like Ishmael and Ahab, like Tom and Huck - the story of Jack and Neal in America.”  They drive Jack home.