Zigzag Bugs And 'A Sea Like God': Kerouac's Big Sur

In 1960, Jack Kerouac boarded a train and headed west. He was "on the road" again, this time to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's isolated cabin in Bixby Canyon, Calif., where he would spend six weeks — an experience he captured in his novel Big Sur.

Now, nearly 50 years after that novel's release, a new documentary brings Kerouac's words to the big screen.

Curt Worden, who directed One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur, uses various artists, including Tom Waits, John Ventimiglia and Patti Smith, to voice Kerouac's prose. As he tells Renee Montagne, it was important to allow the audience to connect with the author's words.

"For this film to be successful, we had to hear Jack," he says. "We had to hear what he wrote. ... By listening, you really get the sense of the beauty and wonder and texture of how Jack wrote."

Kerouac, who had struggled with fame and alcohol addiction since the success of On the Road, ventured to Big Sur seeking solitude and a place to dry out. He found it a magical place, writing:

But despite his attraction to the beautiful scenery, Kerouac felt isolated in the cabin, says Joyce Johnson, a Kerouac biographer and former girlfriend.

"He was always safest when he was in transit. When he actually got someplace, it would all fall apart for him very quickly," Johnson says.

Worden adds: "He always had this vision of himself as a kind of guy living in a hut on a mountain all by himself in seclusion, and whenever he tried it, it didn't work for him."

Ultimately, Kerouac left Big Sur, writing:

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