Kurt Jacobsen

This documentary explores the artistic, musical and literary resonances of the mystique of the road - and especially of going off the beaten track - in American lore. The Westward expansion, the Dust Bowl era, hobos, post-war suburbanization and the Beat critique of it; hitchhiking, the upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s and the current generation of backpackers clutching their Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. American Road ultimately probes the meaning of what it is to be an American, not just a wayfarer.—anonymous

Clancy Sigal ventured everywhere and accomplished everything a bold spirit possibly can in the turbulent course of a mere lifetime: street-smart city kid, precinct worker, union organizer, soldier, UCLA graduate, Hollywood agent, target of McCarthyism, European emigre, Fleet Street journalist, novelist, staunch leftist disdainful of party lines, enemy of cant of any kind, psychedelic journeyer, skeptical devotee of psychiatrist R. D. Laing, National Book Award nominee, and screenwriter of Frida and other films. An eloquent radical who shook up things in every milieu he encountered, nothing he ever wrote was predictable, except for the compassion, dark humor and demand for social justice always at the core.

This provocative documentary arises from extensive interviews with maverick academic Russell Jacoby concerning the fate of public intellectuals, the neutering of radical work in the academy, the need for daring Utopian thought, the scourge of bad academic writing, the blight of pop psychology, the inspiring legacy of the C. Wright Mills, the impact of the 1960s, resurgent conformity since Reagan, and the 'planned obsolescence of thinking' in anti-intellectual American culture. Along the way we learn of the experiences and influences that formed Jacoby's heretical stances. This documentary enables viewers to visit one of the most interesting intellectual figures of our time, much like earlier films on Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, and Jacques Derrida.