- William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, the East Village, 1953.
The Chicago International Movies and Music Festival has lifted the veil of secrecy about its opening night film this Thursday, March 4: it’s Yony Leyser’s William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, which I wrote about in the Reader in August. The story behind the film is fascinating; do check it out.
Begun while Leyser was an undergrad at KU in Burroughs’s adopted hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, this is the first posthumous feature-length doc about the writer of Junky and Naked Lunch.
Fresh from its January premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, A Man Within boasts a who’s-who of counterculture icons who’ve known and been influenced by Burroughs: Patti Smith, John Waters, Iggy Pop, Jello Biafra, Gus Van Sant, Iggy Pop, David Cronenberg, Amiri Baraka, Sonic Youth, and on and on.