Neal Cassady
Acting
Biography
Neal Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s. He served as the model for the character Dean Moriarty in the 1957 version of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. In many of Kerouac's later books, Cassady is represented by the character Cody Pomeray. Cassady also appeared in Allen Ginsberg's poems, and in several other works of literature by other writers.
Known For
Neal Cassady is living the beat life during the 1940s, working at The Tire Yard and philandering around town. However, he has visions of a happy life with kids and a white picket fence. When his girlfried, Joan, tries to kill herself he gets scared and runs away. But when Joan reappears will he take the chance at that happiness, or will he turn his back on it?
The Last Time I Committed Suicide
A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus.
Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place
Sound and image captured by the Merry Pranksters in late 1965 and early 1966: the bus on the road, the Grateful Dead playing an Acid Test, Kool-Aid ritual, etc.
The Acid Test
Documentary about Carolyn Cassady, her life and marriage to Neal Cassady, her relationship with Jack Kerouac and how she takes care of the literary legacy from both.
Love Always, Carolyn
The film was shot on the property of writer Ken Kesey in La Honda, California, in 1965 and depicts Beat Generation figure Neal Cassady high on amphetamines and speaking in a stream of consciousness.