Albert Zugsmith(1910-1993)

Outfoxed "Beat" authors Jack Kerouac ("On the Road") and John Clellon Holmes ("Go") to lay claim to the term "The Beat Generation". In the early 1950s Kerouac was disturbed that his friend Holmes managed to get his "Beat Generation" novel "Go" into print before his own was published ("Go", in which Kerouac is a main character, was published in 1952, while "On the Road" was not published until 1957). Kerouac was worried that Holmes was plagiarizing him, although Holmes was careful to credit Kerouac with creating the term "Beat" for their generation, and much of the material was common amongst them and other writers of their circle, such as Allen Ginsberg. Ironically, Zugsmith outfoxed Kerouac by copyrighting the term "The Beat Generation", which he used as the title of his egregious eponymous exploitation film (The Beat Generation (1959)), which was released by MGM in 1959. A year later the studio released a film of Kerouac's novel "The Subterraneans" (La nostra vita comincia di notte (1960)), made by with top talent. It proved to be a major disappointment, as it grossly misrepresented the scene (as well as Kerouac's novel). Ironically, "The Subterraneans" probably is the premier contemporary movie about the Beats, as so few "Beat" movies were made ("On the Road" has never been filmed), the phenomenon occurring during a time of strict screen censorship in the US. By the time censorship was lifted in 1967, the Beats had been supplanted by the Hippies.